The Bible in E-Prime!

9 Elul - Year 5770

Someone (well, Dr. David F. Maas, actually) finally got round to translating the 'good book' into E-Prime.

For those who've never heard of E-Prime, it "is" essentially a form of English where the verb 'to be' (is, was, etc.) gets eliminated, in favour of verbs which relate to the speaker's point of view and not necessarily a concrete fact.

An example: "John is a real jerk." This implies that everyone sees John as a real jerk. One of his friends may disagree and an argument will ensue. If I state that in E-Prime...it becomes "John seems like a jerk, to me." Now, his friend may still argue - but the E-Prime statement becomes one of subjective content, not of 'objective fact'. Some (but not all) critters will hopefully begin to see that they state most things as if everyone shares the same reality-tunnel, which doesn't seem to be the case, to me. I'd like to say most critters would, but sadly, human evolution doesn't appear to be moving as quickly as I would like it to.

You can read more about E-Prime here and here. Those serve as better 'primers' (pardon the pun) than my little intro.

The E-Prime version of the Bible can be found here.

And finally, a Robert Anton Wilson vid all about E-Prime:



Thanks to Mindy J. for posting the Bible link over at Only Maybe.