I just heard a lady on a call-in radio program say, "God said don't ...

[laststeamtrain]

... open a Pandora's box."
...and Hesiod said, "Don't open a Kosher Delicatessen."
The stuff that people say is 'in the Bible' is amazing. They've got history, myths of various derivations, slogans from ads, fables, etc all 'in the Bible'.
Is there one of those new 'translations' of the Bible I don't know about? A Trivial Pursuit edition of the Bible maybe?

[evlbstrd]

1. That's scary funny!

Welcome to DU, and easy on the paste command.

[Ladyhawk]

2. A lot of the people who believe in the bible most strongly haven't

even read it. Indeed, I can attribute my atheism to a very strong knowledge of the bible. I studied it for most of my life. Now, I'd really rather forget it.

I snatched this from a DUer's signature recently: "The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization." -R.A. Wilson

[Swamp Rat]

11. GREAT quote!

[kliljedahl]

42. I think this is a bit more accurate

Keith’s Barbeque Central

[DanCa]

17. Jung Psychology 101

I think thats why fundamentalist want to push the ten commandments on everyone they wont read it for themselves. I also find it crass for people to wear crosses over thier clothing and not under neath it. Like it was supposed to be worn and not a piece of jewelrly.

[ekelly]

33. My atheism

also comes directly from being raised on the bible.
And, like you, I'd rather forget it.

The only purpose that knowledge serves now is to show the "believers" how much they DON'T know about their own religion.

Sad but true.

[tmooses]

3. Yes, your favorite bible saying is behind door number......

[jojo54]

4. In their eyes, the saying goes like this....

"if the shoe fits"...........

Welcome to DU!!

[Fridays Child]

5. Was this before or after God commanded us to...

...taste that tangy zip of Miracle Whip?

:eyes:

[FreedomAngel82]

6. Pandora's box??

I've never heard of this either. :shrug: I know my Bible pretty well. Unless we have different verison's? :shrug: I have one that is New King James and another one that is NIV. I know what Pandora's Box is from the movie that features that (the name lost me now but it's an 80's horror flick).

[mcctatas]

7. I'm pretty sure Pandora

is a figure from Greek (or maybe Roman) mythology. Didn't realize God liked to plagiarize the works of other philosophers.:rofl:

[tocqueville]

8. Pandora's box

In Greek mythology, Pandora ("all gifted") was the first woman, fashioned by Zeus as part of his punishment of mankind for having stolen the secret of fire.


The legend
The titan Epimetheus ("hindsight") was responsible for giving a positive trait to each and every animal. However, when it was time to give man a positive trait, there was nothing left. Prometheus ("foresight"), his brother, felt that because man was superior to all other animals, man should have a gift no other animal possessed. So Prometheus set forth to steal fire from Zeus and handed it over to man.

Zeus was enraged and decided to punish Prometheus and his creation: mankind. To punish Prometheus, Zeus chained him in unbreakable fetters and set a vulture over him to eat his liver each day. Prometheus was an immortal, so the liver grew back every day, but he was still tormented daily from the pain.

To punish mankind, Zeus ordered the other gods to make Pandora as a poisoned gift for man. Pandora was given several traits from the different gods: Hephaestus molded her out of clay and gave her form; Aphrodite gave her beauty; and Apollo gave her musical talent and a gift for healing. Hermes then gave Pandora a box.

Before he was chained to the rock, Prometheus had warned Epimetheus not to take any gifts from the gods. Epimetheus did not listen to his brother, however, and when Pandora arrived, he fell in love with her. Hermes told him that Pandora was a gift to the titan from Zeus, and he warned Epimetheus to not open the box, which was Pandora's dowry.

Until then, mankind had lived a life in a paradise without worry. Epimetheus told Pandora never to open the box she had received from Zeus. However, one day, Pandora's curiosity got the better of her and she opened it, releasing all the misfortunes of mankind (plague, sorrow, poverty, crime, etc.). Once opened, she shut it in time to keep one thing in the box: hope. The world remained extremely bleak for an unspecified interval, until Pandora "chanced" to revisit the box again, at which point Hope fluttered out. Thus, mankind always has hope in times of evil, but Hope has a great deal of catching up to do. (See also Garden of Eden.)

The daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora was Pyrrha, who married Deucalion and was one of the two who survived the deluge.

[Todd B]

9. Yup, Pandora is from Greek mythology.

Yup, Pandora is from Greek Mythology. The box is supposed to contain all the misfortunes and evil in the world, which were unleashed when her curiousity got the better of her.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora%27s_box

[tocqueville]

13. Pandora = Eve

and instead of stealing apples, she opens a box...

All those stories are neat and intended to have a philosophical impact. It amazes me that there are so many people in the US that take them for the historical truth (at least the Christian variant)

How do you explain that ? There is NO OTHER Western country with Christian background that does that... not even the Poles and the Irish...

