Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "You Probably Should Have Read the Bible | Franciscan University | EP 251" video.

Marx's writings have been influential. Does that put them at the core of the Western Canon?
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It might be useful to define what we mean by "an interpretation" of a text. Words are networks of associations. Some of these associations are explicit denotations (which consciously limit and focus the word enough to make it useful, and are included in a dictionary). Some of these associations are implicit connotations, and these can include "typical" context, famous usages, sense-memory associated with the word, vestigial literal meanings from centuries past, personal / unique associations, and more - whatever contributes to your intuition of what it means. This also holds true of phrases of words. Your brain keeps track of these physically through the way neurons are networked together, and convolutional neural nets keep track of them (as far as they keep track of anything) by connections between "nodes" in that net. Sometimes, these networks are congruent with one another in some way; we call these analogies. You can extend these comparisons into allegories, fables, and parables. Just like tou can "interpret" a word by picking some associations over others, you can "interpret" a text by emphasizing some set of associations over others. You can emphasize the literal associations of an author's writing, for example. Or, you can emphasize whatever your ideology tells you to emphasize, even if every other association is working against you. And, just like using word associations or abstract images to plumb someone's psychology, you can use someone's interpretation of a text to judge their psychology and character, or whether they're incapable of independent thought because they're in the throes of some overwhelming ideology.
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"It's odd that you'd consider a book the fundamental element of your culture." Yes. Without Martin Luther's emphasis on Scripture (and approaching it with a certain amount of conscious thought), Constitutional Government would never have taken off.
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@JJ-qo7th I'm not talking about any given line in the Constitution -- I'm talking about giving so much credence to words on a piece of paper. If you ever watched Game of Thrones, there was a scene where Cersei tore up a piece of paper that Ned Stark put a great deal of stock in, right before she had him imprisoned and murdered. That's a lot like the world that we lived in, prior to Luther's emphasis on Scripture.
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@JJ-qo7th Magna Carta-- the document that Catholic-inclined Charles I tried to ignore, that highly Protestant Cromwell and his fellow Parliamentarians rallied around? "Literally any peace treaty" yes, and before 1500 those were paid about as much heed as Scripture. Are there any significant pre-1500 peace treaties still in force? Honestly, the oldest treaty whose tenets still matter to modern diplomacy is the Peace of Westphalia, which (NOT coincidentally) wrapped up the wars of very Catholic House Hapsburg trying to exalt themselves by wiping out Protestantism.
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