100 languages, 100 different translations. Then translated from dead languages. Then changed to suit a tyrant. Then translated back to another language.

If you think any of that original fiction is still there, you're a fucking idiot. If you don't think it's fiction, you're an even bigger idiot.

Maat - Wikipedia

(en.wikipedia.org)

Oh, plus “only this god, not those”

A tablet written in the very early Bronze Age, when Semites were surrounded by (and often participating in) all sorts of alternative cults and pagan pantheons would naturally mention other gods.

It would be weirder if the early biblical texts didn't mention any other gods.

Iirc the Bible never says there is only one god. Only that the Israelites should only worship Yahweh.

stupid for living 1,000-5,000 years ago, and having zero education, or for thinking that other people would buy that bullshit

This is why I'm always a bit askance when presented with Atheism as some kind of enlightened philosophy.

Just kicking in the door and shouting "Everyone who conceived of a being more powerful than themselves and attempted to extrapolate the natural world into an explainable series of events was FUCKING DUMB AS SHIT" is kinda simple-minded and divorced from any historical perspective on its face.

Nevermind the chauvinism and the egotism of this bland dogmatic assertion. You're casually dismissing whole intermediate strains of philosophical and literary development, because people 5000 years ago weren't spoon-fed a level of education (mixed with its own heady brand of western War on Terror propaganda) you received a few years ago.

That’s why religions brainwash small children using fear.

Trying to explain to my five year old why transendentalism is going to ruin their life and perpetuate generations of human suffering without scaring them. Maybe if I lead in with "Catholics are going to rape you! Stay away from the church!" they'll get the core logic and reason without experiencing any kind of reflexive emotional response.

At the time, you prayed to whoever you thought got that particular job done

Then Catholics came along and replaced this with patron saints.

(technically Catholics believe they are asking the patron to intercede and advocate for whatever the devotee is asking for, but it's still funny to me that they still fill the roles of the lesser gods of antiquity)

This is the point of view that I've had since elementary school after a game of "Telephone".

If you can't put 6 people in a line, whisper something to the first, and have the same thing come from the last, what are the chances any of those books contain any original text? Especially when you have sycophantic rulers like Orange Hitler looking to bilk the masses and trying to rule the world.

Religion is a tool of fear and control to keep the population where you want them. It is broadly and repeatedly used to justify the absolute worst actions in humanity. Religion is the fuel that makes individuals hate entire countries of people they have never met.

Man, imagine being really devout, so devout you become a Saint, then instead of hanging out in Heaven you have to do paperwork for people praying to you.

Literally been carrying that all my life, too. It definitely doesn’t seem like most people took that message away from the game.

You are correct about the meaning being not to have other gods, I didn't say it was a mistranslation. I said they are purposefully taking the alternate and more popular meaning of the word "before". In the scripture it means 'in front of' or 'in my sight'. They take the meaning as 'in line in front of'. Because of the eccentricities of English and many other languages, the meaning could be taken either way if you didn't have context. Also, the joke hinges on ignoring that mentioning other gods doesn't mean they exist or exist in the way they are purported to exist. In that German translation from the post I was replying to, the translation was more specific and didn't lend as much confusion.

Considering 3 major world religions claim the text was inspired by their god, the discrepancies make it at least highly suspicious.

A dove drops a feather next to a towering stack of completed requests. St. Anthony picks it up and sighs

"This guy is asking me to find his keys for the tenth time this week! I wish I was the patron saint of memory, because this guy really needs one, ugh."

no one but the Jews had only one God they prayed to.

Well, there was that one time ancient Egypt suddenly took a turn to monotheism (arguably more correctly monolatrism). Which lead to an alternative theory of Exodus as the story of Atenist priests fleeing Egypt after Akhenaten's death and deciding to have another go at monotheism with the Isrealites...

It wasn't just other cultural groups that had other gods -- proto-Judaism was polytheistic.

I mean, there's even other godlike characters in the Bible. Satan may not be the most powerful deity in the book but he's canonically a deity. Same for angels and their ilk. Hell, even the later bits struggle to keep a lid on the numbers, jumping through hoops to make the claim that three deities is actually one.

Way back when, the religion that turned into Judaism was openly polytheistic, and simply held that Yahweh, the king of the pantheon and God of war and weather, was the only god worthy of worship.
Over time Yahweh merged with an adjoining religions god El, and started the transition to being the only god, instead of just the only worthy god.
This transition happened literally a thousand years after many of the earliest texts were written, so there's a lot of verbiage where the deity explains that the other gods aren't important, which is later clarified to them not existing, or really just being servants and not at all lower tier gods in a complex pantheon.
It's why there's so many weird turns of phrase, beyond it being thousands of years old and translated a lot.
"El" being a word that was used for both "a god" and "this god" didn't help. "The high god divided the world for all the gods, and our god God the only God and creator of all was given our land as he's the high god and father of God the only God of the sky and also that mountain".

Different parts of the world took a lot of the same root deities and went a different direction with them. There's a degree of overlap between aspects of ancient Greek religion and the Abrahamic religions because parts of each of them came from a common root. Just one mushed then together and made the grammar extra confusing. "King sky god", "water god", "afterlife god" being the children of mother and father cosmic creator gods. Also a big sea snakes who are up to no good. That one had legs, so to speak.

The Torah has been preserved in Hebrew, but changed in writing over time. The Quran has been preserved in Arabic and the original text is preserved, which is also why the language is preserved.

Your argument is factually wrong and calling all Jews, Muslims and Christians "fucking idiots" is racist and antisemitic.

This is why I’m always a bit askance when presented with Atheism as some kind of enlightened philosophy.

Its not a philosophy, its a position on the existence of god.

is kinda simple-minded and divorced from any historical perspective on its face.

Its simple because its only a statement of belief in no god in the form of identification. A historical perspective is not needed to come to a conclusion as to whether people who believe in god are stupid or smart. You can also do that through thinking about their rationality or logical process for coming to those conclusions.

You’re casually dismissing whole intermediate strains of philosophical and literary development

If I wrote a philosophy or theology about how everything is made of bananas, and then for hundreds/thousands of years people argued about the nuances of my absurd and baseless belief system I think it'd be fair to dismiss it anyway. It doesn't matter how much fan fiction is written about Musaceae-ology. You don't have to read it, you can safely ignore it.

I'm into decolonization of Christianity, and one thing that's really interesting is how saints were used by conquered peoples to preserve their gods and cultural practices i.e. syncretism. That's one of the reasons Catholicism has remained more prominent than Protestantism in Latin America.

Catholicism outside of the Vatican is peganism and animism and ancestor worship with the labels scratched off.

And I'm mature enough in my atheism (really, post-atheist) to think that's actually really cool.

It's not so much an alternative meaning of a translation as one part of the mythos was written a millennia before the other.
Early the-religion-that-would-become-judaism was pretty openly polytheistic.
Over time Yahweh went from being the god of the mountain to the king of the gods, to the only one that mattered to worship, to the only one at all.

It's entirely unsurprising that there are bits that allude to different phases of their worship. This isn't even the most blatant. Satan? Holy Trinity? Host of angels?

The way it sounds in full is like "I saved you from a tyrant you were forced to serve and worship! Therefore you must serve and worship me!"

I'm not the only one reading it like that, right?