Moridin said:
Is it just me, or do many religious texts seem like the result of someone who just got stoned and started writing gibberish?
I'm an atheist but I really do not think they're anything like that. You have to take on the perspective that for a devout person of that particular religion who grew up with it, the premises and mindset and cosmological viewpoint / mythology of the religion permeate their mindset and their every thought. You can't attempt to see the writing from your own viewpoint and cosmological beliefs (not if you're really trying to understand what it's saying, at least.) I think studying a religious text in isolation from the religion itself is going to make it seem especially wacky and far-fetched.
In particular, even besides the lack of context to the pious reader's mindset, many of these texts are written in utterly ancient languages. The
Tao Te Ching is almost unintelligible to a modern Chinese reader, much less if you try to read it in Klingon. For another example, the portions of the
Zend Avesta we have are only very distantly related to modern Farsi. Or Ancient Hebrew in the
Old Testament /
Talmud, which lacks vowels¹ and particles and things; even modern-Hebrew-speaking scholars fiercely debate exactly what a particular word or phrase or sentence means and applying these different meanings can lead to a radically different meaning for a passage - particularly interesting when that passage is cited as the foundation for some extra-scriptural doctrine.
To give a specific example - in the Christian
New Testament there are four different words that are commonly translated as “Hell”: the Hebrew
Sheol and
Gehenna and the Hellenic Greek (or Middle Greek, or whatever it's called that was the Roman-era version of Greek)
Tarterus and
Hades. Now if you know what “Hades” was in Greek mythology (the
New Testament appears to have originally been written in Greek) - not a place where bad people go, but where everyone may end up, including heroes like Achilles or Herakles/Hercules - that kind of puts an interesting twist on Biblical passages that have the word “Hell” in them and extra-scriptural doctrines that incorporate Hell. But many translations do not give the slightest hint of what word they're translating as “Hell”. I'm always greatly amused by Evangelical Christians who say something about Hell that's obviously a completely interpreted doctrine and then insist that their sect or they personally read the Bible strictly literally.
An interesting side note to the above is that the word “Hell” actually appears to come from Norse Mythology - “Hel” or “Hela”, Loki's daughter and Queen of Helheim, one of several Hades-like underworlds in Norse Mythology (although I think in this case usually only people who did
not die in battle would end up in Helheim.)
(I've tossed out lots of facts above but I believe they're all conventional scholarship and can be easily Googled if sources are desired. In particular, the presence of Hercules in Hades is straight out of
The Odyssey.)
¹
It's not that there weren't any vowels in spoken Ancient Hebrew, it's that they were not present in the written form of it which sometimes adds some ambiguity to figuring out which modern word, or which syntactic form of one, a written word is equivalent to.⚛
)
The Roman Church was very much into pruning the vine too, sometimes for lofty reasons, sometimes for petty reasons.
