Jack D Capehart's blog

Quoting the Bible

The biggest problem in quoting from the Bible is selecting material to quote that is truly relevant to your purpose and yet is something which is still applicable in today's world. If you quote something that sounds as if it might not apply in today's world, then you must also supply an interpretation of your quote that is broad enough to make it applicable. If you find it difficult to come up with this broad interpretation, then you are trying to quote what I call an "exiom". This is a contraction for "ex-axiom". If it is truly relevant and applicable, I consider it to be an "axiom". It might not truly be an axiom according to the dictionary definition of axiom, but this is an easy way to classify and discuss Biblical quotes. Even the most zealous dogmatist will agree that there are some exioms in the Bible. I don’t think anyone today would cut off one of their fingers if they accidentally touched a pig (I’m not sure that’s what the rule was in the Bible, but I’m sure you get the idea).

I believe that you can avoid most of the exioms in the Bible by just reading the words attributed to Jesus. Thomas Jefferson is reported to have said that he did not believe everything in the Bible but he believed in the philosophy of Jesus Christ. He even had a Bible made up mostly of the sayings of Jesus. It’s called "The Jefferson Bible" ( http://www.angelfire.com/co/JeffersonBible/ ). So the difficulty in good Biblical quotes comes down to deciding whether your quote is an axiom or an exiom.

No one can know all the massive amount of knowledge and wisdom we've accumulated in the last two thousand years that might possibly turn axioms to exioms, but the weirdest, most unfathomable thing is that people, who know enough of that knowledge and wisdom and even accept it as true, still quote the exioms that refute it. Some people say they believe the earth is only six thousand years old and humans did not descend from primates even though they know about carbon dating and fossil records. Other people say the Bible should be interpreted "literally", but I'm not sure what that really means.

Islamic extremists believed they were interpreting their religious books literally when they flew planes loaded with passengers into the Twin Towers in New York and when they committed many other heinous acts of terrorism. Down through the ages, ever since there was a "written word", many millions if not billions of people have been slain in the name of literal interpretations.

Just what is a "literal interpretation"? If a group of people are asked individually for a literal interpretation of one of the books of the Bible, do you think their interpretations would agree?

The Merriam-Webster OnLine Dictionary defines the word "literal" as follows:

Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French, from Medieval Latin litteralis, from Latin, of a letter, from littera letter
1 a : according with the letter of the scriptures b : adhering to fact or to the ordinary construction or primary meaning of a term or expression : ACTUAL <liberty in the literal sense is impossible -- B. N. Cardozo> c : free from exaggeration or embellishment <the literal truth> d : characterized by a concern mainly with facts <a very literal man>
2 : of, relating to, or expressed in letters
3 : reproduced word for word : EXACT, VERBATIM <a literal translation>

As you can see there are even several meanings for the word "literal" itself.

In truth, interpretation, even "literal interpretation", is a subjective process. Words don’t have exact definitions. Words have dictionary definitions, but they also have connotations. And even if everyone uses only dictionary definitions from the same dictionary, words still have different connotations to different people. Take for instance the words "slain" and "killed". For example: "In the gun battle, 3 of the men were killed by the police" vs. "In the gun battle, 3 of the men were slain by the police". They both mean to take life away, but "slain" has different connotations from "killed". When translating a sentence containing either word into a different language, that other language may not have both words available and the translator has to use what he believes is the closest word available and so the translation will not be as easy to interpret "literally". The Bible, I’m sure you will agree, has been translated several times and translators had to make those kinds of decisions many many times.

Then there is the fact that even though the Bible may be the divine word of God, it is the divine word of God as communicated to humans thousands of years ago when much less was known about the true nature of the universe. We have discovered that the earth is not the center of the universe and that the earth goes around the sun. We know what makes the grass green and the sky blue and that our sun is a star just like all the other stars we see in the night sky. If all we have discovered today had been known in Biblical times, I think the Bible would read a lot differently today.

I actually believe it is impossible to write something today that can be "literally interpreted" correctly even 200, much less 2,000 years in the future. Look at some of Benjamin Franklin’s or Thomas Jefferson’s writings and try to literally interpret them so that that interpretation agrees with anyone else’s literal interpretation. Or, conversely ask a lawyer or law maker how difficult it is to write so that their writings will not be misinterpreted many years in the future. Just read some laws that were written 200 or so years ago and see how appropriate they are to the present.

Now, are you sure you want to "literally interpret" a 2,000 year old Book that has been translated several times from languages that aren’t spoken today.

