Christian Chaplain Fired for Preaching Compassion and Love Over Violence of American Sniper

The most popular Bible in the world is the King James Bible.

In the anglophone world. Which, as I should remind you, is mostly populated by Americans. The most faithful translation to the original is the New International Version.

King James was a racist, greedy, adulterous asshole who wasted every last penny of England's money. Most of it went to extravagant mask plays that were written and performed with the message of "King James was sent by God to rule England, the greatest country ever, let's suck his dick for an hour following our fancy dance number." This was the guy that decided what was to be written and printed into the Bible.

An ad hominem argument does not speak about the quality of the translation.

Even if the original text was literally the word of God, it's been so watered down with translation, interpretation, socio-economic progress, and personal culture that there's no logical way to conclude that what's in the Bible is actually God's word.

In Translation Studies, we learn that in a translation properly made by trained professionals (which are very rare in the anglosphere, and weren't even standardised until the last century) must favour the core meaning of the text over its shape. So we get, say cogito ergo sum, which was translated very literally a long time ago as "I think, thus, I exist". This is a bad translation, since, as we all know, rocks don't think, and they do, in fact, exist. A modern, trained translator would analyse the text where the phrase was found. And it was originally found in French. Fucking Latinists. So we read the text, and we find that the most adequate translation would be "I am sentient; thus, the world is real". Which does make some kind of sense as a statement.

And that is the kind of reasoning modern translations use. They also work with the Talmud and the Septuagint, the oldest, less adulterated versions of the Bible, in order to make it more faithful to the original.

The rest of your comment is just bigotry, so I won't bother to reply to it.

/r/nottheonion Thread Link - alternet.org