Which Bible? (Continued)

Thanks for the comments, private and public on my original Ramblings

If you are looking for citations for my Ramblings, you are out of luck. This is not an academic exercise, but a culmination of 35 years of research (academic, mentored, and personal) and my opinions based on those 35 years of intense navel-gazing contemplation with the support of an assortment of a dozen (or more) Anglican, Baptist, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic Priests/Ministers , no less than five Rabbis, three Imams, a Mahasaya and a very interesting Sikh Granthi who had more positive input on the Christian Bible than any other community religious leader noted above.

My original point was referring to a document that cannot be called THE Bible, because there are so many variations and information lost in translation from the second and third century CE Armenian (the common language of the people in the Middle East from 2000 BCE), to Greek (the common language of international commerce and philosophy of the day) to Latin (the common language of law of the day) to ancient Spanish (the most widely spoken language on the planet after the 4^th Century CE) and finally to English in the 16^th Century CE, and the variety of translations in English since 1611.

This is not to mention the dozens of political additions, subtractions, and translations from the bible from the First Council of Nicea (325CE) to the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council (Concilium Oecumenicum Vaticanum Secundum) in 1965.

As an instrument of instruction for living a good life, it can be boiled down to what has been come to be known as the “Golden Rule”: Treat everybody that way you want to be treated. This is common in every one of the current spiritual instruction books on the planet – Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, Islam, Jewish, etc. Everything else is filler and often poor translations from the original Armenian/Greek/Latin writings of the second and third Century CE when 90% of the Common Era history was written.

In 35 years of academic instruction, reading, and being mentored in the study of organized religions, there is nowhere in any Bible I have been able to find that rejects the celebration of birthdays, that requires spiritual leaders to abstain from marriage, that the world was going to end in 1925, that the ‘gates to heaven’ closed in 1935, that the world would end in 1975, or that the birth date of Emmanuel (Jesus) was December 25 (rather than late Spring/early Summer as indicated in actually READING the book).

The bottom lines:

Do good stuff, not bad stuff

Treat others as you want to be treated