somersetcace1
New member
Verse String Theory (VST) works like this. Take any large compilation of texts, break it up into verses, and you can pretty much get that text to say anything you want by stringing the proper verses together.
Any religious text will do. The bible is a great example. What does the bible say? Hmm Well, it's 66 books long (protestent version,) written by an unknown amount of writers spanning thousands of years, and has been broken up into verses. Kind of difficult to say.
You can make the bible say almost anything though. "Thou shalt not lay with another man, as though would a woman." What does that mean? We could debate that one verse alone for 2 months and never reach an objective consensus. "Love thy neighbor as thyself." What does THAT mean? Another 2 month debate. We've got 4 months worth of debate on two verses.
That's not even employing the verse string method. Some christians even have names for their compilations. ie; "Romans row." This is a grouping of verses which seems to suggest that we are all guilty of sin, simply for being alive, and that only by accepting Jesus can we be saved from certain destruction.
It's not just christians though. Critics also use the same theory to show how aweful the christian *** is. Check out infidels.org and you can see all sorts of examples.
It's not just the bible either. The qu'ran is also used in this fashion by muslims and islamic critics alike. There are whole web sites dedicated to proving the qu'ran is divine because it supposedly says things the authors could not have known without divine help. Likewise, there are whole websites dedicated to showing how evil islam is, and how they exist only to destroy that which is good.
They ALL use VST. So, what can we conclude from all of this? It's my opinion, however useless it may be, that if a method gives contradictory results depending on the attitude of the person employing it, that perhaps the method its self has a problem. Maybe.....ya think?
Any religious text will do. The bible is a great example. What does the bible say? Hmm Well, it's 66 books long (protestent version,) written by an unknown amount of writers spanning thousands of years, and has been broken up into verses. Kind of difficult to say.
You can make the bible say almost anything though. "Thou shalt not lay with another man, as though would a woman." What does that mean? We could debate that one verse alone for 2 months and never reach an objective consensus. "Love thy neighbor as thyself." What does THAT mean? Another 2 month debate. We've got 4 months worth of debate on two verses.
That's not even employing the verse string method. Some christians even have names for their compilations. ie; "Romans row." This is a grouping of verses which seems to suggest that we are all guilty of sin, simply for being alive, and that only by accepting Jesus can we be saved from certain destruction.
It's not just christians though. Critics also use the same theory to show how aweful the christian *** is. Check out infidels.org and you can see all sorts of examples.
It's not just the bible either. The qu'ran is also used in this fashion by muslims and islamic critics alike. There are whole web sites dedicated to proving the qu'ran is divine because it supposedly says things the authors could not have known without divine help. Likewise, there are whole websites dedicated to showing how evil islam is, and how they exist only to destroy that which is good.
They ALL use VST. So, what can we conclude from all of this? It's my opinion, however useless it may be, that if a method gives contradictory results depending on the attitude of the person employing it, that perhaps the method its self has a problem. Maybe.....ya think?