Why the Bible is the greatest of all religious scripture (it's not even a fair competition)

Why the Bible is the greatest of all religious scripture. I'm very excited to release this video because I've had the material on the backlog for this for ages. And it's been a very long time since I started the series on biblical textual stuff and haven't really delved into it since then. So, I'm really excited to get this video done at long last and take a break from editing the documentary. It would be impossible for me to compare the Bible to every piece of religious text out there, especially every single micro or national ancient religion. So, I'll mainly talk about the text of major religions and maybe one or two apocryphal writings as well. Now, in my usual fashion, I've taken probably too many notes on this. This might be a bit of a long video, so chapters will be provided and you'll probably want to watch it in bits. The purpose of this video is to give you an insight into how the Bible compares with other religious texts that are out there. And some of the texts probably deserve their own video one day if only I had the time. But this will be a fairly shallow and basic and generalized video. We won't be going too deep. Sometimes non-Christians get rather annoyed with dogmatic Christians for our arrogance to think that our religion is the only correct one and that the Bible is the word of God. You might have heard people ask, "How do you know this? How do you know that the other scriptures that are out there aren't the holy scriptures of God? How do you know that you have the correct one?" It's rather arrogant considering that most of you have probably never even read any of these books. Have you ever read the Quran or the Upupanishads or the Guru Grant Sahib? Well, my answer is that I'm trying to read some of them. But when you have the treasure that is the Bible, they are comparatively rather boring. They are generally much more poorer pieces of literature by comparison. And frankly, given what I have read and [clears throat] I do know, it's not exactly a fair competition. It's like trying to stand up to a double-edged sword with a butter knife. So, a lot of the stuff that I will say in this video, it doesn't prove that the Bible is the true word of God compared to these other writings. But nevertheless, I do think that it will be a testament to how good this book is by comparison. Even if in a secular sense, we remove our Christian bias. It seems to be very clear to me that the product speaks for itself. This is a much better piece of literature. So, reason number one why I think the Bible is the best is the desire to distribute. There is no precise commandment in the Bible to make different translations of it and distribute them across the world. Preaching and teaching notwithstanding. Nevertheless, something about the Bible, some influence it has on the Christian psyche, compels Christians to do this, to translate and distribute it as widely as possible with willful intent and enthusiasm. Speaking generally, the Bible motivates Christians to distribute and make available the Bible far beyond other religions holy scriptures do to our counterparts. There are far more manuscripts of the Bible than any other book by a very, very large margin. While some other religious texts such as the Quran are relatively well preserved, there has never been such attempts to distribute it to the same extent as the Bible with intent. The Bible was copied, distributed, translated, and accompanied with many supporting resources multiple times by independent groups. There are more translations of the Bible than any other book by a large margin. It has been translated into more languages than any other religious text and probably even secular works. Arguably, the Bible has had more impact on the world through translated languages than its original, far more so than can be said about other religious texts, many of which are confined to the cultures and languages that produce them. The Christian ethos has been to make the Bible as accessible as possible to the whole world in as many languages as possible because getting the message out is more important than the language in which the message was originally given. Some religions exalt their texts in the original languages or do not highly regard their text or do not actively seek converts. So they have less motivation to translate the text to make them accessible to other languages and cultures. Now, one of the benefits of speaking the English language as a first language is that it's often a target language for most things to get translated in. So, those of us that speak English comfortably, we can at least access quite a wide variety of literature and re religious resources compared to the speakers of other languages. And so, our access to the English language does make us incredibly fortunate to have direct access to a lot of translated literature that otherwise wouldn't be available. The guru grant sahib which is the seek text has only been fully translated into about seven languages. Four of which are Indian anyway. So there's really only English, French and Arabic. It's now only starting to become available in other languages because software is doing the translation work rather than extensive seek committees. The seeks themselves focused primarily on Indian languages and dialects. The English translation was translated first by a philologist and then again by a British civil servant not by the Sikhs themselves. The Buddhist texts or sutras which have a varied cannon in different traditions were at least translated into several languages within the Buddhist sphere of influence. So mostly South or Southeast Asian languages. They have been translated into some non-traditional Buddhist major languages. So English, French, Spanish, Arabic etc. But unless I am mistaken, Buddhist monastics generally confine translation efforts to languages where Buddhism already has some kind of a foothold. They're not making any willful effort to make their sutures accessible to as many languages as possible with deliberate intent. Translations only made it into our languages because Christian missionaries did the translation work for them. And even then, there are different cannons in different traditions. So, a lot of their work hasn't even been translated anyway. Now, Hinduism is a bit messier because it isn't really one precise religion in in the Christian sense or in other senses. So, I may be mistaken, but I think it's more of an encompassing term for lots of different traditions. And these different traditions have a lot of different scriptures that they use. So, it's not like Christianity where you can just pick up the Bible and it's all in here. There's all these different works and if you're not a Hindu and you're not very familiar with them, it's not really very clear which ones comprise of the Hindu holy scriptures. So that can make it a bit confusing and often a lot of their works again aren't really translated into other languages. The only two holy books that really even come remotely close to the Bible in terms of a willful effort to translate them in lots of languages that I know of anyway are the Book of Mormon and the Quran. both of which come from religions that carbon copy ideas and practices from Judaism and Christianity anyway. So to an extent they're really piggybacking off the Bible success. So both the Book of Mormon and the Quran have been translated into well over a 100 languages. And to be fair to their respective religions, Muslims and Mormons do actively make their own efforts to translate their text. They don't just leave it to secular academics to do it for them. But again, the Book of Mormon is only really distributed widely because they inherited the Christian practice from the Bible anyway. It's not because the Book of Mormon is having worldwide success. With the Quran, again, Muslims do seem to try and distribute it and translate it. But I get the feeling that they kind of do this begrudgingly because they elevate the original Arabic language above any other language. And some traditions assert that only Muslims should be translating it. So sometimes they're only translating it just to try and knock other translations off the shelf, but they'd really much rather that you just learned Arabic and tried to argue about the Quran from the Arabic language itself. They will often try and deflect if you're trying to argue about what the Quran says from a translated language. So this is why I would say that their translations are more begrudging. They kind of do it because not all Muslims can be bothered to learn Arabic, not really because they want you to read it in all these other languages, though. Now, within my stock of Christians, we mainly use the King James Bible, and we kind of feel like there are too many translations out there in English. That there's far too many, and many of them are heretical or problematic or just otherwise outright garbage. But despite our sentiments about that, I still think it testifies to the influence and the power of the Bible over mankind that it still compels so many Christians to make various translations. Anyway, and there does seem to be an effort to translate the Bible into even some of the smallest and most obscure languages out there. You could say that the Bible is a victim of its own success because even outlandish extreme heretics want to try and make their own version of it and spread that rather than just doing like a Joseph Smith on Muhammad and just writing their own holy book instead. and the rest of us. Conversely, we feel obliged to protect and preserve it, not just treat it as any old book like it doesn't matter. This in of itself shows the power of influence that the Bible has that the text motivates its believers to want to try and spread it as far and wide as possible. We want this book to go out to the masses. Even if they reject Christianity ultimately, we still want the Bible to be available and accessible to them. Christians want to translate it. Christians want to distribute it. We want to preserve it. We want to spread it. We believe in the power that this book has. It's not just merely ceremonial or traditional. For much this same reason, the Bible is the bestselling book in history and has arguably had more influence on history and culture than any other book. Reason number two why I think the Bible is the best, and that's Many Witnesses. Contrary to popular opinion, the Bible is not merely one man says a thing. Trust me, bro. It has many authors, many historical events recorded, sometimes multiple accounts of the same stories with the importance of multiple witnesses being emphasized in it. And the stories connect together in terms of how the New Testament references the old and how people remember the stories that had come before. Jesus himself, while claiming to be the Christ, did not write any of his own letters in the Bible. Everything was compiled by third party witnesses. And it's very important that they did this. Even the fact that we have four gospel accounts, three of which have the same overlapping stories shows the importance of other people witnessing Christ. Even Jesus himself said, "If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true." So it was necessary for even the most important figure in history to have other people witnessing him, not just him saying things about himself. John the Baptist being one of those witnesses, John the Disciple being another one of those witnesses. And we also have a balanced perspective because later in John's gospel, we also see examples of Jews that saw his miracles and couldn't really argue against those miracles, but they still rejected him anyway. It wasn't all just praising this character and just only saying good things about him. We get a balanced perspective of the Christ that's being described here. The Apostle John himself spoke about people who would deny Christ. But he represented people who have heard and have seen with their eyes and have looked upon and have handled. Even towards the end of his epistle, he makes several statements about the witnesses. For even God himself consists of multiple witnesses that bore the record. There were many prophets prophesying over events that share multiple written witness accounts. There were many people who saw Christ. It wasn't just a trust me bro. There were several people who wrote about the doings of Christ that many other people saw. There were people who endured persecution for their confessions. Muslims like to brag that they also honor the prophets like