[mcctatas]

20. I'll resist the impulse to make a crass joke...

about how Eve opening her "box" started this whole mess. I am much to devout to do anything like that.

[tocqueville]

22. lol

but it's exactly what happened. Remember that a big snake was also involved...

[mcctatas]

23. You have a dirty mind...

I like the way you think.;-)

[kestrel91316]

27. You come here right now and clean up this mess .................

that I made snorting soda all over my computer!!

BAD BAD Tocqueville! :spank:

[tocqueville]

29. you sure it was soda...?

gotta stop that...

[dweller]

30. that snake was

the Clenis!

dp

[wli]

15. Pandora's Box starred Louise Brooks

And was a silent film.

[alcibiades_mystery]

10. Why not? Half the Epistles in the New Testament are cribbed from then

current Greek philosophy.

Why not grab some old Testament stuff from Greek mythology?

:rofl:

[sam sarrha]

16. the teachings of Jesus were in ARAMAIC, a language based on Metiphore...

Greek is a Logical language.. it is not possible to translate Aramaic into greek.. and understand the punch line.

[alcibiades_mystery]

40. LOL: I didn't realize we have actual teachings of Jesus!

Lordy Lord!

First, it would be metaphor...in English. ;-)

Second, the notion that one language is "metaphorical" while the other is "logical" is just bizarre. No idea what you're talking about there. All languages are "metaphorical" in that they substitute X for Y. All languages are "logical" to the extent that they use subjects, objects, negation, and the law of excluded middle.

Actually, I'm not even sure what your point is here, or how it has any bearing on my post? Clarify?

[mcctatas]

19. Or how about Mithraism...

apparently God had alot of source material to work with...or maybe the bible was actually written by men???? Shhhhh, don't tell the fundies, their heads will explode!:evilgrin:

[sam sarrha]

21. Jesus is Mithra.. the wise men were followers of Ahura Mazda, astrologers

following the sign of the birth of Mithra.. that is the reason they killed jesus.. the roman soldiers followed mithra.. they didn't want a unifying Messiah taking over the armys... especially one preaching PEACE..!!

[Djinn]

31. Mithra predates Jesus

the veneration of Mithra began roughly 2000 years before the wise men went walking - he also predates Zoroastrianism which didn't replace but changed the role of Mithras.

Also Ahura Mazda was a "unifying" god who beleived in peace and there's little difference between the teachings of Zoroaster and those of Jesus - one ultimate "God" an earth that contains both good and bad, an eventual "reckoning" etc.

The motto of of the followers of Zoroaster is "Good thoughts, good words, good deeds." so the romans killing jesus because he spoke of a unifying messiah and one that spoke peace doesn't really make a lot of sense.

If the wise men were followers of Ahura Mazda they would not have looked for the "son of god" because they wouldn't have beleieved in it

Every religion in the history of mankind has woven previous beliefs and mythology into it's own - none of them are particularly original

[sam sarrha]

41. believe what you will

[Djinn]

49. it's not so much about belief

I don't "beleive" in any mythology - it is a matter of chronological fact though.

Mithra was worshipped long before anyone invented Jesus

[sam sarrha]

12. the foundations of all the major religions are based on Prophets hearing

"Voices"... the Voice of God.. telling them to fulfill Divine instructions.
I have a friend whose girl friend, when she goes off her medication, has conversations with her vagina. I am waiting for the religion that comes out of that one..!!!

like the story about Abraham being told to kill his son by a voice.. the only people i hear about that god tells them to kill their children are schitzophrenic...

I can only extrapolate that maybe Abraham had a problem...,which he passed along to his offspring from the servant girl, his wife cast off into the desert whose linage would become Mohamed the Prophet of Allah.. another voice in someones head.

so i am never surprised when i hear these people telling stories about voices..

[tocqueville]

14. I know people having conversation with their penis

stand up, you bastard !

Viagra killed that religion...

[TankLV]

34. Hey, my ass speaks, but I usually try to leave the room afterward.

Why do we even try to reason with these assholes?

[Canuckistanian]

18. And Jesus spake, saying "Chill, dawgs, we be in the house"

[More Than A Feeling]

26. and God said, "That shit's bullshit, yo"

[tocqueville]

24. the truth about the bible

The Old Testament consists of a body of literature spread over a period from approximately 1450 B.C.E. to 200 B.C.E. There exists no original writings of the Old Testament. There does exist, however, hundreds of fragments from copies that became the old testament. These fragments consist of Cuneiform tablets, papyrus paper, leather etchings and the famous Dead Sea Scrolls. The scribes of the old testament wrote in classical Hebrew except for some portions written in Aramaic. The traditional Hebrew scribes wrote the texts with consonants but the Rabbis later added vowels for verbal pronouncing. Of course the Rabbis did their best in choosing the vowels that they thought gave the words their proper meaning and pronouncement. In the second century C.E., or even earlier, the Rabbis compiled a text from manuscripts as had survived the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. and on this basis they established the traditional or massoretic text, so called from the Hebrew word massorah. This text incorporated the mistakes of generations of copyists, and in spite of the care bestowed on it, many errors of later copyists also found their way into it. The earliest surviving manuscripts of this text date from the ninth to eleventh centuries C.E. It comes mostly from these texts which religionists have used for the present Old Testament translations.

