228: Jamie's analysis

[Alex Starkiller]

I see what you're saying, but you did leave out the big ol' loophole that goes with the "breaking the laws sends you to hell forever" bit.

[onigame]

• The Bible is 2000 years old and the sociocultural context it was written in no longer exists, so understanding what the author actually meant is an exercise in literary history at the very least.
• The Bible is (among other things) a book of laws and breaking those laws sends you to Hell forever. Have you seen what our modern laws look like? Definitions and sub-clauses all over the place to leave no room for error in the interpretation of the law. And it's still not enough - new technologies and cultural norms mean that we need to debate whether spyware is a type of wiretapping. Imagine how it is when the laws haven't been updated since the New Testament, and the stakes are an eternity of bliss or torture.

Of course there's still room for error. If there were no room for error in our modern laws, we wouldn't need judges. In the US, at least, our constitution is 222 years old and the sociocultural context for it is not anything anyone alive has ever experienced -- so there are plenty of ways to interpret it. The biggest difference is probably between originalist beliefs (generally, "The Constitution means the same thing now as it meant in 1789") vs. loose constructionism (generally, "The Constitution is a dynamically changing document that just gives general guidelines that should be reinterpreted as time changes").

Unsurprisingly, biblical interpretation also tends to fall into those two camps, although the details are much more complex.