Moses and Abraham. They will say that their religion is based on their teachings and that Jews and Christians corrupted the original stories in the Bible. The problem is with this though, they can only know that supposedly because one person several hundred years later after the fact told them this. Only one claimant who was not a witness gave them the Quran. The Bible is for a large part a self-sufficient book because people in the New Testament like Paul and Jesus would quote prophets from the Old Testament and then we can just flip back in our Bible and refer to those passages. We can see the books of prophecy and the books of history and the original writings from where those quotes came from. The Quran references stories it doesn't actually tell. Or if it does tell a story, it's just one man describing something that allegedly happened hundreds or even thousands of years before he was born. We have manuscripts of the so-called corrupted text from hundreds of years before Muhammad was born. The only way that Muslims could know the original stories is to use the Bible. But then according to their religion, the story could be wrong anyway. For example, Sora Albakara declares several times to remember or recall certain events that happened in the past, like Moses striking the stone and water gushing out. Sorah Alaf mentions the story also, but the original story is not in the Quran. Why did Moses's people ask him for water? What was the context? What relevance do the 12 tribes have to do with the story of the water or anything to do with Islam? The Quran doesn't really give you a lot of detail here. In the Bible, we have the original story. We know the context that they were in the wilderness and thirsty to drink. We know that the people did it through murmuring and complaining. We know that the place was actually named because of this particular event. So, this doesn't necessarily prove anything outright, but if you had to take a guess, which one is more likely to be correct? The Bible, which was written much closer to the time of the event and contains the original story, an entire nation of Israelites and their scribes were witnesses to the event. or the Quran. One man over a thousand years after the story took place tells you to remember it and you can only get it from a corrupted source, but it doesn't bother to give you the original story with its correct details. The answer is rather obvious which one is more likely to be correct. Joseph Smith also apparently received the revelation from God that the Bible was full of mistakes, writing his own books to give his followers the truth, so-called. He also came up with his own version of the Bible. More on that later. But he didn't have time to finish the Bible even though he found plenty of time to write this other stuff. You know, this kind of sounds like a lot of Christians today who say the Bible is full of mistakes or our English translations are all wrong and they know better. It just seems to be the same spirit that's behind those people that's also behind Joseph Smith. As it happens, if you read the stories of how Joseph Smith received his revelation and certain behaviors he engaged in, you would find a lot of noticeable similarities between Mormonism and Islam. Even though Mormonism tries to market itself as being a denomination of Christianity, I have heard it jokingly described as the white man's Islam because of certain uncanny resemblances. Both wrote their own holy book. Both said that Christianity in the Bible was full of mistakes and they were sent to give the corrections. I'm paraphrasing, of course. Both of them received their revelation while meditating. Both of them supposedly had an angel visit them. Both marketed themselves as being the last one. The final thing, although I should add that Mormons do have other prophets since then. Both of them used their position of profit to acquire multiple wives, some of a suspiciously young age, and some of their members continued to do so. And both of their founded religions developed a ponchomp for killing people who opposed them or dishonored them. Although the Mormons discontinued this practice in the 70s, I think the official story is that Joseph Smith translated what essentially became written as the Book of Mormon from some mysterious golden plates which were written in a language called reformed Egyptian. Basically, a language that never existed and bears no resemblance to any Mesoamerican or ancient Egyptian writing system or any writing system for that matter. But he didn't read the plates directly. He placed some sear stones in a hat to block out other forms of light from interrupting the stones. But if you think that's strange, well, sometimes he wasn't even in the same room as the person transcribing. So if you think this story sounds stupid, well, it kind of is. >> You see, you believe it now? >> Well, yeah, sure. Why would he make that up? >> As you can imagine, these golden plates have never been found. Nobody knows where they are or if they even existed. There were supposedly witnesses to these plates, but some of them only saw it with their spiritual eyes, not their naked eyes. or they were all tied to Joseph Smith in his family or financially. So, the witnesses were at best questionable and the details about the golden plates do differ slightly. >> Now, once again, we ask the same question. Now, I understand this doesn't prove anything in the scientific sense, but if we had to pick one, we can take a pretty good guess which one is more likely to be correct. The Bible that had four gospel accounts documenting Jesus's doings and sayings, none of whom were commanded by Jesus to write them that we know of. They did it of their own valition, and some of the disciples independently wrote epistles verifying all of the same truths and principles from those gospel accounts. or the Book of Mormon. One man 1,800 years later claims. I can read some gold plates that only my most suggestible followers can claim that they have seen, some only in a vision. And I'll tell you what I saw. Trust me, bro. The answer is rather obvious which one is more likely to be correct. There is a reason why the Bible has four gospel accounts documenting some of the same events. And there is a reason why multiple apostles wrote their own letters verifying some of these same teachings. None of them warned that any of the four gospel accounts were false. Christ did not directly command anybody specifically to write his words. Yes, he commanded his disciples to pass on his teachings, but he didn't tell them specifically how to do it. He did make very grand claims about himself, of course, such as being the son of God and the importance of his words. But it was entirely the valition of others who wrote down what they saw him do and say, with several independent witnesses saying the same thing. The author of the non-synoptic account, the disciple John, serves as the only witness to many of his unique records. However, he went on to write his first epistle referring back to many of the things he had quoted Jesus as saying, and according to the introduction of the letter, there were other people who accepted his testimony, including other people who had seen the Christ. But this same epistle also writes about people who denied that Jesus is the Christ come in the flesh. So John, if there were these Antichrists that you speak of, denying your claim that Christ has come, how can we be sure that we should trust your testimony and not these antichrists? How do we know that your gospel account accurately records what Jesus said and the miracles he did? Why should we trust you that this all really happened? >> BECAUSE I WAS THERE. >> THE MANY witnesses to the New Testament Judaism that Christ founded stands in stark contrast to the witnesses of other religions. Not just the spin-offs of Christianity, but even the more distant and unrelated ones. Now, again, it would be impossible for me to cover them all, so I've just handpicked a few. Buddha was also recorded as doing miracles. So, a Buddhist probably wouldn't be all that impressed by Christians attributing so many wonderful miracles to Jesus, as if that proves something. Also, like Jesus, the Buddha made some claims about himself that were borderline messianic and probably exclusionary to Jesus's self-professed claims. For example, he said, "I have overcome all foes. I am all wise. I am free from stains in every way. Having myself gained knowledge. Whom should I call my master? I have no teacher. No one is equal to me. In the world of men and of gods, no being is like me. I am the holy one in this world. I am the highest teacher. Don't you just love a humble person?" The cannon would not formally be written until centuries later. Prior to that, teachings were handed down orally. While this doesn't necessarily discredit the accuracy of information, it can be more difficult to ascertain the original witnesses of certain events and to know how widespread they were. Most, though not all, of the sutras come from the recitations of a single disciple, Anander. While there were several miracles documented by various witnesses, many miracles were only seen by one witness who oftentimes was already close to or trusted the Buddha. where miracles were supposedly seen by many witnesses such as the twin miracle, they are only preserved in one official narrative because it was written after 400 years of oral recitation. Now, to be fair to the Buddhist monks, they did seem to have quite a rigid system for reciting the stories because it wasn't down to the memory of just one person. The Buddha had acquired many monks and nuns and other followers who orally recited and passed down the teaching. So the person taking the writings would have had multiple witnesses to confirm the accuracy of the story. But the problem is with only having one written account is that you essentially have a story that's just based on hearsay of the people around you. You can't really distinguish fact from fiction. Sometimes fanciful fables do enter into stories that are passed down, especially when a central figure is exalted to a high degree. It's much more difficult to establish whether the historical figure existed and whether the people who recite the stories and testimony heard them from the same person or from a group of people when you pass it down in history. So what I'm getting at is if a thousand people recite a claim, but that claim came from one person, that's still only one witness. for various reasons. I can't really list them all in this video, but Jesus' miracles do seem to be more multiply and independently attested when we compare them to the Buddha. And we have a balanced perspective of Jesus' miracles for people that thought very highly of him and people who weren't really fased by his miracles and still didn't believe him. That gives us a much more balanced point of view of the history rather than a book that's just constantly singing somebody's praises. It is more difficult to compare the seek scriptures because they are mostly poetry lacking in history comparable to the psalms. It's an apples to orange comparison. Most of its content comprises of vague statements about the greatness of God which are fairly agreeable even in Christianity. The guru grant sahib doesn't seem to intentionally aim to contradict or refute ideas that came before it. We therefore have to rely on a variety of other sources to get the biography of the first guru who contributed to its content. Guru Nanuk. A lot of his biographical details are rather mundane and uninteresting for the purpose of this video, even though there are multiple witnesses. So, for example, the fact that he was born on the day of the full moon of Katak. Well, I don't think most people watching this video really care about information like that. Since these scriptures reveal little to nothing about the guru's personal life, most accounts of his doings, particularly miracles, are from sources long after his death and have a habit of being haggio. In layman's terms, the accounts are often embellished and sensationalized with less concern for historical accuracy. And the later the sources, the more wild and sophisticated they are, and they're very highly mythologized. And this is the problem when you just want to big up somebody as much as possible. And seeism is a relatively young religion, so it's not like it takes a very long time for these stories to get mythologized and embellished. And so this just shows how much more difficult it is to ascertain the accuracy of their claims. Now there is no doubt that Guru Nanuk was