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Thiering, Revelations and da Vinci

By Murray Bourne, 16 Jan 2005

I have just finished reading The daVinci Code and I loved it!
In Uni days I took the class "Biblical Studies" as an interest elective. The lecturer was Barbara Thiering and I felt at the time that she did an excellent job of revealing several belief-shattering concepts to us...

  • most societies have creation stories that are similar to the one(s) appearing in the Old Testament
  • there are other flood stories out there (Utnapishtim from the Gilgamesh Epic comes to mind) - move over Noah
  • the Bible's contents were decided in committees via votes
  • there were many other sacred writings that were rejected for various reasons by the committees
  • the Dead Sea Scrolls helped to sort fact from fiction in the accepted biblical accounts

While my friends in that class did not perceive a conflict, I found it all to be profoundly disturbing. This notion (held since childhood) that God somehow dictated the bible was established in our minds by the stories of Moses receiving the 10 Commandments, God talking through the burning bush and Saul/Paul hearing the voice of God on the road to Damascus.

To find out that the Bible was all a man-made notion was quite something at that age - especially having had quite a deep involvement in church up to that point.

And now to read the wildly successful daVinci Code - complete with interesting mathematical and other mysteries throughout - was very satisfying.

It seems inevitable that people need some kind of religion. Why are many of those religions perverted so badly in the hands of men (usually men - few religions give women much power) and end up causing a lot more harm than good?

Some possible answers...

  • power
  • greed
  • money

Hmm... same list of reasons that people go into politics and business...

See the 5 Comments below.

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