The German translation reads "Du sollst keine anderen Götter neben mir haben" so "[...] no other gods besides me", which explicitly forbids paying homage to other gods.
this post was submitted on 30 May 2025
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100 languages, 100 different translations. Then translated from dead languages. Then changed to suit a tyrant. Then translated back to another language.
If you think any of that original fiction is still there, you're a fucking idiot. If you don't think it's fiction, you're an even bigger idiot.
This is the point of view that I've had since elementary school after a game of "Telephone".
If you can't put 6 people in a line, whisper something to the first, and have the same thing come from the last, what are the chances any of those books contain any original text? Especially when you have sycophantic rulers like Orange Hitler looking to bilk the masses and trying to rule the world.
Religion is a tool of fear and control to keep the population where you want them. It is broadly and repeatedly used to justify the absolute worst actions in humanity. Religion is the fuel that makes individuals hate entire countries of people they have never met.
Literally been carrying that all my life, too. It definitely doesn’t seem like most people took that message away from the game.
The Torah has been preserved in Hebrew, but changed in writing over time. The Quran has been preserved in Arabic and the original text is preserved, which is also why the language is preserved.
Your argument is factually wrong and calling all Jews, Muslims and Christians "fucking idiots" is racist and antisemitic.
Racist and antisemitic are not the right terms here. Please let us know why you think it is factually wrong to call Muslims and Christians "fucking idiots".
lol, man didn not even mentions jewish ppl expicitly and you threw in antisemite lmaoo
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The joke hinges on misusing an alternate meaning to an English word that is a translation already from ancient Hebrew (likely via Latin). I am pretty sure the artist is well aware of this. Of course, some people will read this comic and think they discovered some profound contradiction...
"I am the Lord thy God who brought you out of the land of Egypt out of the house of slavery and you shall have no other gods before me"
That's not a mistranslation, that's the entire first commandment. The old testament openly acknowledges the "existence" of competing deities.
Remember that when this was written down for the first time, it was super strange to have only one all powerful God. There were hundreds of gods that the Jews would have been at least aware of. Even if the whole Exodus thing is not accurate to Jewish history in particular, which it likely isn't, no one but the Jews had only one God they prayed to. At the time, you prayed to whoever you thought got that particular job done. The first commandment says no, set them all aside and worship me and me alone.
Which is exactly why the second commandment is about not making idols.
Also the whole Egypt thing was probably the Hitites, who got diaspora'd and many of whom probably ended up finding the Jewish people and integrated with them. There's literally 0 physical evidence of large scale Jewish enslavement in ancient Egypt.
At the time, you prayed to whoever you thought got that particular job done
Then Catholics came along and replaced this with patron saints.
(technically Catholics believe they are asking the patron to intercede and advocate for whatever the devotee is asking for, but it's still funny to me that they still fill the roles of the lesser gods of antiquity)
Man, imagine being really devout, so devout you become a Saint, then instead of hanging out in Heaven you have to do paperwork for people praying to you.
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no one but the Jews had only one God they prayed to.
Well, there was that one time ancient Egypt suddenly took a turn to monotheism (arguably more correctly monolatrism). Which lead to an alternative theory of Exodus as the story of Atenist priests fleeing Egypt after Akhenaten's death and deciding to have another go at monotheism with the Isrealites...
You are correct about the meaning being not to have other gods, I didn't say it was a mistranslation. I said they are purposefully taking the alternate and more popular meaning of the word "before". In the scripture it means 'in front of' or 'in my sight'. They take the meaning as 'in line in front of'. Because of the eccentricities of English and many other languages, the meaning could be taken either way if you didn't have context. Also, the joke hinges on ignoring that mentioning other gods doesn't mean they exist or exist in the way they are purported to exist. In that German translation from the post I was replying to, the translation was more specific and didn't lend as much confusion.
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The Bible itself acknowledges other gods. When God made Man "in our image" he was speaking to the pantheon of gods.
There are other examples, but I'm no scholar and my toast is almost ready.
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I mean, there's even other godlike characters in the Bible. Satan may not be the most powerful deity in the book but he's canonically a deity. Same for angels and their ilk. Hell, even the later bits struggle to keep a lid on the numbers, jumping through hoops to make the claim that three deities is actually one.
Way back when, the religion that turned into Judaism was openly polytheistic, and simply held that Yahweh, the king of the pantheon and God of war and weather, was the only god worthy of worship.
Over time Yahweh merged with an adjoining religions god El, and started the transition to being the only god, instead of just the only worthy god.
This transition happened literally a thousand years after many of the earliest texts were written, so there's a lot of verbiage where the deity explains that the other gods aren't important, which is later clarified to them not existing, or really just being servants and not at all lower tier gods in a complex pantheon.