a real person who traveled around and started seekism and he compiled some of the hymns at least in the guru heap. But stories about miracles and all the miraculous crazy events in his life are really just devotional additions rather than witnesses claiming to actually see something. Now obviously we can't prove that miracles in the Bible actually happened. You know we can't prove that the resurrection happened for instance. And so there's a lot of stuff in the Bible that we can't prove that it happened any more than anybody else can about their religion. But still, this fact that there were many witnesses, it it wasn't just down to one guy to say a bunch of stuff. There were multiple prophets prophesying future events, then those events coming to pass. There were multiple witnesses to Christ, including people that were against him. This just gives us a very balanced and holistic perspective in the Bible that does seem to be lacking in other religious scriptures. And the Bible has context. It's not an aontextual document. that the fact that there's history and there's a variety of literature helps us to piece everything together. And this brings me on to the next point. I'm going to spend quite a lot of time on this. And reason number three for why the Bible is the best is the quality of literature. Not every book is regarded as having been given by God. But most religious texts are held in some regard as having wisdom that is beyond most conventional writings, even if they are not held to the same esteem as the Bibleist Christians. You would hope that a book that inspires entire religions and philosophies that have shaped centuries of history should contain a lot of wisdom and power and so on. Leaving aside belief in God and the argument of whether our religion is even true or not. Even from a secular point of view, the Bible just seems to be a better piece of literature than its competitors by a long shot. The Bible contains a wide range of literature. history, poetry, prophecy, personal letters. This gives us a rich depth into how everything ties together and how context applies to context. We have the laws of Moses, but we also know how people applied them or didn't apply them. We can see how the Old Testament is quoted in in the New Testament and how the book of Hebrews bridges the two together. We can see how Psalms, though appearing as mere poetry, were understood to be prophetic. And then we can see history unraveled which the witnesses reflect on the prophecies that preceded the history. The [clears throat] Bible explains to us the stories and passages that are quoted or referred to in the New Testament. The Bible explains why there are certain Old Testament practices that we do continue in the New and why there are some that we don't. The Bible contains a variety of topics that can apply to everyday life and still are relevant today and in a wide variety of categories. It has history, geography, numeracy, zoologology, astronomy, law and order, morality, philosophy, psychology, sociology, politics, economics, the evolution of language and culture and technology and genetics. Now, I'm not saying that the Bible necessarily goes into huge detail about all of these things or that it compensates for secular science if you want to study those topics, but there is at least something in there for everybody, even if it's just a little bit. We have an ancient example of how socialism failed. We have an example of how the politics of a nation changes. We have examples of animals or places that used to exist or don't anymore. We have examples of how different groups of people have different genetic features. We have examples of how languages evolve and change. The Bible hints at all of these things. A lot of these other books are just insufficient or just lacking in remarkably interesting content. Again, as I said, the Quran references stories and accounts it doesn't actually bother to tell. Asian religious scriptures such as the Guru Grand Sahib or the Taqin are just a series of philosophical statements or poetic statements, but they're not really that in-depth. They don't tell you how to live your life. They don't give deep moral or practical guidance. Now, obviously, the religions like seekism and taoism do have moral codes and ethics and philosophies, but those evolved from tradition. They're not really clearly defined in the scripture on which their philosophies are based. And I suspect this is why a lot of other religions don't necessarily put the same emphasis as we do on spreading and translating their precious scriptures because they're just not that interesting to anybody outside of the religion and probably not even a lot of people inside. Imagine, for example, if we only had the Psalms in our Bible and the Psalms only ever talk about how great God is, nothing else. But then imagine that for the entire Bible and that's all you've got for your scripture. Well, that's fine if you're already a Christian, I guess, and you don't mind that repetitive theme over and over again. But even if we know how great God is, I'm not sure I want to read an entire book this size of just that same theme over and over again. And that's kind of what it feels like when you read the seek or the Hindu scriptures. The poems don't really tell you very much, but they just they go on forever. Like the the word there's just so many of the writings and it's just saying the same thing over and over again. A lot of these other religious texts are just boring and repetitive. The Quran, for example, mentions hell all the time, way more than the Bible does. And when you read the Quran, it almost seems like it talks about hell as much as the Bible talks about Jesus. It's obsessive. This is a religion that is driven by fear. And that's why a lot of the sects of Islam resort to violence to spread their religion because the very religion is founded on scaring you into membership, not on any rational reason why you should even believe it. Even some of the more positive phrases like calling God the most merciful appears dozens of times in the exact same phrase every single time. And that's not even withstanding the verse that says he is full of mercy or using other terms like most gracious. It's just it's so annoyingly repetitive. Having read a collection of Buddhist sutras, I can also say that some of them are irritatingly repetitive. And I'm not going to read all of this on the screen. You can pause it if you want to. But what what's going on here is the Buddha is answering the question and he's repeating his answer three times over with almost the exact same terminology except he's just swapping out a couple of words here and there. And it's just it doesn't make for a very enjoyable lead. The seek scriptures don't tend to be as repetitive in the actual text, but the theme is fairly repetitive. Like I said, take this sample. Almost every verse says something along the lines of God is good, God is wise, he is this, he is that. And large sections of the seek scriptures are not even objectionable from the Christian point of view. We would probably agree with a lot of these statements, but it's a very long book given that this seems to be most of its content. So, after about three chapters, it's not telling you anything that you don't already know, and it's just hours and hours of as many compliments for God as we can possibly think of. Imagine over 6,000 pages likely. So, again, it doesn't make for the most compelling read, and you just zone out after a while, unless you're really concentrating. If I could describe the Hindu scriptures in one or two words, I would say verbosity or word salad. The Upupanishads are a whole lot of words to not say very much. Some of the sentences are fairly meaningless. Sometimes words are coming out, but I'm not getting any meaningful statements. There is a lot of jargon as well, which is not very helpful if you don't already know what the words or the names represent. It's just blah blah blah blah blah without really saying anything. Perhaps the four vades are arguably of a slightly higher quality than the upupanishads and maybe a little bit more like our psalms or the seek scriptures in their nature, but comparatively very boring in content. Again, a whole lot of words without really saying very much. Now, I admit sometimes, you know, I've read certain psalms and they don't all speak to me all the time because the thing is I haven't suffered all of the things that David suffered. So, I can't relate to everything he says. But at least something in the Psalms somewhere will make you feel moved. You can feel emotion. You can relate to some of them. There is something intelligent or moving that is said in them. I read the four Vaders and I feel almost absolutely nothing. Even some of the positive statements are written in the most drone flat way possible. There's nothing inspiring. There's nothing relatable. And yet, if you were to read them, there's a whole lot more to read than there is in the Psalms. I mean, it just seems to go on forever. And so, it's no wonder that a lot of these other religions don't emphasize translating or distributing their works to different languages. And some of them don't necessarily highly rever their script to the same extent we do the Bible because for a large part, there's nothing interesting here. They're not special. They're not moving. They're not interesting. They're not all that profound apart from the odd statement here and there. There aren't always deep lessons or practical application. There's no context to understand what a lot of the jargon means or how people have historically interpreted them. They are mundane. They are unnecessarily long. You could trim them to about 10% and still get the same message. Now again, I understand there are parts of the Bible where people can kind of feel that way. Not every part of the Bible speaks to everybody all of the time. At least each book in the Bible doesn't go on forever and ever. There is something in there for everybody. So like for example, the Bible has memorable proverbs, but it's not like the book of Proverbs goes on forever. It's a relatively short book. You would quickly get fed up if the book of Proverbs was the length of the entire Bible. And so the variety of literature in the Bible means that there is something for you. If you are not a big fan of poetry, you've got some history. And even if you're not a big history buff, there's still a few good stories here and there. There's still a little bit of a sense of humor in some of the stories. And there are still some stories that you do remember. And even if some of the stories are a bit weird, the story itself does make sense. It's just that a very strange thing happened. Now, of course, I understand that I'm coming at this with a certain degree of religious bias. And just because I'm not particularly moved by these other text doesn't mean that somebody else isn't. I suppose obviously the things I am saying are somewhat subjective. But what I will do for my subscribers is I will provide you with a sample of these religious works just to exercise your curiosity. And if you think that maybe you're lacking something, that the Bible just isn't doing it for you, well then you can go and do your homework and read these other texts and come back and tell me that I'm wrong and that these texts are so much better than the Bible. Although I have a feeling that a lot of my subscribers would probably end up with the same religious bias that I do. So, I'm sure that virtually all Christians are familiar with the story of Joseph and Potterer's wife. She tries to seduce Joseph, who was a slave to of her husband. He refuses. She accuses him of essay. He goes to prison. It's a small story, only spans a few verses, but it's easy to remember and it serves as a good allegory for being alone with another man's wife in a room and how some [clears throat] women behave, not all of them. Don't get me wrong, it's a strange story. I don't know why she was interested in a slave when she was married to a rich and powerful man. That's the opposite of how I thought female hypergamy works. Maybe Joseph was a chad and Potterer was a s. I don't know. And I don't know why she felt she needed to make this false accusation and ruin his life instead of just leaving it and moving on. Be careful, gentlemen. There are some crazy psychos out there. And they don't all wear a nose ring, by the way. What can I say? But weird or not, the story does make sense. It's memorable. It's cohesive. Sorry Ysef provides the Quranic interpretation of the story and this is an example of where