| padib said:
To be honest guys I haven't been following this segment of the thread much because I don't agree with much of Player1x3's view on his faith (though I liked your posting the zeightgeish refutation vids which I hope to check soon), but I just wanted to say that the bolded is not true. Oral tradition =/= telephone tag. There are significant differences. 1) In telephone tag, the listener is not allowed to ask the speaker to repeat. 2) The speaker can only whisper into the ear of the listener, making it a 1-way communication with little sound quality. In other words, telephone tag is made to be funny and fun. Oral tradition is basically the opposite: 1) Those assigned to oral tradition are trained and train to remember large parts of a story. 2) They constantly check for confirmation as to whether or not they got the message right. 3) When they tell part of a story, they leave out a certain percentage of the story at random which another teller should in all probability share at his turn. 4) It is a community practice so it's a n-way communication practice. Don't take my word for it I learnt this while reading the Case for Christ and those are the words of a leading theologian (who is now probably dead 5 years ago maybe). Most main textbooks he wrote and he has made significant contributions to official bible commentaries and was a contributor to the RSV bible. His name: Bruce Metzger, Professor of New Testament, Emeritus, Princeton Theological Seminary; |
that may be true but we are talking hundreds if not thousands of years plus multiple languages etc and storyies are also adapted to their audiance and the situation. It's not going to stay exactly the same it's going to change adapt and grow as cultures change, story tellers meet and exchange stories etc these things were not static. They weren't completly changing every other year no but they were changing.
Take for example these two excrepts from to different stories from two cultures
"Māui takes the jaw-bone of his ancestress Muri-ranga-whenua and uses it as a weapon in his first expedition. This is to snare the Sun and make it go slower because the days were too short for people to get their work done. With the help of his brothers, Māui nooses the Sun and beats him severely with the jaw-bone club until the Sun promises to go slower in future"
and
"a young boy named Eagle Feather takes revenge on the sun by
snaring it with a giant rope. The animals do not like the sun being gone from
the sky, so they meet and ask Dormouse to solve their problem. There are
consequences to Dormouse’s actions."
same root story of a young man capturing the sun but they have been changed a lot as the traditions split and was carried on fo thousands of years in to very different cultures. Also keep in mind that not all oral tradtions around the world are treated the same, every culture has a different way of keeping oral traditions alive. Where some would have a designated story teller that would train an aprentice in all the oral tradions of the tribe etc, others would have everyone learn the stories and take turns reciting them or other such adaptions. Also some traditons were given higher importance than others and this would also change.
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