The New Testament has even fewer surviving texts. Scholars think that not until years after Jesus' alleged death that its authors wrote the Gospels. There exists no evidence that the New Testament came from the purported original apostles or anyone else that had seen the alleged Jesus. Although the oldest surviving Christian texts came from Paul, he had never seen the earthly Jesus. There occurs nothing in Paul's letters that either hints at the existence of the Gospels or even of a need for such memoirs of Jesus Christ. The oldest copy of the New Testament yet found consists of a tiny fragment from the Gospel of John. Scholars dated the little flake of papyrus from the period style of its handwriting to around the first half of the 2nd century C.E. The language of most of the new testament consists of old Greek.

There has existed over a hundred different versions of the Bible, written in most of the languages of the time including Greek, Hebrew and Latin. Some versions left out certain biblical stories and others contained added stories. The completed versions of the old and new testament probably got finished at around 200-300 C.E. although many disputed the authenticity of some books which later ended up as Apocrypha (uncanonical or of questionable authorship). For example, the book of Ecclesiasticus appears in the Catholic Bible but not in Protestant versions.

At around 405 C.E. Jerome (Eusebius Hieronymous) finished translating all the Old and New testament books into Latin (Vulgate Bible) which provided the Roman Catholic church added power. The Vulgate Bible went through several revisions up until the early 1900s!

http://www.nobeliefs.com/DarkBible/darkbible2.htm

[kestrel91316]

28. Oh you lie, BAD tocqueville!

The bible is the one and only, true, unadulterated, never changing literal Word of God. Jimmy Swaggart told me so years ago on teevee.:sarcasm:

[TankLV]

35. Interesting that. When I used to attend church, there was a great

discussion that determined that which came first, the church or the bible.

The answer was that the Church came first.

The bible was complied and CREATED many centuries later.

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

50. If the King James Bible was good enough for Jesus, It's good enough for me

:evilgrin:

Hey, I have a signed 1st edition of the Old Testament for sale.

3/4 Leather, marbled end papers, minor worming. Signed & inscribed:

To my bud, Moses. You da'man!

Best Wishes,
God.

[Generic Other]

25. Is God coming out of the closet?

Just wondering.

[Diane R]

32. Too bad she didn't worry about the Pandora's Box.....

....before he started a war in the Middle East.

[WCGreen]

36. Mediterianian Mythology for Dummies.......

[dchill]

37. Doesn't the Bible also say...

"Thou shalt not mix ammonia and bleach?"

If it doesn't, don't you think it should?

[allalone]

38. Pandora's box rule follows right after

thou shalt not swim for 1 hour after eating.

[NMMNG]

39. Typical fundie wingnut

All talk and little actual knowledge of the Bible. Pandora was from Greek mythology, not the Bible. But you already knew that, didn't you?

Wouldn't it be ironic if hell existed and all those whackjobs ended up in there for perverting God's word like that?

[mcctatas]

51. If God is a just God...

that is exactly where they will end up, and I hope there will be nothing but the American Pie trilogy for them to watch over and over again while listening to Megadeath and eating curry, not that any of those things are necessarily bad, but I'm sure the fundies would HATE IT!

[NMMNG]

52. Sweet

Wouldn't that be poetic justice

[kliljedahl]

43. God's name was Zeus at the time though.

Keith’s Barbeque Central

[Tsiyu]

44. And then Gawd sed:

"Don't call into talk shows when you are a clueless fool."

Dumbshit 1:01

[Puzzler]

45. Pandora's Box...

... is Greek mythology.


-P

[lectrobyte]

46. But Bush already opened Pandora's box? Does that lady know that?

http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=28966&archive=true

[realms]

47. The end of suffering

People can use their biological computers to:

pre rationality- look for endlessness
rationally- look for significance
trans rationality- integrate the beginning with the end

BTW use the word "god" too much and I think your setting something apart from the whole.

[zanne]

48. Men should help around the house...

It's in the bible.

[mykpart]

53. Years ago, I read a list of things that people thought were in the Bible.

Next to each quote was the actual source. A couple I remember:

"The Lord helps those who help themselves." -Benjamin Franklin

"All that glisters is not gold." -Shakespeare

Wish I had the whole list.