the Quran does actually provide a story contrary to my earlier criticisms. So verses 21 to 22 fairly normal so far. Joseph being sent to Egypt. God will do some great things through Joseph. He has lots of wisdom and knowledge despite being sold into slavery. In verse 23, Piper's wife tries to seduce him and Joseph resists her by saying he will not betray his master and invokes God as his refuge as to why he shouldn't do this. Verse 24 suggests that if Joseph had not seen this sign from God about how he was a chosen servant, he would have accepted her advances, but he didn't. Okay, fine so far. In verse 25, they raced to the door. I guess Joseph was trying to escape and she rips his shirt in the process. And even though verse 23 said that she locked the doors firmly, her husband was there at the door. That's not very well explained, but okay. Then in that verse and the next, it seems like she is trying to have him accused. But Joseph actually has the chance to defend himself unlike the account in the Bible. And then one of the family members suggests what seems like a fairly logical answer. If he was advancing on her, his shirt would be would have been torn from the front. But if he was trying to run away, she would have torn his shirt from the back. Now, I appreciate this is not quite on the level of Solomon's wisdom, but in the ancient world, there was no CCTV, so you just have to accept the wisdom. It seems like a fairly logical and sensible approach to the problem. So then in verses 28 to 29, it's clarified that she was the one who was guilty. Potterer recognizes this and blames her for it. The women of the city found out about this and started gossiping about her. So then she invites them to a banquet to see for themselves. And this is where it gets a little bit weird. She gave them all a knife and when they saw how handsome he was, cut their hands with the knife. Now, I have no idea what this practice is or if women are known to do this. I've never heard of women doing this. But she's not inviting them to the banquet to try and explain that she's innocent or something like that. Because in verse 32, she tries the feminism lack of accountability card instead and says, "Of course, I tried to seduce him. Look how handsome he is, and you all cut your hands with a knife I gave you, no questions asked. But he refused, and I can have him imprisoned or fully disgraced if he doesn't do what I say." And verse 33 is where the story starts to get stupid. Joseph then prays to God. He doesn't want to do what they invite him to do. Even though only one of them invited him to do anything. And even though he successfully resisted Potifith's wife because of a vision he saw from his lord, apparently he won't be able to resist them next time and describes them as cunning. Even though so far they have done nothing cunning. Only one person was cunning and she was already exposed anyway. So in verse 34, God decides to do something profound in order to turn their supposed cunning away from him by pulling strings in verse 35 to cause him to go to prison even though the people in charge knew he was innocent. I mean, this is so ridiculous. They could have just sent all of these women home from the banquet and kicked them out. But no, he needed to innocently go to jail to avoid the temptation of all these women at the table, even though he was able to find somewhere to pray. And so you wonder why Muslim men dress their women like letter boxers and have a higher than average number of them who have so little respect for Western white women because they clearly can't control themselves. Now maybe Muslims can defend this and say, "Well, she used her power to manipulate justice or whatever." I don't know. But if that's the case, that's the problem. The Quran doesn't even tell me. So again, it comes back to trust me, bro, doesn't it? So this is just a sample of how the Quran makes absolutely no sense or it's just incomplete. And unlike the Bible that has structured stories and linear epistles and so on, the Quran just jumps around from one point to another like it just doesn't seem to make cohesive sense in places. In Surah Albakara, Saul is apparently chosen to be king, which the people protested, which is the exact opposite in the Bible. But the Quran seems to subtly confuse the story of Gideon, who was told to choose an army based on how they drank from a river, as if the story belongs to Saul. I can't remember all of the examples off the top of my head, but there are numerous stories in the Bible where the Quran recounts them but completely mixes up the details, completely mixes up the characters, you know, like mixing up the Virgin Mary with the character Miriam from centuries before. But apparently the apologists will tell you that this is just an ancient practice out of respect that was totally common at the time. And God who is all knowing and wise could have chosen any other title of respect apart from the one character in the Bible where it would be kind of obvious that Muhammad got confused between the characters. Sure. Islam check. What about the white man's Islam? After all, the Mormons do try to be a bit more closely aligned with Christianity and claim to uphold the Bible. And at least Joseph Smith could read well ancient non-existent languages at least. Well, let's take a trip down memory lane. Using his special powers, Joseph Smith made his own translation of the Bible, which was basically just the King James Bible, but he removed, added to, or otherwise altered the parts he didn't approve of. The problem is he didn't finish his translation before he died. So, the original version of their Bible is incomplete. He found plenty of time to finish his other writings, though. So great was the incomplete translation by this faithful Mormon prophet that many Mormons don't bother using it. Many of them use the King James Bible, which remains the official translation used by the Church of Jesus Christ. One of our favorite passages in the Bible is Romans 4. You know, that one that makes it obvious even to an idiot that justification onto righteousness is without works. Undoubtedly, that passage had some mistakes that Joseph Smith felt it's appropriate to correct. Besides the fact that he redacted several verses out of that chapter that he didn't approve of. You know that irritating talking point by works tarts today that goes around how when Paul says not of works he just means ceremonial works of the law or something like that and not of moral works which the argument was only formulated in the 70s and popularized by Catholics but never mind that Joseph Smith was really ahead of his time because he rephrased of works to the law of works. So you cannot be justified by the law of works. But yet in verse 16, we are apparently justified of faith and works through grace. So I guess somebody had removed and works from our King James Bible. And he had to put it back in there. For some mysterious reason, he decided that Ephesians 2:8, another one of our favorites, does belong in the Bible, but nothing else in chapter 1 and then only verse 11 in chapter 2. So unless he just didn't finish that part, but I don't know. His translation is missing so many verses that the verses that are included in there don't make any coherent sense. You can't start an entire epistle with the word for. That doesn't make any sense. What are the odds that some work salvation devil would tamper with the not of works verses? Say it isn't. So, it probably comes as no surprise to you then that James chapter 2 after verse 14 has noticeably fewer alterations in it. Some verses are redacted still, but the redactions are noticeably less. Apparently though, in verse 20, which is labeled as verse 18 in this translation, Smith felt it necessary that faith without works is dead should be rephrased as faith without works cannot save you. What was his justification for these alterations, you might ask? Well, he is quoted as saying, "I believe the Bible as it is read when it came from the pen of the original writers. Ignorant translators, careless transcribers, or designing and corrupt priests have committed many errors." Again, kind of sounds like what a lot of Christians say today, doesn't it? Problem is, we don't have the original writings of the original writers. But for some mysterious reason, we just have to believe that Joseph Smith got the revelation and nobody else did for some reason. I am a >> whatever original manuscripts Smith allegedly had access to, apparently have been kept secret from Jews and Christians alike for thousands of years by having completely new verses not found in any known Hebrew manuscript. Genesis 4, which is labeled as Genesis 5 in this translation, also managed to sneak a repent of your sins in there. Shocker. While looking at these additional verses I didn't know existed, you will notice in the first verse, behold, how he uses New Testament verbiage. Even though this was in the beginning of the Old Testament, long before the revelation of Jesus came about, God apparently told men everywhere by the Holy Ghost to repent and believe in the son. Multiple times, Smith could not properly separate New Testament and Old Testament concepts. He seemed to confuse the two in a lot of his writings. Smith believed that in ancient America there were Israelite tribes who were the ancestors of the Native Americans but descended from Israel worshiping the God of the Bible and so forth. And apparently the more holy you are the whiter your skin is which is bad news for my darkkinned subscribers but that's off topic. Now, people will criticize the Bible for not having much evidence for many of the things. But the thing is, there is archaeological evidence for a fair amount of things in the Bible. For example, the second temple. When it comes to all of the crazy things that Joseph Smith said, we have nothing, absolutely nothing. In the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith would just come up with utter nonsense, like stories of fictional kings that never existed. and he would try to wrap it with language from the Bible to make it sound like it was the Bible, but he didn't understand how to use the Bible's language correctly. What I mean by this, let's say someone wants to imitate the King James, right? They might end words with an etc incorrectly. Like for example, the Lord is thy shepherdth. Thou shalt not want. Well, that doesn't make grammatical sense unless you talk like Gollum if he lived in the 16th century. Joseph Smith didn't understand this though. In the Book of Mormon, in the inner section, also called Mormon, chapter 8 uses the word behold 27 times. Now, behold is quite a frequent word in our King James, I grant you. And we don't use it very regular in our modern vernacular. But even if you start with Genesis, for example, you might get up to maybe four beholds in one chapter. And it's typically used for people in direct dialogue towards each other. Or maybe it's just included in the narration when something surprising happens. But Joseph Smith seemed to set himself the challenge to just randomly insert the word into the narration as many times as he could fit to make the passage sound like the Bible. But it serves no functional purpose. He's just turned it into a meaningless filler word to complement the punctuation. He did the same thing also with it came to pass. For example, in 1 Nephi 8. This phrase is used 17 times in a single chapter. And again, he just uses it as sentence filler. Some of them are forgivable, but he would use it for things that don't have any chronological separation between the events whatsoever. It came to pass 2 seconds after I finished talking that somebody replied to me. And it came to pass 5 seconds later as I started walking with them. Again, he he's just a fraud making up a religious text but trying to make it sound like the Bible to stupid people. But he himself didn't know how to use these words and phrases correctly. Now, according to the website of the Church of Latter-day Saints, Jesus came to the Americas to establish his church after his resurrection somewhere around 34 AD. Sounds kind of crazy, but at least the the claim does make coherent sense. The Book of Mosiah is about King Mosiah II, one of many fictional kings that apparently ruled over a Hebrew tribe in ancient America somewhere around 124 BC to 91 BC, long before Jesus visited the Americas. And yet for some mysterious reason it makes reference to a church. This same book talks about being baptized and being called the church of Christ. This is what I mean where Smith just completely confused New Testament