Comment by jqpabc123

5 days ago

What is the "expanse"?

Answer: The sky. The ancient people who wrote the bible thought the sky was a solid dome that separated "the water's above" (aka rain) from the water's below. God lived on the other side of this dome.

This is confirmed later in Genesis with the Tower of Babel story.

They tried to reach this dome by building a tower. And "god" was so offended by their ignorance and stupidity (which he perpetrated) that he decided to punish them.

The "faithful" obviously reject this simple interpretation in favor of something more obtuse and mystical.

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jqpabc123

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epsteingpt  5 days ago

Not here to have a religious debate - though given HN, it may turn into one!

Imprecise language is a common human feature of a lack of understanding - something we all suffer from. We call LLM's "AI" without fully understanding what's artificial and what's intelligence.

The story of faith is, in some ways, the story about how little we know about the universe. That doesn't mean there's no progress. If anything, it shows there is an end goal.

The ancient narratives of Babel and Genesis reduce the incomprehensible (Creation, the Divine) into elements we as humans at that time could understand.

How else could our ancestors have possibly related to the divine?

  • krapp  5 days ago

    >How else could our ancestors have possibly related to the divine?

    Simply, the "divine" isn't real. Nothing within the Bible points to any truly incomprehensible truth. The God of the Bible is not beyond understanding, he is cut from the same cloth as other sky-father deities of the time.

    Everything within the Bible was limited to what the authors themselves could comprehend given their personal and cultural biases, because they are a product of human imagination and intellect.

    When the writers said the world was created in seven days, they meant seven days. When they said that people tried to build a tower to heaven and God struck it down, and created different languages to confuse humans so they never tried that again, that's what they meant, and believed.

    You could bring up the Trinity as an example of God's incomprehensible truth but the Trinity doesn't really exist in the Bible, it's an extra-biblical concept created by Christians as a philosophical compromise between rival factional ideologies and a desire to maintain a monotheistic religion given polytheistic elements. It is intentionally irrational but there is no deeper truth behind it. It's just accepted as a matter of faith.

  • order-matters  5 days ago

    there is also the unspoken alignment of those people from being of the same age / time period.

    humans additionally have a spectacular ability to use absurdity and loose definitions of things in ways that play with this unspoken alignment to communicate other ineffable ideas and/or build community. I'd go as far as to say we play with this unspoken alignment more so than we say exactly what we mean.

    I would think this behavior, although often seen in meme culture nowadays, would be highly relevant to religious communication and documentation of the past. I think actually trying to write down an exact meaning is a modern phenomenon and is observed in the over articulation and general structure of "legalese", for which I dont think the bible resembles very much in spirit in any way.

  • jqpabc123  5 days ago

    How else could our ancestors have possibly related to the divine?

    There is nothing "divine" in the story to relate to.

    It is a collection of unscientific, erroneous myths and beliefs that were popular in the culture at the time it was written --- by men. The only reason any divinity can still be subscribed to it is that these basic facts have been somewhat obfuscated through translation.

    I truly appreciate the fact that they put this right up front in the book. Interpreted for what it is, it succinctly obviates the need for much further consideration or worry.