this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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I used orange for inconsistencies between parallel accounts (like 4000 vs 40000 stalls in 2 Chr. 9 vs 1 Kings 4). I used a lot of orange flags.
The term you're looking for is univocality According to the consensus of biblical scholars, the bible does not have this property. Accoring to most of the ~40,000 ministries, the bible is assumed by fiat to have this feature.
I swear it was ~4,000 ministries… hmm.
It's 39,000+change denominations including all the dangerous cults^†^ but not including non-denominational churches, who are typically too small and localized to be part of a ministry, but some are big enough but pretend to be small and non-denominational so as not to draw too much attention (because US law enforcement really doesn't want another Waco or Jonestown)
Some of these are actually extinct like the Shakers -- nope, we still have one Shaker village -- but between the 1970s and now, a lot of liberal / relaxed / left-leaning denominations faded into insignificance, correlating to a rising popular atheist movement. (Before the new atheists of the aughts and places on the usenet and the internet where atheist philosophy could spread, it was constrained to academics and scientists and hobbyist philosophers. Richard Dawkins was moved by the 9/11/2001 attacks -- enabled by radical religious suicide attackers -- to not just promote that atheism should be an acceptable norm, but we should challenge the rhetoric of churches, many of which were already a lot more politicized than they were supposed to be while retaining tax-exempt status.
My numbers come from the (defunct?) Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance in the aughts, which tried to catalog all the religions of the world and what they believed (and how they differed from their adjacent schisms).
(FIXED)
† In 23rd century parlance, when we say cult we usually mean an NRM (New Religious Movement) that is dangerous. There are plenty of NRMs that are not dangerous (that get cult status anyway and harassed by US law enforcement) and there are plenty of old religions (more than a century-plus) that are dangerous, but not regarded as cults.
I was actually making a tongue-in-cheek reply to the comment above yours, but damn. Interesting stuff, thanks for sharing!
You're welcome!
Jonestown happened when I was a kid, so when Waco happened, I did some rabbit-hole dives into cult phenomena how they entrap people, so I'll nerd out about it from time to time.
And don't get me started on Far Cry 5 and its failure to actually look at how cults work. (Of course Ubisoft was afraid of ~~losing business from~~ getting called out by the rising Christian nationalist movement in the US.)
How is the actual number relevant? 4000 and 40000 are both a grant bunch of stalls.
But they're not the same, so at least one of them cannot be accurate. At the very least, it's a copy error by a scribe, but that still means current biblical canon cannot be considered infallible, which is a big deal if you come from a tradition that demands you accept infallibility as a core doctrine.
True, but what interact with these people? Arguments do not matter to them anyway.