>>>I think you are reading too much into the text
>>
>>Gee, do you think? Sometimes I swear I think I'm reading the Onion instead of a post by someone who has the mental horsepower necessary to write code.
>>
>>It really does support the case of those who didn't want "sacred" texts translated into the Vulgate lest the ignorant totally misunderstand them. <g>
>
>That reminds me of a situations where a man tells his wife: "You look beautiful!" and the wife starts running her mental engines and comes to the following conclusions:
>- "Surely he must want something from me, and for that he says something nice to me."
>- "Does he now imply that I don't look beautiful on the other days?!"
>- "He means I am not beautiful but he just wants to flatter me!"
>- "Surely he finds the other girls more beautiful than me"
>- "He must be hiding something, perhaps he has an affair with his secretary".
>
>So the man says: "I'm just saying, you look beautiful! That's all I meant to say, there is nothing more to it."
>And she says: "I don't believe you, you don't think I look beautiful."
>"Ahh, shut up, forget it!"
>
>That's the way how people treat the Bible, they just don't believe what they read, they think there is some hidden message deep down there that only the most intelligent and wise persons can decipher, and God wouldn't just say what he means to say. So they end up in error and religious doctrines that creates a whole mess of hatred and violence. But I don't think it's the fault of the message, it's the fault of the receiver.
>
>That some people still know how to produce good code: well that's beyond me!

The thing I find most disturbing is the idea that somehow "God" - an anthropomorphic construction in man's image - has "spoken" and created a users manual in a collection of disparate documents assembled, deconstructed, mistranslated and rewritten over 2500 years by committee and that ultimately this is the authority for questions of human existence, when the only authority for its primacy or integrity is itself.

I am familiar with the culture and history that makes it so, but it really does make discussion of nuance of what it really means rather like arguing over Star Trek episodes. Proper human behavior is "self-documenting". I would take Kant's categorical imperative over Leviticus any day. Those parts of the Bible which have moral authority represent the wisdom of human experience rather than a dictate whose value would never have been perceived without the imprimatur of the Man behind the Curtain.