It's why there's so many weird turns of phrase, beyond it being thousands of years old and translated a lot.
"El" being a word that was used for both "a god" and "this god" didn't help. "The high god divided the world for all the gods, and our god God the only God and creator of all was given our land as he's the high god and father of God the only God of the sky and also that mountain".
Different parts of the world took a lot of the same root deities and went a different direction with them. There's a degree of overlap between aspects of ancient Greek religion and the Abrahamic religions because parts of each of them came from a common root. Just one mushed then together and made the grammar extra confusing. "King sky god", "water god", "afterlife god" being the children of mother and father cosmic creator gods. Also a big sea snakes who are up to no good. That one had legs, so to speak.
I feel the need to add some context here.
The patriarchal push to erase the pantheon started just before the Babylonian Exile under the reign of King Josiah. He ruled from 640 to 609 BCE.
His son Ellakim (or Jehoiakim) refused to pay tribute to the Neo-Babylonians which resulted in 60 years of slavery for some 7000 Judeans.
It was only in 539 BCE when the Neo-Babylonian Empire fell that they were allowed to go home.
The Judeans come home, but their temple has been sacked and most of their sacred texts burnt, so they rebuild and recreate.
This is when Noah and Moses were invented, a long with anything before Solomon, and even much of his life as well.
It was war, conflict and invasion that turned people to Yahweh to be the major god, since he was the god of war. Before then he was a minor figure. The odd part is why previous references weren't eventually changed or edited out to reflect this turn to monotheism.
Probably wasn't edited because it wasn't a deliberate change. People were the ones to write the texts and stories, but not a person.
Telling the story you were told as you understand it will introduce some drift, as will making the jump to writing it down. Translation also introduces points where meaning can drift, since you have to write down what you understand the text to read, and you can be unclear on both sides.
People making a good faith effort try not to intentionally embellish their important texts, even if parts seem to contrasict.
Judaism and the old testament have had a lot of the quirks stick out so much because there are strict rules about preserving the integrity of the stories, once they got written down. Not from memory, only from another scroll created in this fashion and no other sources, only a specific font with specific text alignment, copy letter by letter and read aloud as you go, and then you can check the number of letters as you go to verify.
Other religions over time haven't had as much of a focus on textual preservation, so the stories can drift to match with the change in beliefs.
Wait wait wait, did Judaism invent the basic concept of a checksum?
That is... very interesting. I know numerology and the like are very popular parts of Jewish occultism.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, my knowledge of this history is iffy at best,
Iirc, Early Judaism wasn't monotheistic like it, Christianity, and Islam are now.
The people at the time had multiple gods, one of which was a minor god associated with storms. At some point this god was boosted into popularity and became the primary god of the old testament and eventually THE god of the 3 Religions.
The line being written like this could be a holdover from this extremely early culture which was initially Polytheistic.
OR it's just a funky translation and just ment to mean "Don't worship someone as a God like their any better than me.THE God."
Yeah, there's a bit of a discussion about this further down the thread. Yahweh was originally some sort of god of war (and maybe storms? See the great flood), but as his worship became more prominent he assumed the attributes (and name, even) of the chief god of the pantheon, El.
Yaweh was the "subgod" for Israelites.
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Yahweh was just one of many gods worshipped at that time. Which is why like 1/3 of the ten comandments are related to his own insecurities
Iirc the Bible never says there is only one god. Only that the Israelites should only worship Yahweh.
Yaweh was one of the sons of El in Caananite religion, which has the same Noah myth, and the religion/people is based on one of his son's decendants. El was accepted by Greeks as the same god as Zeus. Many other Caananite polytheistic gods had Greek equivalents.
When Moses wrote the tablets, he was basically doing a religious coup to claim the Hebrew/Israelite "subgod" was the primary god. Denouncing Idolatry, and "thou shalt not covet" was also a rebelion against the main/historical Phoenecian/Caananite religion to when Israelites war against Phoenecians "do not covet their idols, destroy them".
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Fun fact: In the Old Testament, God first calls himself as El Shaddai, which many scholars translate as "God of the Shaddai people". So, even He doesn't see Himself as the universal gods, just one of many.
A common misconception, it actually means alphabetically as god's true name is A. Aardvark.
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Start from the beginning. The text makes it absolutely clear that there "are other gods".
God: An Anatomy is a great book that goes more into this if you want to read more about the ancient conception of the Abrahamic god. Very little of it has survived into Christianity.
A tablet written in the very early Bronze Age, when Semites were surrounded by (and often participating in) all sorts of alternative cults and pagan pantheons would naturally mention other gods.
It would be weirder if the early biblical texts didn't mention any other gods.
Considering 3 major world religions claim the text was inspired by their god, the discrepancies make it at least highly suspicious.
