God: the Author

“It seems that if our species ever eradicates itself through war, it will not be because it was written in the stars but because it was written in our books.”

- Sam Harris, The End of Faith

In The End of Faith Sam Harris points out that most people in the world believe that God has written a book. “We have the misfortune of having many such books on hand, each making an exclusive claim as to its infallibility.“

This of course has lead to deadly conflicts among the various Book Clubs over the millennia, each proclaiming their own as the #1 book.

Question:
Was the animosity between the clubs as vicious before the written word? When the “book” was a purely verbal medium? Was there something about the permanency of the written word that placed religion in bondage, that made it difficult to change as the club encountered new tribes and new knowledge? Was religion more fluid before it was set in stone, vellum, or papyrus? 

King Ptolemy’s translation of the Torah into Greek in the 4th century BCE was considered a day of mourning for the Jews, equal in sadness to the creation of the Golden Calf. For by translating from the original Hebrew, Ptolemy changed the words of God.

Were the Greeks once livid at Homer for setting down in writing what was supposed to be eternally oral? Did they fear their religion would lose its dynamic power after this? Passages could now be called out. Someone could point to a passage and say, “Really? Does that jibe with what we now know? Or what another tribe has shown us?”

Tellers created life spans for the prophets’ ancestors that lasted centuries, despite never knowing anyone who lived to be over a hundred. If new information came to light to improve our knowledge on the history of sacred events, one could simply update the telling. As more tellers updated the story, the new story would replace the old. There was no permanent record for the average faithful dinosaur to go back to review and say, “This is the way it always was, this is the way it always will be.”

Before the written word, despite opposition, religion could adapt to observation over time. Since the written word, the faithful dinosaurs have asked human observation to adapt to the books.

continued in:

But what has He written lately?