themes and terminology with the Old Testament. How can there be a church of Christ getting baptized in the name of Christ when the name of Christ wasn't known yet and Jesus hadn't come yet? Mormons obviously have a ridiculous explanation that like the Nephites knew about his coming in more detail than the Israelites because trust me, bro. The Pearl of Great Price is another one of Joseph Smith's works. The Book of Abraham within it describes Collab. It's not clear if this is a star or a planet, but it's some kind of celestial object that's up there somewhere in the universe. Mormons aren't really sure where. The Earth may have belonged to Collab at one point and then moved to its current location in the solar system of the Milky Way. Mormonism cosmology is a bit like trying to mix Elron Hubbed's wacky Scientology ideas with Christianity. And this is also the book where Mormons get the idea of multiple gods ruling over their own little planet. And we have to pretend that like the God of the Bible is part of this pantheon. I mean, need I say anymore. Mormonism check. Now, let's compare some religious poetry. This is Psalm 150, the last psalm in the Bible. Knowing that people have a habit of not finishing books until the end, I would typically put my best writing out first. But this is a very good psalm to end the book of Psalms with and see your way out. Praise ye the Lord. Praise God in his sanctuary. Praise him in the firmament of his power. Praise him for his mighty acts and so on. Sounds very fitting for a holy book, doesn't it? Those are some powerful words right there. And although praise him is a bit repetitive, it sounds good. It sounds moving. It sounds powerful, but it's quite short. So the repetition doesn't go on forever. Praise him with all of these instruments. Praise him for his power, his mighty ax, his excellent greatness. These are some strong and powerful words for a psalm. And you've probably heard some good songs and spontaneous worship music use parts of this song, too. It sounds very fitting for a holy book. Let's compare that with a hymn I found in the Rig Vader. You know that collection that I accused of going on and on and on with many words, but not actually saying anything of substance. Well, there is a hymn in the Rig Vader called Butter. Reference 4.58. The wave of honey arose out of the ocean, mingling with the stalk. It became the elixir of immortality. That is the secret name of butter. Tongue of the gods, navl of immortality. When it is pronounced, let the Brahmin priest hear it. This four-horned buffalo has let it slip out. Four horns, three feet, two heads, and seven hands has he. Bound three-fold, the bull bellows. The great god has entered mortals. In the cow, the gods found the butter that had been divided into three parts and hidden by the panis. Indra brought forth one form. Sura one and from the very substance of Vena they fashioned one. We will proclaim the name of butter. We will sustain it in this sacrifice by bowing down low. Now look folks, I like butter. And yes, probably more than what's good for my health. Amen. And you know the Bible prophesied about Jesus eating butter in Isaiah chapter 7. Butter and honey shall he eat. But I'm not going to bow down and worship it and profess its name. Folks, I think that's taking it a bit too far. And if there's one thing that butter is definitely not, it's an elixir of immortality. Hinduism, check. Water is an element that is so common in our world and essential to our everyday life. Just about every religion or culture has some sort of important or methodical ritual for using it. And naturally, of course, it's good hygiene. Well, except perhaps for the aforementioned Hinduism, which washes in the Gandes, yet Indians completely pollute the water and it's extremely dirty. Some Hindus will nonetheless go so far as to drink it. But heaven forbid they place hands on somebody of the darlit cast. Now, do you remember that really profound story in John chapter 13 where Jesus washed the disciples feet? It's a really beautiful story that the King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Savior of all mankind, belittled himself to wash the feet of his lowly serpent. They're dirty, smelly, sweaty, flaky, crusty, bunion ridden, possibly fungally infected feet. The King of Kings bringing himself down low to such a dirty job out of love for the people that were hierarchically beneath him by every measure. So the Bible paints a very special picture of how a respectable religious leader should behave. That even the mighty God himself loves mankind so much that he became a very servant and brought himself down to do one of the lowest jobs imaginable for the people that he loves. Now just as Christians have baptism as a water ceremony which typically accompanies somebody believing the gospel and getting saved, the seikhs also have a baptisque ceremony for new converts. But it's slightly different. The convert drinks from a bowl of sugar water. Not all of it though, and some of the water is then used to sprinkle them. But the use of sugar water is an evolved practice. It's not how the ceremony initially started. In the SE text, the life of Guru Nanuk, someone referred to as the tyrant, was so angry about some people being in his territory, including the guru, that he wanted to have him put to death. But as he captured him, the guru responded by falling into a trance and singing a hymn. The gist of the song, which is only a few lines, is that the worshipper of God will obey God and be pleasing to God. This is a fairly classic thing in religion. Apparently, the tyrant was so moved by this transcendental song that he changed his mind about killing the guru and bowed down before him. I guess he believed the seek equivalent of the gospel, whatever that is, and was ready to convert to their religion and go through the water ceremony. So Sedo, an accomplice of the guru, gave the tyrant water which the guru had used to wash his feet. And he drank the water and apparently that made him a seek and ensured him deliverance. Imagine being cleansed from your sins by water that's already dirty. And you wonder why work salvation doesn't work. I'm not sure which is more disgusting, drinking dirty foot water or drinking and bathing in the Ganges. Don't get me wrong, there are some likable elements to seekism and it did improve a lot of things wrong with Hinduism, but that wasn't one of them. Seekism, check. The Bible sometimes gets criticized for being unscientific in places. Now, obviously, believing that miracles happened really needs to be a separate category because miracles are by definition unscientific. They have to defy science in order to be considered miracles. But to be fair, the two biggest subjects in the Bible that it gets criticism for are the creation and the flood, which happened long before there was any documented history anyway, long before any of it existed. So, we don't really know what happened thousands of years ago, even though we often pretend that we do. From a literary point of view, though, these stories could be considered allegorical anyway. So, even if they weren't understood literally, they don't make bad writing. Many cultures have some sort of ancient origin story or flood story like this. And from an allegorical point of view, the story still comes across effectively. Regarding the world we live in today and everyday things that we see and observe, the Bible doesn't make all kinds of wild scientific claims that can be attributed to ignorant superstition that could have even been debunked 2 or 3,000 years ago. In fact, you could argue in some ways that the Bible was thousands of years ahead of its time, like all the Mosaic laws about washing, for instance. Obviously, they didn't understand concepts such as germs, but the fact that they knew thousands of years ago about washing and isolating people that that are sick. The Bible was well ahead of its time here. And yes, I realize this picture probably isn't very accurate because it's got a sink with running water, but hey ho, I didn't make it. The Bible also mentions physicians and apothecaries, but the recipes or instructions and health claims are noticeably absent from the Bible. It's not like we have a book in the Bible that makes all sorts of wild claims about what medicine to dispense for this illness and the goodness does drive out the badness unlike a lot of folk medicine and the like. So it's not like the Bible has all these wild suggestions that make no sense and have been contradicted by modern medicine. This is not necessarily the case with other religions. There is a Buddhist text called the filial piety sutra where the Buddha makes some very wild claims that were even disprovable in his own time. We didn't need modern medicine to counteract them. A disciple of the Buddha called Ananda asked him how we are supposed to be able to tell whether a skeleton was once a male or a female. We can tell them apart when they are alive because of their clothing, but not when they're dead. So, how can you distinguish them? Personally, I don't know why this question matters, but there you go. The Buddha's answer was to look at the color of the bones. Apparently, men are so wonderful and spiritual and they listen to religious texts and recite all of the Buddha's names, which helps for some reason. So, their bones will be very heavy and wide. But women are a bit stupid, emotional, and raising children is such a drag. And nursing the children with breast milk drains them of so much of their life force that they become so worn out their bones go black. Even in the ancient world, in ancient India, no less, some medicine systems recognized certain issues with bones, such as disease, and cremation was much more common in India than it was in the West. So, it wasn't surprising that bones would go a different color when you cremate them. Even ancient peoples could tell the difference between male and female skeletons. Now, one of the most obvious differences, of course, is the extra set of ribs in females. You know, that thing in the Bible for which we have a story about. I'm not saying that the story scientifically proves that the Bible is true or anything, but if you would have taken a literal understanding of the Bible hundreds of years ago and then observed the difference between a male and a female skeleton, the observation would have matched your expectation. This can't be said for Buddha's explanation, which could have been proven false even at the time. If you're going to make medicinal claims in your holy book that could be debunked in the society of your own time, be careful that you don't say something that somebody else might prove wrong. In the same sutra, the Buddha then goes on to make all kinds of wild claims that also aren't true. Now, to be fair, some of these things couldn't have been known without modern medicine. But classical Indian medical texts such as the charaka samita and sushut samita have much more accurate descriptions of the development [clears throat] of the baby in the womb compared to this writing. So Buddha's claims that the baby's limbs start to take shape in the fifth month of pregnancy would be falsifiable. Again, this is the danger of trying to start a religion and being a know-it-all when you don't quite know it all. In the same passage, the Buddha also claimed that if the child is very filial, meaning very respectful and worthy to his parents, they will have a peaceful birth with the hands joined together in respect and also the mother would suffer no pain or injury. Now, believe it or not, I have heard work salvation Christians claim that women could be so holy and sinless that they don't suffer birth pain. It's amazing how much work salvation Christianity has in common with false religion. It's a very grand claim, and even the Christians who make the grandest claims about their own holiness sound like some of the arrogant things that Buddha said about himself. Go figure. The problem is there is a lack of historic or medical literature from historically Buddhist cultures documenting that this ever happened to anybody. You would have expected the ancient midwives would have recorded this kind of phenomena. You can bet that if the Bible said something like this, there would be, first of all, loads of scientific inquiry to debunk the matter, and loads of fake Christians exaggerating their children's birth, so they can pass this off as their holier than thou testimony. Thankfully, the average Buddhist is a bit more humble than the average legalist or Pentecostal Christian, I guess. And thankfully, this isn't in