Altered books(spoilers)

we know their holy book and the testimonies were altered from the originals, I wonder if the temple titself retains copies of the original texts. Zion makes the best religious books, what if their shipments suddenly had copies of those unadulterated books among them? It should show the church has altered the truth for a long time, and the battle of good and evil was more of a civil war. None of them directly mention advanced tech, just a the true version of the holy war.
Just like the news sheets, if made forbidden, it just makes other curious.

SYED wrote:we know their holy book and the testimonies were altered from the originals, I wonder if the temple titself retains copies of the original texts. Zion makes the best religious books, what if their shipments suddenly had copies of those unadulterated books among them? It should show the church has altered the truth for a long time, and the battle of good and evil was more of a civil war. None of them directly mention advanced tech, just a the true version of the holy war.
Just like the news sheets, if made forbidden, it just makes other curious.

How would you distinguish between changes made in copying and changes made in the originals? More importantly, how do you demonstrate to the man on the street, which version is original if all you're distributing is copies?

If the man in the street isn't convinced but begins to doubt and think for himself, Merlin's cause is advanced.

Expert snuggler wrote:If the man in the street isn't convinced but begins to doubt and think for himself, Merlin's cause is advanced.

True, but I question whether copies of unaltered texts would be accepted as unaltered or dismissed as altered. If what the man in the street thinks is, What a load of rubbish! The Heretics must be really getting desperate," it doesn't do much to dispel the CoGA stranglehold on belief.

SYED wrote:

It should show the church has altered the truth for a long time, and the battle of good and evil was more of a civil war.

I've always been dubious about the altered books. There were millions of Adams and Eves, all of whom were literate and many of whom recorded their testimonies. Then there was the writ and hundreds or thousands of copies across all of the cities of the world. Even with an organisation as oppressive as the inquisition, how do you replace them all? How do you insure that there exists nothing like the Ste. Zherneau repositories by people who were merely revering the scriptures? How about people who take notes during the homilies? For example, according to http://www.str.org/articles/is-the-new-testament-text-reliable#.Vi_-3m5Z9p8 even if every copy of the bible were somehow magically destroyed, even so nearly the entire new testament can be reconstructed from patristic quotations.

~Tonto

SYED wrote:we know their holy book and the testimonies were altered from the originals, I wonder if the temple titself retains copies of the original texts. Zion makes the best religious books, what if their shipments suddenly had copies of those unadulterated books among them? It should show the church has altered the truth for a long time, and the battle of good and evil was more of a civil war. None of them directly mention advanced tech, just a the true version of the holy war.
Just like the news sheets, if made forbidden, it just makes other curious.

Actually that's an interesting idea for spreading some propaganda with the Church's imprimatur (at least until the inquisition cottoned on to the problem). Think about it: The church sends out wagon loads of new schoolbooks and copies of religious literature all with the new harsh doctrine as dictated by the Grand Inquisitor and in the middle of the night, OWL's remotes swoop in and replace all of them with entirely different books containing reformist propaganda who look identical on the out side to the other books. Obviously the Schuelerite principals of those church-run schools will act quickly to burn the problematic books, but if thousands of such schoolbooks have been altered to contain the latest in Archbishop Maikel's sermons or the newest engineering and medical techniques coming from Delthak and Charis, the church would be hard pressed to find them all and destroy them, especially in the middle of a war. Certainly it would be nothing more than a huge practical joke played at the church's expense, or another layer of the propaganda war between the two sides, but the CoGA is already in deep shit at this point. It might accelerate the process of encouraging freedom of thought and questioning the Church's authority and decisions.

Or if the oldest churches and monasteries stumble across copies of the original Writ in their secret archives.

"I didn't know we had that!" "But, Brother Y, it must have been there all along. Look how much dust is on it".

Tonto Silerheels wrote:SYED wrote:

It should show the church has altered the truth for a long time, and the battle of good and evil was more of a civil war.

I've always been dubious about the altered books. There were millions of Adams and Eves, all of whom were literate and many of whom recorded their testimonies. Then there was the writ and hundreds or thousands of copies across all of the cities of the world. Even with an organisation as oppressive as the inquisition, how do you replace them all? How do you insure that there exists nothing like the Ste. Zherneau repositories by people who were merely revering the scriptures? How about people who take notes during the homilies? For example, according to http://www.str.org/articles/is-the-new-testament-text-reliable#.Vi_-3m5Z9p8 even if every copy of the bible were somehow magically destroyed, even so nearly the entire new testament can be reconstructed from patristic quotations.

~Tonto

Child's play. Wait until the Adams and Eves are gone. The originals are in the Temple. Whenever there is a discrepancy between a copy and the original, rule automatically in favor of the original. Eventually those who knew the original Adams and Eves are gone and the Temple can alter to its heart's content with no one around to effectively challenge the results.

Don

If the Grand Fornicator gets narcissistic enough to add a Book Of Clyntahn to the Writ, he'll do just the sort of damage we're rooting for.

Once the idea that there's only one Writ is broken it can never be glued back together.

Expert snuggler wrote:If the Grand Fornicator gets narcissistic enough to add a Book Of Clyntahn to the Writ, he'll do just the sort of damage we're rooting for.

Once the idea that there's only one Writ is broken it can never be glued back together.

No one is going to change the Writ - after all, it hasn't been altered since after the War of the Fallen, when Chihiro had to remove any books written by San-Wei or her followers, and turn Shan-Wei into Safehold's version of Satan. Chihiro added her book and the Book of Scheuler at that point.

The question is "How did the populace accept the massive changes to the Writ at that time?" I recognize that the archangels were revered, but once the war started mortals didn't know which side a visiting archangel fought for, and were told they could hesitate to obey orders from a an unknown angel until those orders were confirmed by an angel they knew.

By now the population as a whole accepts the Writ as it currently exists, but there have to be some copies of the original Writ around, and it would certainly give those who read it a deeper view of the division between the archangels. Whether that would ruin their belief or prepare them for the Big Reveal I don't know.

Interesting to think about though.