The Diminishing Bible .. Appreciated, Koog. Good to know you are around reading some. Still revisit the book off and on. See:
The Diminishing Bible
"At some point in my parochial HS education I left the dogma from the 'religion classes' behind and focused on the ethics, philosophy and literary influence of Judaism and Christianity on western lit & civ. Anyway I never found myself putting down a Shakespeare play to go look up the religious references; ditto for Dante and Milton."
[...]
The modern evangelical message promotes a simplistic soul-saving-exercise of praying to accept Jesus Christ as the lord and saviour of your life; that is apparently the ticket to heaven. This concept of salvation through Jesus Christ, rather than religious rituals at church, was suggested in The Divine Comedy. Dante also created an in-depth description of heaven and hell that isn’t a biblical concept. Dante’s poem has given much weight to these eternal rewards and punishment in today’s Western dogma. This post-death pursuit renders the bible of little value when a ticket to heaven is not clearly outlined in text and the waters have been muddied by works of fiction.
There can be no disputing that the literary giants of Dante and Milton substantially affected the Judeo-Christian religion despite being works of fiction and decidedly not borne of the divine. The longevity of the Roman Catholic church has meant that many of their internal Catechism decrees have become ingrained in the wider Protestant dogma although not necessarily founded upon a biblical source. Many practices and rituals, ordered by God and stipulated within the bible, have been abandoned in the modern era. This seemingly leaves the bible as a take-it-or-leave-it book and a pick-and-choose text that exists more as a companion to The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost. Any book loses its worth and its moral tale as more and more chapters are dismissed. I would suggest that the abandonment of so many biblical instructions, alongside the propensity to shape dogma by the literary works of others, inherently renders the bible with a value very much diminished in the year 2023. [...] The Roman Catholics also advanced the concept of Purgatory.
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