our holy book, so we can skip this subject as being the object of ridicule. Buddhism check. Now, as many of you know, the Bible contains many proverbs which have become very well known even outside of the Bible. I've shown you a few on the screen. And obviously, I've only handpicked a few from Proverbs, but it's not just proverbial statements. A lot of people are very [clears throat] familiar with some of the ideas of Christianity and certain slogans like judge not. And the name of Jesus is so famous, he became an exclamation. The Bible has had a big impact on the world. That's not to say that Chinese culture and proverbs haven't also had a wide impact on the world as well. They have. You are probably very familiar with some Chinese sayings and proverbs without actually knowing it. But this video is about religious scriptures. Now, the most famous Chinese scripture that you have probably heard of and is probably the most widely translated, but I'm not sure, is the Taqing. But could any of you really tell me anything about it, though? The vast majority of you probably couldn't tell me anything about this book at all. Now, maybe you've heard of yin and yang, but the document doesn't give that specific name. You could argue it talks about the concept, but it doesn't directly name it. And really, you've probably heard of yin and yang more as an idea in of itself. So, you're probably more familiar with that Chinese religion assembly thing rather than a concept that came out of this book specifically. Well, let's have a look at a sample of a few sayings from this book. Paragraph 65. The ancient masters didn't try to educate the people, but kindly taught them to not know. Paragraph 67. Some say that my teaching is nonsense. Others call it lofty but impractical. But to those who have looked inside themselves, this nonsense makes perfect sense. And to those who put it into practice, this loftiness has roots that go deep. Paragraph 70. My teachings are easy to understand and easy to put into practice. Yet your intellect will never grasp them. And if you try to practice them, you'll fail. Charming. Well, that's helpful. This book is full of meaningless statements like this that make it sound like this book is meant to be like super wise, super powerful, super mysterious, but it's not really saying anything. There isn't really any teaching in this book or nothing that's very concrete. Anyway, here's another one. Paragraph 42. The tow gives birth to one. One gives birth to two. Two gives birth to three. Three gives birth to all things. This sounds like a proverb you would adapt and morph into a really lame scene for your dreadful Star Wars TV series. >> 47 really summarizes the whole book for me. The more you know, the less you understand. The master arrives without leaving. Sees the light without looking. achieves without doing a thing. It constantly talks about this thing called the tow or the way, but it's never clearly defined. It's useless as a practical book. It's useless philosophically, morally, religiously. It's just trying to sound vague and mysterious to trick you into feeling stupid, but doesn't really say anything. There is minimal literary value to this book unless you're like that internet motif of men that like to say trivial things in a particular style that makes it sound really profound and deep when it isn't like we're all one [gasps] profound. One of the aspects of a good teacher or a clever communicator is that they are supposed to be able to explain complex ideas in a way that simpler minds are able to somewhat understand. But the sort of person who thinks that this book is amazing is the sort of person who won't explain it to you but makes you feel inferior for not understanding it. And the statements in this book, they're just not memorable. There's no memorable quote. There's one quote that bears some uncanny resemblance to Jeremiah. It could just be the way it's translated in English. It says somewhere about like the law written in their hearts or something. That's probably the only statement I could remember from this book. The poetry is really just full of apathy or it's contradictory, although I understand that's probably meant to be the point of it, I guess. But but it's not remarkably clever or funny or interesting. It just pretends to be. You know, it's it's like a 12year-old wanted to become a wise philosopher, but didn't really have the imagination to do it properly and make it successful. Here's the last one to see this book out. I am different from ordinary people. I drink from the great others breasts. Towism check. Now, Bible translation is always a challenge. You want the Bible to be accessible to your language, but you want it to be accurate. An interlinear Bible might be accurate, but it wouldn't actually make any grammatical sense in English, and it wouldn't read from the pulpit very easily. But you don't want to paraphrase and even thought forthought translations can be dangerous because you're getting the translators interpretation of the text rather than what the text actually says. So a lot of energy goes into translation committees that try to put some of the more accurate Bibles together. But even if people disagree with King James only and the like, at least the final product is a Bible that overall makes sense. And in our King James Bible, if you didn't already know that it was translated from Hebrew and Greek, you wouldn't actually know that it's a translation. It sounds very native. It sounds almost like it was given to us in English. Now, obviously, in the Bible, there are a lot of Christianes words that we don't use so frequently in the secular world, like justification and righteous. But these words are still not exclusively Christian anyway. These words still have secular definitions or at least a slightly different definition in the secular world that non-Christians are familiar with. This helps the Bible to feel accessible. You read it and yes, you might not understand justification deeply, but on its own, you know what the word justify means. You know what a spirit is vaguely speaking. You know what eternal means. Now, you might not use them outside of a Christian space very often, but a non-Christian should broadly understand what these words mean with the text of Indian religions. That's not the case. There are a lot of words in there that are transliterated rather than translated because there is nothing to translate them into. They're very religious words with no practical secular usage. Unless you already know what a biku is or dharma or moxa, it's really difficult to read these religious texts and understand them, they just don't feel as accessible. You have to already somewhat know the culture and the language behind these words to make any sense of it. And this can create a sense of dependency on religious people to explain the book to you. The book in itself is not self-sufficient. funnily enough, the Bible often does actually self-explain some of its more obscure words. There are many examples where the Bible actually defines what things are. Like for example, I wouldn't expect a non-Christian to know what a Leviathan is or behemoth is. But the Bible does give some description and shows that they are animals. You don't have to learn the religion to know what they are when you read the Bible. Now, you don't have to know what angels look like exactly, but broadly speaking, they are spiritual messages. It's usually obvious from the Bible when a word is a name of a person or a place. Japanese Shinto seems to take a different approach. Yes, it uses words that also have secular meanings, but it seems to join them up into very long names. Now, I always thought that Japanese was a language that takes rather a long time to say basic sentences, and you quickly start to see why. Shintoism believes in many gods for all the different things in the world. And in the Kojiki, we get the names of these deities like the great male of the great thing deity and the princess of swift autumn deity and the heavenly water drawing god possessor deity. Before you ask David, maybe these are just terrible English translations of a much more poetic sounding name because they didn't want to do the Indian thing and just transliterate, but then you don't know what the words mean. Well, I can't comment on how poetic it sounds in Japanese since I don't speak it. But the famous creator deity is called is anagi no mikoto which is quite the mouthful and apparently even that's the short version of the longer name or shiomimi no mikoto that's quite a mouthful on occasion sometimes it's easier to transliterate the name rather than a literal translation like lord heavenly rice ears or something the word august appears quite a lot in Japanese texts such as his augustness but I don't think it refers to the season it means respected or majestic. But I've never really heard August ever used in the English language in that way. So why they couldn't translate it with another word, I have no idea. But I don't really understand how else you are supposed to translate a name like his Augustness, the great male who rules the 8,000 spears. And then imagine this multiplied by dozens and dozens of deities. And you have to read all of this. They could maybe trim it to Lord of Countless Spears, but that's still a very cumbersome book to read all the same. Now, obviously, I think it's fair to say that when you read in the Bible, so and so begat so and so, son of so and so, a lot of you would agree that those passages are probably our less favorite parts of the Bible. Not many people are choosing those passages as their favorite verses, I'm sure. But at least the names are short and the passages are relatively brief. The Nongi, which is perhaps a slightly higher literary quality than the Kojiki, does at least in this translation appear to have more transliterated names rather than translated. But the names are still so long and it's so inaccessible to somebody who doesn't already understand Shinto that it's absolutely littered with footnotes. Some pages have more footnotes than the actual text. You can't just pick it up and read it. The text is not enjoyable to read. It's not inspiring. It's dull. It's repetitive. The story is not engaging in any way at all. Imagine reading the Bible. You have this huge book to get through. You're 10 chapters in and we're still on his most excellent, praiseworthy, creative augustness of the 10,000 flies. And then imagine that on every single page. Thankfully, we can just call him God or the Lord and we've only got one to remember. We don't have to come up with dozens of silly names for dozens and dozens of deities. Even within chapter 2 of Genesis, you've already made some progress in the story. That's not so much the case with Shinto scriptures. Several chapters in and you're still on the deities with the weird names. Shintoism check. And there's so much more I could say on this. I realize I've only given you snippets of this text. And again, I'm biased. So, you're more than welcome to read these works in their entirety. And then come back and comment and tell me that you think they're better than the Bible and give me some examples and we'll see where we go from there. Well, how do you know that the Bible is the best? That's pretty arrogant. Haven't you read all of these other religious scriptures? Yes. And they're crap. Such is the power of the Bible that even people who hate the Bible still have some positive things to say about it. Richard Dawkins has time and again shown himself to be one of the most god-hating rep probates of our age. It's pretty clear that he doesn't like the Bible and thinks it's an appalling book. But even he has said that the King James Bible should be in every school. Now, he obviously believes it should be a work of fiction and criticize. Don't roast tint the article. But I find it interesting that he isn't saying hide it from the populace or throw it in the bin of history. He still wants the Bible to be accessible and argues that it's one of the best pieces of literature in English. So he still admires the King James Bible in some ways, not as a moral compass, but as a piece of literature at least. And he has spoken highly about the book of Ecclesiastes, I guess, because it speaks to some degree to the logical nihilism that comes with atheism. Another Christ-hating repbate, Christopher Hitchens, was also known for disliking the Bible quite a lot. Ironically, for [clears throat] a logical, intelligent person, he was also very wrong on a lot of his criticisms, including some of the ones shown on the screen, but that's