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The following is a thought-provoking article from The Atlantic about the political biases that influence how history is written. I recommend it, for one reason:
Not all flawed histories are the result of calculated, deceitful, intentional attempts to hoodwink the readers. Much of it is the result of a sincere attempt to share the writer’s honest beliefs – which create a specific narrative that, while sincere, also is subjective to the core and flawed to varying degree. On one side, there is O’Reilly; on the other side, there is Maher.
It’s easy to accept this about history – but it also is easy to assign some kind of dishonesty to it when it is manifested in religious narratives that seem too simplistic and “white-washed”. It also is easy for most people to ignore it with regard to foundational religious texts – what we call scriptures. It’s easy to apply an unrealistic, impossible standard to such text. It’s easy to forget that even these “histories” were written by people with human perspectives and biases – and that, rather than unbiased, pure Truth, these records, even if recorded in all sincerity, convey the personal views and agendas of those who wrote them.
I’m not knocking scripture in any way by saying this. I really do honor and respect the effort it took to record them for our study today – and I value HIGHLY the insight they provide into the minds and souls of their authors and compilers. I just don’t imbue them with some unnatural purity that raises scripture above the compilation of any other historical record. I value our scriptures (and others) more than many other tomes, but I don’t view them as infallible – without error. I don’t insist on believing every word is correct or pure, straight from God’s mouth to man’s mind to written page.
I do believe this. Regardless of what others might think about JS or the authors of scriptures or whomever. Growing up I read very issue of national geographic and centuries of old news that my grandmother had collected. It wasn’t uncommon to read different accounts of the same thing in history even within the same news source like national geographic. Of course being 60, 80, or 100 years apart being written by different authors inside the same news corp. will give different accounts of what happened. It wasn’t deceitful, it was just written with different sources of knowledge and viewpoints. Likewise my fathers version of Vietnam(having served) was very different then what I learned at school. It didn’t invalidate his or the schools history book but it gave a very different perspective from his honest point of view then the official and commonly accepted version of it. We did have Vietnamesse selling their house and cars and leaving their family to say thank you in various ways like the rose parade. While others tell a different story. Both were valid points of view. But each was just a limited point of view not intended by most to be deceitful. Although I acknowledge that there are various intentionally rewritten history much like the indoctrination of leading us into WW2 and others. But that’s not true for a majority of history. Both our own LDS history and scriptural history I believe is a result of waxing strong in stories that uplift or shape us until they can lose intentional focus. A little like fisherman tales that often have a base truth but wax strong on the events to the point were the fish got ever bigger or the struggle got ever harder and more bizarre then originally was so. Not intentionally usually but we christen of god have a tenacity to tell sorties that take a life of there own over time. Doesn’t mean the base of the story is rooted in untruth.
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