I'm into decolonization of Christianity, and one thing that's really interesting is how saints were used by conquered peoples to preserve their gods and cultural practices i.e. syncretism. That's one of the reasons Catholicism has remained more prominent than Protestantism in Latin America.
Catholicism outside of the Vatican is peganism and animism and ancestor worship with the labels scratched off.
And I'm mature enough in my atheism (really, post-atheist) to think that's actually really cool.
My Filipino wife gave me a whole different view of their Catholicism. She has a rosary in the car and rubs it for protection, believes in Jesus and heaven, all that, but isn't familiar with even the most well-known Bible stories and I have no idea if she's even been to Mass. To her, the bible simply isn't important in any way, and neither are the practices of the church. All very strange to my American senses, having been raised in a white-bread Presbyterian church.
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This is my first wife Yahweh, and my second wife Amen-Ra.
This take is actually pretty close to the original reading. In the ancient near east it was a given that there were many deities. It's not that the worldview of the Bible is a strict monotheism but taht YHWH is the supreme God and the source of all.
If Cthulhu is your number 2 you immediately need to check for hemmorhoids.
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It's just hard to directly translate accurately from the original Klingon texts.
There's a logical problem to a language-based religion, in that even a literal interpretation is still an interpretation. Your understanding is not infallible, and no one on Earth likely believes The Bible, 100% verbatim, yet many claim to.
If the source material is always fuzzy then who is to say what a real christian is? Who is the authority? What is? The book itself isn't sentient and Jesus isn't here to break any ties.
But then, you'll get people who say they know God, that they talk to God and it would seem as though their belief and participation is, from their perspective, at least, beyond the limitations of the Christian source-code. They allegedly know God via dimensional speed-dial via.... vibes. I don't believe he does, but they do, so, rules of engagement, I temporarily have to believe he does until I'm done speaking to the person with mental health problems.
Living in the American south is like having multiple gears of belief to swap into like a 6-speed transmission based on who you're talking to. Alright, what flavor of kool aid is this person drinking?...
Back in the day you would pick and choose the gods you worshipped, like from the greek or roman pantheon. But if you chose to worship God you would have to put him literally before the other gods.
It's important to remember at all times that every single thing religious, was made up by very stupid people. Either stupid for living 1,000-5,000 years ago, and having zero education, or for thinking that other people would buy that bullshit.
Confusion happens when things don't make sense. Religions don't make sense because they're hasty lies. You know people that constantly lie. They may even be religious. You're going to trust knowledge of an afterlife to a hallucination they had? lol. No.
That's why religions brainwash small children using fear.
stupid for living 1,000-5,000 years ago, and having zero education, or for thinking that other people would buy that bullshit
This is why I'm always a bit askance when presented with Atheism as some kind of enlightened philosophy.
Just kicking in the door and shouting "Everyone who conceived of a being more powerful than themselves and attempted to extrapolate the natural world into an explainable series of events was FUCKING DUMB AS SHIT" is kinda simple-minded and divorced from any historical perspective on its face.
Nevermind the chauvinism and the egotism of this bland dogmatic assertion. You're casually dismissing whole intermediate strains of philosophical and literary development, because people 5000 years ago weren't spoon-fed a level of education (mixed with its own heady brand of western War on Terror propaganda) you received a few years ago.
That’s why religions brainwash small children using fear.
Trying to explain to my five year old why transendentalism is going to ruin their life and perpetuate generations of human suffering without scaring them. Maybe if I lead in with "Catholics are going to rape you! Stay away from the church!" they'll get the core logic and reason without experiencing any kind of reflexive emotional response.
This is why I’m always a bit askance when presented with Atheism as some kind of enlightened philosophy.
Its not a philosophy, its a position on the existence of god.
is kinda simple-minded and divorced from any historical perspective on its face.
Its simple because its only a statement of belief in no god in the form of identification. A historical perspective is not needed to come to a conclusion as to whether people who believe in god are stupid or smart. You can also do that through thinking about their rationality or logical process for coming to those conclusions.
You’re casually dismissing whole intermediate strains of philosophical and literary development
If I wrote a philosophy or theology about how everything is made of bananas, and then for hundreds/thousands of years people argued about the nuances of my absurd and baseless belief system I think it'd be fair to dismiss it anyway. It doesn't matter how much fan fiction is written about Musaceae-ology. You don't have to read it, you can safely ignore it.
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Religion is baked into our very genes.
“Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there were`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia
And yes, the penultimate sentence is an experimentally verified fact.
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or for thinking that other people would buy that bullshit.
Look around. Religions exist. Cults exist. Plenty of people have found great success by starting a religion/cult, whether that means access to power, money, wives, children, etc. If they got what they wanted out of the deal, then I'd be more keen to hone in on greed or selfishness as their most prominent character flaw rather than question their intelligence.
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