Member-only story
Religion and Love
I remember an afternoon when I’d stood with an Achuar hunter in the rainforest. He aimed his blowgun at a bird in a tree. Then he lowered it without shooting and stared at the bird.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I realized that it’s the nesting season for that bird. His mate is sitting on eggs. If I kill him, those eggs won’t hatch.”
Later that night, as we relaxed around the fire, he told me that Achuar men are raised to understand that the birds and animals they hunt must be loved. “We always ask permission before killing,” he said. “That bird this afternoon did not give me permission.”
— John Perkins
*
… Bart Ehrman estimates there are 200,000 to 400,000 variants in the Christian scripture based on something like 15,000 Greek and Latin manuscripts. So the top half of the pages in our picture, what biblical illiterates take literally, are somebody’s best guesses about what the original message might have been.
Whatever the ancients meant by “God’s unchanging word” could not have meant the biblical text. Just looking at the King James Version shows how English has changed since the original writing. It is staggering to think about how language has changed over a much greater span of time and across various cultures and languages…