off topic for this video. But again, even he has spoken positively about the King James Bible as a work of literature. Something about the Bible makes even the people who hate it the most find something positive to say about the literature. Well, the King James Bible translate. Well, the King James translation at least. Are we really that surprised? You would be hardressed to find people outside of these other religions that speak highly about their religious texts. From a literary quality, they are just not as good. They're not inspiring. They're not moving. They're not impactful. The closest thing I could find was like from a work of fiction. So if you've ever seen the film V for then you may remember that there's his character played by Steven Fry who lives in an alternate reality Britain that is now becoming a reality but that's another story. He has a secret vault where he keeps contraband including the Quran and he said and I quote I don't have to be a Muslim to find the images beautiful its poetry moving. I suspect that the Wowski brothers who directed this film probably never read the Quran and they didn't provide an example quote from it in this scene. I very much doubt that the actor Steven Fry, who is very well read and by worldly standards very smart, would find anything poetic in the book whatsoever. Frankly, I think they just needed a standing religious scripture because they couldn't use the Bible in this alternate reality because it's a a pseudo-Christian fascist state. So, they just had to pick the next closest thing. But if you've ever read the Quran, you know that no homosexual atheist who is hiding a room full of contraband would bother with this book. he just wouldn't find its poetry that moving. Sorry, not sorry. The truth of the matter is comparing literature against literature. These other books just aren't as good. Not by a long shot. Like, it's not even a fair competition. And all that leads me into the last reason I'm going to give in this video for why the Bible is the best. Which ties in with the Bible being a better quality form of literature. Number four, it is a complete, clearly defined compendium. It's easy to find the Bible. It's easy to get hold of the Bible and you know exactly what you are looking for. It is a complete compendium from Genesis to Revelation. It's relatively straightforward. What is and is not the Bible. As well as all of the translations, it has so many tools and features available to no other. In Islam, which is perhaps the closest competitor, as well as the Quran, which at least the Quran you could say is a clearly identifiable work from start to finish, they have all of these extra hadiths and [snorts] scholars have to classify them into different categories based on how reliable they are. The different branches of Islam don't agree on which hadiths are authentic. You can't necessarily buy one big book of all of them. They are spread across many books. It's not even clear how you would get hold of them all or if they are even in your language or on the internet. Different schools and scholars have differing opinions on which hadiths are authentic or inauthentic. So, it's a very messy subject. Some say you should just use the Quran and not bother with the hadith. But, as I said earlier, the Quran does seem to be incomplete. This can make it very confusing for non-Muslims because you might not be able to tell whether certain ideas come from a hadith or from the Quran and you have no way of testing an idea's authenticity or even agreeing on it with all Muslims. But at least the Quran itself is a clearly defined book. So Islam is already scoring higher than most other religions here. Now you could say that seekism does have a canonized defined holy book, I guess. But since it's just a collection of hymns, it doesn't say anything about seek practice. What should the religion look like? The story of Guru Nanuk, morality, how the religion evolved or where its practices came from. You still have to go outside the holy book to get that information like the Janam Sakis or the Dasam Grant. Supposedly, you can get moral guidance from the guru grants. But as I stated earlier in the bits I've read so far, all it's doing is just constantly complimenting God. It's not really teaching me anything of substance or moral instruction. Maybe that's just something wrong with me. Maybe I haven't got far enough into it. Hinduism has multiple different books and diverse collections and different traditions use different ones. There isn't a clearly defined holy cannon where you can say I want to study Hinduism so I'm going to read their book. Where do you even start? The Rig Vader, the Upanishads, the Bag of Adget Gita. Sometimes if you look for Hindu hymns, you don't even bump into these collections. You instead find somebody's book online where some random person has just compiled a list of random hints. No clear indicator as to which one is legit or not. Buddhism is also similar in this regard. There's different cannons, different sutras. They're all jumbled up. When I looked online for my own study, I found a downloadable PDF that didn't even have a front cover. It just opens with a table of contents and a seemingly random collection of sutras that was put together by a relatively famous monk called Tikniatan who you may recognize because other than the Dalai Lama, he was probably one of the most famous Buddhists uh of recent times until he died recently. But you look for a compendium on Amazon and you won't find a definitive holy book. You just see these random collections or you don't even know if it is a collection or if it's just a commentary about the sutra. And an online collection doesn't even appear first in the in the search engine results. Just shopping seems to appear first. So, you have the same problem online. You can't just open a website like you can with the Bible and start navigating chapters and verses. It's all obscure PDFs on very badly designed websites. This can make it hard to study the religion. You can't just pick up the holy book and learn about Buddhism. It feels like the religion is kind of gatekept by Buddhist teachers, but you have no idea where their teaching comes from or if it's even authentic Buddhism. If you want to obtain the Bible, you pretty much know what to look for and where to find it. You buy a book, it's got a name. It goes from Genesis to Revelation, and it's all there from start to finish. And the books within are labeled, listed in a certain consistent order. And nowadays they have chapter numbers and verse numbers for easy referencing. If you're looking for it, you will find it. And there's so many online tools. If you want to compare [clears throat] translations, if you want to compare the English against the Hebrew and Greek, if you want a concordance to see every other instance of a word, if you want to search for related verses or which Old Testament verses are quoted in the New Testament, it's very well archived. It's very well organized. It's accessible. Christianity has what you might call a closed cannon and is somewhat unusual for doing so. Now, of course, this is where the pseudo scholars come out of their basement. Well, actually, I discovered the Apocrypha [laughter] and you've clearly never heard of the dudaro cannon. Well, sure there is a discrepancy that there are additional books in the Catholic or Orthodox Bibles compared to the Protestant ones, but the full Protestant cannon is still included in those books. And every Protestant Bible contains the same collection. It's not like the Buddhist or Hindu scripts where you've got to search online for all these different random collections. It's still all there. And if you're missing the Catholic or Orthodox cannon, which is inconsistent anyway, those books are disputed. It's not as if the books that aren't included are like hidden gems that can measure up to the rest of the Bible. The best books are still in there. And frankly, it's not difficult to understand why those books didn't make it into the Protestant cannons or why they are relegated to duterroonical works. Anyway, these books were originally written in Greek instead of Hebrew despite being part of the Old Testament, so to speak, which in of itself isn't a sufficient argument to say they don't belong in scripture because our New Testament is written in Greek. But the reason they are in Greek and not Hebrew is because as even this Catholic article explains trying to justify why they are scripture. These books weren't written around the time when the events within them are supposed to have taken place. They are written centuries later. For example, the book of Baroo is supposed to be like an extension of Jeremiah, but it was compiled in the time between the testaments centuries later. Let's take a look at the book of Judith for example. The very opening verse makes a statement that is not historically correct that King Nebuchadnezzar reigned over the Assyrians when actually he reigned over the Babylonians. And this is not just one example. Judith contains multiple historic inaccuracies in this regard. And this kind of summarizes what is wrong with a lot of the duterro canonical books. Some will try and defend this saying that the book is an anacronism. In other words, historical accuracy isn't important to the writing and that it may be an intentional juxtaposition of events or people from different times for whatever reason. The problem with this defense though is that the book is still written like a history book and the Catholic Bible includes it in the history section, not in a separate section. This would be incredibly confusing to somebody reading it and you wonder why the Protestant Bibles don't include it. Anacronisms are fine in a children's or family comedy film where Jackie Chan plays as a 19th century character in England and they want to throw in as many references to the period as possible. Like some random guy just thinks of the character Sherlock Holmes and some random homeless kid is called Charlie Chaplain or where the film barely has any resemblance to the novel that it namesake is based on. But it's not really very fitting for the Holy Bible if you're going to categorize it as history. And the book is intentionally supposed to be teaching us to trust in and rely on the spirit that gave us the words in this book. The Bible already receives criticisms pertaining to its inaccuracy as it is without these books giving extra lines of fire. Of course, the Catholics and Orthodox will claim that there's still valuable lessons that can be learned from those books, but you could apply that to secular pieces of literature. So it's not unreasonable for non-atholics and non-orthodox to be somewhat arrogant about the fact they are right in disregarding these books. And then of course there is the apocryphal writings that Christians and non-Christians alike are frothing with excitement about these days. The book of Enoch, the Epistle of Clement, the Gospel of Thomas. If you were to compile a list of these mysterious books, there are actually dozens if not hundreds. There's loads. And you wonder why that is. Why are all these extra writings and questionable works that we even have to ask why they're not in the Bible? In our modern world, we tend to clearly categorize books in their genres. For example, you've got fiction and non-fiction at a basic level. And then in non-fiction, you've got fantasy, thriller, and so on. Consider this. Factual books aren't necessarily something that everybody considers to be true, but but from but they are presented as fact by the author. So, for example, we would probably disregard a book about another religion or about witchcraft, but it would still be in the factual section. Opinion pieces aren't technically classed as non-fiction. But then even fiction can be used to teach a moral story. For example, children's television, their cartoons will try and convey some sort of moral message to children. But in the ancient world, these categorizations didn't exist. Sometimes entertainment was more of a byproduct of the writing rather than the main purpose of it. The Iliad and the Odyssey, for example, would be considered fiction in our modern category, but ancient Greeks didn't necessarily see it that way. Many antiquities works regarded as poems, even though we don't particularly find them to be poetic. It was acceptable to embellish the details in many cases. Many writings had religious themes. So they appear to be apocryphal writings even if the author didn't intend that they would become holy scripture. And sometimes it was a known practice to