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223 points benkaiser | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.217s | source
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ddtaylor ◴[] No.42538247[source]
I'm heavily biased here because I don't find much value in the bible personally. Some of the stories are interesting and some interpretations seem useful, but as a whole I find it arbitrary.

I never tell other people what to believe or how they should do that in any capacity.

With that said I find the hallucination component here fascinating. From my perspective everyone who interprets various religious text does so differently and usually that involves varying levels of fabrication or something that looks a lot like it. I'm speaking about the "talking in tongues" and other methods here. I'm not trying to lump all religions into the same bag here, but I have seen that a lot have different ways of "receiving" communication or directive. To me this seems pretty consistent with the colloquial idea of a hallucination.

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1. marky1991 ◴[] No.42543462[source]
"From my perspective everyone who interprets various religious text does so differently"

The existence of denominations and confessions/creeds really shows that this isn't true generally. (There may be more than one interpretation, but not a unique one to every reader)

Even ignoring denominations, nearly all mainline christians for example would agree to the Nicene creed. (Anyone that disagreed probably wouldn't be considered "mainline", so somewhat definitional)

To suggest that all of theology is basically noneeterministically making things is naive and in my opinion insulting to an entire academic discipline, much less to the entire body of believers. (I can't tell if this is what you're taking about or not)

Nearly no group of mainline believers accept speaking in tongues and basically all of main protestantism believes that the time of prophets and new messages from God is over, the Bible is complete and will never be added to. (Pentecostals would be the one exception here, but I don't consider them mainline christians personally)