Seems logical to me, either you believe you can understand the divine will by interpreting holy books or you don't. If you don't believe the divine will is knowable, then why would you follow any religion?
It is my understanding that Catholics believe that Pope can interpret the scriptures, but laypeople can't. Sort of how a Supreme Court judge can interpret the law, but a layperson can't, I guess.
> If you don't believe the divine will is knowable, then why would you follow any religion?
This doesn't follow. If you believe you can just decide how to reinterpret the word of God then you put yourself at the same level as Him and are qualified to follow your own word, rather than a religion.
You follow a religion because you want to be given the word of God to follow. Not the word of a man who pretends he is at the same level as God so his reinterpretation weights the same.
Let me bring it down to earth. If you go for a lecture from Einstein you want to get Einstein's word, not an assistant to interpret "I think he meant we're all relatives man".
If anything you have two choices. 1) You take God's word at face value, no interpretation, no exceptions. 2) You choose to freely interpret everything because God wanted you to.
E.g. In war time emergency you are allowed to carry guns and a radio but the volume must be kept low. This is a very arbitrary interpretation drawing from present needs rather than anything in the word of God. Well and good, anything can be categorized as an exception. If everything can be an exception that you don't need a rule book. The only reason for that book to still exist is so some men can make rules for other.
Especially since its a text written thousands of years ago, where the meanings of some of the words are pretty unclear, and you are probably not reading the original but a translation.
> You follow a religion because you want to be given the word of God to follow. Not the word of a man who pretends he is at the same level as God so his reinterpretation weights the same.
. . .
> You take God's word at face value, no interpretation, no exceptions.
But your judgment that god's word must be understood in this way just reflects your own belief about how god has chosen to communicate with us.
And it's actually a belief that does not give god very much credit. Great books convey meaning in numerous different ways at the same time. Why would you assume that god has written a text that operates on the level of an Ikea instruction manual when he could have used all of the tools available to great literature — and, through his omniscience, used them perfectly to speak to the needs of different readers in different times and places?
Ask yourself this: when you read scripture, does does it seem more like an instruction manual or a piece of literature?
> But your judgment that god's word must be understood in this way just reflects your own belief about how god has chosen to communicate with us.
I'm trying to understand it in the most likely way it would have been understood by the first man who heard it, and put in that context (as much context as I can have from back then).
> when you read scripture, does does it seem more like an instruction manual or a piece of literature?
If you read them you know they very much sound like both. So the way I read it (and I read the "major" ones as a religious agnostic) is that if I take the freedom to interpret everything from that book always in a way that's aimed at making my life or religion more convenient, then I'm in it more for show. Something that's probably true for most religious people I've met.