claim a biblical character as the author or the relevant person of the epistle or writing even if they didn't write it. So the lines between fact and fiction were much more blurred. Sometimes a story could be regarded as not entirely true, but it contains elements that are true and the teaching is still true. Perhaps the closest equivalent that we are familiar with would be like King Arthur or Robin Hood. These are not real stories or characters, but because their stories are highly probable and very culturally recognizable and well-known. Here in Britain, you could actually be mistaken in thinking that Robin Hood was a real character. And you wouldn't be laughed at or mocked for being wrong necessarily, apart from by an actually person, because those characters blur the lines between a fictional character and an actual historical character. Some writings are more obvious to spot than others because it's obvious when you read the Bible and it gives you a concept that certain apocryphal writings are always trying to outdo the Bible. For example, a couple of months ago, I did a video on these visions of hell that people like Bill Whis have. And I said that they're absolute garbage. And and and people add a bunch of conjecture like all this stuff about demons that's not even in the Bible. And I referenced apocryphal writings. In the Bible, Paul talks about the third heaven. He doesn't go into great detail about what it is or what it means. It's so underexlained and it's something the Bible only mentions once. So, you kind of just have to leave it there and not delve too deeply into it. And so, what happens is when Christians get too obsessed about demons and things that aren't explained a lot in the Bible, they geek out and add a bunch of conjecture to fill the gaps. And that is precisely what some of these apocryphal writings also like to do. Whoever wrote the gnostic apocalypse of Paul decided that third heaven wasn't enough. He needed to outdo the Bible. So, he went to the fourth heaven and then the fifth heaven. The Bible just didn't go far enough. And we have to have all of this graphic detail and a notable obsession with angels mentioned in abundance. Now, this is a big one and this ought to give you a clue why these books didn't make it into the Bible. And you're not missing out on much because they were written by a complete skitsu. There are some apocryphal writings of course that do have more credibility among some Christians than others which do seem to have more historic credibility also. For example, the problem of deciding today whether say the first book of Enoch belongs in scripture and why some Christians would claim it as valid is the same problem they had 2,000 years ago. Different groups of Jews and to a lesser extent early Christians couldn't necessarily agree on whether certain books were religiously authoritative or not. different Jewish groups disagreed about whether the first book of Enoch was considered scripture. Now, the defendants will say that Jude quoted a statement from Enoch, and we have Dead Sea Scrolls proving that the quote existed before the time of Christ. But Paul also said things which could be regarded as coming from non-Christian poetry while making doctrinal statements. For example, in Corinthians, he said, "Evil communications corrupts good manners," which is quoted from an ancient poem called the Manandis. That doesn't mean we should include the original poem in the Bible, though. So, you see how it's not that straightforward. I'm fairly confident that the good books made it into the Bible. The easiest way to describe the Book of Enoch is like an ancient sci-fi for Christian Star Wars nerds. That's probably the easiest way to describe it. The people that seem to be the most obsessed about this book are endtime fanatics who think that the New World Order is all about bringing back these 400 giant aliens to rule over the world. It does seem a little bit far-fetched compared to what we actually read happening in Revelation. I do find it very telling that in our canonical Bible, although angels are mentioned frequently as delivering messages because that's essentially what the word word angel means. It's a messenger, the Bible doesn't go into huge detail about them. Yet a certain subset of Christians are often obsessed and have an unhealthy fascination with demonology and all of this detail about angels and fallen angels and the like that doesn't come from the Bible. And that's what I notice about these apocryphal writings. As I've mentioned before, they go way overboard in the details. There's constant details about angels. There's an obsession with including angels in absolutely everything. And there's all these names for all these different angels. Whereas in the Bible, you could probably count on one hand the number of angels we actually know the names of. Funnily enough, what happens in the Book of Mormon? A lot of angels with all these different names, Nephi, Moroni, Alma, and so on, weird and wacky subsects of religion, have an unhealthy obsession and fascination with this kind of thing. Again, ancient sci-fi for the then equivalent of Christian Star Wars kings. Modern cults like the Mormons and the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Seventh Day Adventists often have strong end times obsessions. And funnily enough, some of the ancient groups that had all these extra writings were also apocalyptic groups like the Essins. All these extra writings are for people who have endtime obsessions to an unhealthy degree. So, you will forgive me if I don't feel the need to append first Enoch to my collection. For the same reason, I don't need to add the book, the Book of Mormon, as an extra testament. It just seems to be sensationalist, badly written, unnecessary detail for people who are single issue obsessives. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has reawakened some of these ancient writings that weren't available to most of us for hundreds of years. And supposedly, there's a big conspiracy that the church has tried to hide this for thousands of years. The church doesn't want you looking at these ancient scriptures. A a big one that gets attention in this regard is the Gospel of Thomas. This great secret hidden gem has been hidden from the time of Christ all the way up until the 20th century. Some scholars date the work as far back as 60 AD. So some people are saying that this gets really close to Jesus's original teachings. You know, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, they all came later. They could have been tampered with. Nobody knows if they're even faithful. Gospel of Thomas, we're getting really close to what Jesus actually taught here. Like, we're getting the good stuff. In fact, this this Gospel of Thomas may have even influenced some of these other gospels. They probably just borrowed ideas from this book. But the church condemned these Christians as Gnostics with some of my ilk of being accused of. And this is a Gnostic gospel. So, that's why the church has kept it hidden for hundreds of years because they don't want the truth to get out. They don't want Jesus' real teachings to come out. Otherwise, people might return to being a true biblical Christian. Well, I realize that most of my subscribers are probably not biblical scholars. I don't expect most of you to give me a university level thesis on the reasons why you think this gospel is or is not the real deal. To keep things simple, I'm going to give you a sample of writings from this book. You tell me if you think that this belongs in the same league as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, or even whether it can knock them off the shelf entirely. Verse 114. Simon Peter said to him, that's Jesus, let Mary leave us now, for women are not worthy of life. Okay, not off to the best of starts. I thought we were one in Christ, but I guess not. Jesus said, I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling new males, that every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven. Hm. Maybe I'm just not spiritual enough to understand the true message of what Jesus is saying here. Let's try another one. The biatitudes in the sermon on the mount is like one of the most famous parts of the Bible, right? Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Gospel of Thomas, verse number seven. Jesus said, "Blessed is the lion which becomes man when consumed by man, and cursed is the man whom the lion consumes and the lion becomes man." Okay. Um verse 37, his disciples said, "When will you become revealed to us and when shall we see you?" Now, obviously, they're already looking at him and talking to him. So, like me, you probably get the impression that this is like an end times kind of verse, right? Well, what's the answer? Jesus said, "When you disrobe without being ashamed and take up your garments and place them under your feet like little children and tread on them, then will you see the Son of the living one, and you will not be afraid." Wow. Can you believe it, folks? The church has kept this hidden from us for hundreds of years. This is the real truth right here. We're getting real close to source now. Verse 87. Jesus said, "Wretched is the body that is dependent upon a body, and wretched is the soul that is dependent on these two." This is real wisdom here, folks. Now, I guess this verse is like the living water that Jesus talks about. Verse 108, Jesus said, "He who will drink from my mouth will become like me. I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him." H. Now, you know those short but powerful verses in the Bible like Jesus wept, pray without ceasing, rejoice ever more. The Gospel of Thomas, verse number 42, Jesus said, "Become passers by dude." So folks, based on these excerpts that you have heard, does this sound like men spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost? Or does it sound like someone had too much communion wine? I will leave you to be the judge of that. So all of that to say this, are you absolutely sure that you are following the right religion? Are you absolutely sure that your holy book is absolutely the best one? Words given as men were moved by the spirit. Are you sure you don't want to give these other books a try? I mean, you could be missing out on some good stuff in there. There's some really moving stuff in these other books, man. Some powerful verses, I tell you. Precept upon precept. You're just limiting yourself with your narrow-minded Christian worldview of only reading the Bible. You've got to broaden your horizons of it, you know. So, folks, is it really a fair competition? The Lord God has taken rib from man, made he a woman, and brought her onto the man. Women are so drained from raising children, and so unspiritual that they have black bones. Mary, cousin of Elizabeth. Mary, sister of Aaron, repent ye, and believe the gospel. Repent of your sins, or you will have black skin. For unto us a son is given. His name shall be called wonderful counselor, the mighty God, everlasting father, the prince of peace. His augustness, the heavenly water drawing god possess a deity, great male who rules the 8,000 spears. In Christ, there is neither male nor female. Women are not worthy of life. He pourth water into the basin and began to wash the disciples feet. He drank the guru's dirty foot water. Praise ye the Lord. Praise God in his sanctuary. Praise him in the firmament of his power. Bow down and proclaim the name of butter. This is how false religion is. This is man's attempt at writing his own holy books without inspiration from the spirit. This is how it comes out. So if you want to know which one probably came from God, it's not even a fair competition, is it? So you ask me, what is the point of a video like this? NNC, you're supposed to be teaching us the Bible. You've read the Quran. You've read something from the Rig Vader. You've read from the Book of Mormon. This has gone on for what, two hours is this video by this stage? You've read the Gospel of Thomas. What is the point of a video like this? Well, I want you to realize the treasure that you have in your hand. The Holy Bible. In fact, not just the Bible, the King James Bible. Because the NIV says that women should marry their rapists. Yeah. tampers [clears throat] with God's word and you end up with all of this kind of stuff. But the precious King James Bible, the greatest holy book ever written in the English language. There is always something new to learn in this book. Pick it up, read it, study it. The words in this book are a priceless treasure. Praise ye the Lord for his marvelous work.