The spiritual, moral, and ethical content of the Bible are not necessarily lost by a liberal interpretation but may even be enhanced because it may be much closer to the intended interpretation!

Center of What?

It seems the human race has always considered itself to hold a special place in the universal scheme of things. I suppose it's only natural, but they (the human race) has so far always turned out to be wrong in this assumption. Once upon a time the earth was considered the center of everything, then the sun was the center, then the solar system, etc. Now it seems we believe that everything we can detect with all of our most sensitive instruments is the entire universe.

I would like to propose that our detectable universe is merely a very small part of a much larger universe. I read this small article a while back that got me to thinking along these lines:

Ever wonder where in the universe you’re headed?

"We’re Going Thataway"

From "Discover" September 2000

While sprawled in a lawn chair, munching a labor day hot dog under the late-summer sun, you may feel perfectly at rest. It’s an illusion, of course. Earth is spinning, orbiting, and swooping at hundreds of miles per second, carrying you on a complicated pathway through deep space. The motions range from the familiar progression around the sun, which touches off the start of autumn on September 22, to arcane movements that betray the hidden construction of the universe.

The primary step in this celestial dance is your daily circle on the spinning Earth, and your speed has everything to do with latitude—zero at the poles and a maximum of 1,040 miles per hour, or 0.3 miles per second, at the equator. If you’re not afraid of the math, you can find your exact speed by multiplying the cosine of your latitude by 1,040. This works out to nearly 800 miles per hour in New York City or Indianapolis (latitude 40 degrees north) but just 450 mph in Fairbanks (65 degrees north).

The next complicating factor is Earth’s yearly revolution around the sun, at an average speed of 18.5 miles per second. To get a feel for this movement, face the midday sun and picture yourself orbiting to the right. When watching a sunrise, our planet’s rotation carries you forward—that is, toward the sun—but the much faster orbital motion is hurling you upward, around the sun and toward a spot high in the south.

The sun itself takes a 250-million-year carousel ride around the nucleus of our galaxy, the Milky Way, dragging Earth along for the ride. Visualizing this swift motion, some 140 miles per second, is particularly easy this month. Along with most of the stars of the night sky, we rush straight up at nightfall, toward the cross-shaped constellation Cygnus and its brightest star, Deneb, nearly overhead in early evening. The galaxy’s densely packed nucleus hovers lowish in the south, marked by a brightening in the misty glow of the Milky Way.

The Milky Way, part of a small gathering of galaxies called the Local Group, is moving too. We’re falling toward the center of the group at about 25 miles per second. And in 1969, scientists noticed a strange distortion in the ubiquitous cosmic microwave background, radiation thought to be left over from the Big Bang. That distortion implies that the whole galactic neighborhood is moving about 370 miles per second toward the constellation Hydra. This unexpected and still unexplained motion might result from the pull of vast super-clusters or walls of galaxies—the biggest known structures in the universe.

Our celestial velocity could also reveal what holds the superclusters together. Cosmologists believe that more than 90 percent of the universe consists of dark matter—invisible subatomic particles that make themselves known only by their gravity. These particles, if they exist, do not generally associate with ordinary atoms, but they occasionally collide anyway, producing some secondary effects,

So as we circle the Milky Way’s center, we should plow through swarms of dark matter. In June, our planet’s orbit around the sun carries us in the same direction as the galactic rotation; in January, we move against the flow. We should therefore slam through more of the evanescent particles in summer than in winter. This past February, a Chinese-Italian research collaboration claimed to see just such an effect (see last month’s Works in Progress column).

Interestingly, September brings not only the time of the equinox, when day and night are equal in duration. It also gives us the time of another equality, when Earth’s motion about the sun neither adds to, nor subtracts from, our orbital velocity around the galaxy. Something to ponder as you savor the dwindling lazy days of summer.

From this article, I extracted the following motions:

1.) Earths Rotation – 1,040 mph (or 0.3 miles/sec.) at the equator. 800 mph (.23 miles/sec.) at Indianapolis ( lat. 40 deg.)

2.) Earths Revolution (around Sun) – averages 18.5 miles/sec.

3.) Solar Systems Revolution about Galactic Center - 140 miles/sec. (250 Million Years per orbit)

4.) Milky Way’s motion within the Local Group of Galaxies – 25 miles/sec. Toward the center of the group.

5.) Motion of the Local Group of Galaxies toward Constellation Hydra – 370 miles/sec.

So, you see, that "370 miles per second toward the constellation Hydra" is what got me started thinking and wondering if we're not wrong once again in thinking "our" universe is all there is.