Also, how can the final and unalterable word of god be open to multiple interpretations?
I can anticipate a few possible responses to this question but in setting them out here, it would be a mistake to assume that I subscribe to any of them.
One would be mystical: the absolute truth itself is ineffable and cannot be expressed in words. So any attempt to frame ultimate reality within language is not going to do the job. For example, monistic religious philosophies take this line. If reality is non-dual and language is inherently dualistic, if it inevitably carves reality up into subject and object, then it simply isn't up to the job of expressing how things truly are. Some forms of Hinduism and Buddhism advance this teaching via the notions of
samvriti-satya and
paramartha-satya, or provisional and absolute truth. For example, in the Upanishads, the phrase 'neti, neti' ('not this, not this') can be found when it comes to attempts to set out the contours of Brahman.
Similar ideas can be found floating around in ancient philosophical Taoism, in both the Tao Te Ching and the Chuang Tzu. Here are a couple of extracts from Chapter 2 of the latter text.
Words are not just wind. Words have something to say. But if what they have to say is not fixed, then do they really say something? Or do they say nothing? People suppose that words are different from the peeps of baby birds, but is there any difference, or isn't there?
....
There is a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is being. There is nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. Suddenly there is nonbeing. But I do not know, when it comes to nonbeing, which is really being and which is nonbeing. Now I have just said something. But I don't know whether what I have said has really said something or whether it hasn't said something.
There is nothing in the world bigger than the tip of an autumn hair, and Mount T'ai is tiny. No one has lived longer than a dead child, and P'eng-tsu died young. Heaven and earth were born at the same time I was, and the ten thousand things are one with me.
We have already become one, so how can I say anything? But I have just said that we are one, so how can I not be saying something? The one and what I said about it make two, and two and the original one make three. If we go on this way, then even the cleverest mathematician can't tell where we'll end, much less an ordinary man. If by moving from nonbeing to being we get to three, how far will we get if we move from being to being? Better not to move, but to let things be!
Of course, with the notion of the Tao we are a long way from traditional monotheism and moving more in the direction of an impersonal monism. The nearest thing to that in the monotheistic faiths would probably be pantheism, though it gets complicated as Buddhists are monists but Buddhism is a non-theistic religion: there is no God getting His knickers in a twist about what we do down here.
Some forms of Buddhism dismiss the value of scripture altogether. For example, Kaiten Nukariya, the author of
The Religion of the Samurai wrote that 'scripture is no more than waste paper' and went on to state that the universe itself is the scripture of Zen.
A second approach might be to dismiss the idea of a definitive rendering of revelation. In other words, it's
all interpretation, which is an inevitable consequence of the so-called 'Divine' interacting with the human.
A third approach would be to take the view that it is a testament to the very sacredness of revelatory texts that they cannot be pinned down. Just as one can return again and again to great literature and poetry and derive something new from the content, this is even more the case for God's word, in the sense that that the product of the infinite has the potential to resonate infinitely.
Personally, I like the line taken by what the Marxist biographer of Muhammad, Maxime Rodinson, described as 'independent spirits in Islam' who attempted to 'shed doubt on the incomparable nature of the Koranic text'. Rodinson goes on to state that some '...actually set out out to write imitations of the Koran. One of these, in medieval times, faced with the objection that his text did not produce the same mesmeric effect as recitations of the Koran, retorted, 'Have it read out in the mosques for centuries and then you will see!'
This, of course, brings us to the more sceptical possibility that the reason for the lack of consensus is because there is no God. Revelations are actually the product of the human imagination. All that then needs clearing up are the reasons why this sort of thing happens. Feuerbach, Marx, Durkheim and Freud all have interesting theories about that. More recently, New Atheists like Dan Dennett have advanced the view that religion is a superfluous by-product of evolution. The first step is to posit the existence of a hypersensitive agency detector device. This is based on the idea that even now we see faces in the clouds but never clouds in faces. The explanation is that our brains are hard-wired to spot what might possibly be a potential threat to our survival: the face of a possible predator. This device is on a hair trigger and is not always accurate. But the mistakes are all in one direction: the detection of an agent when none is actually present. This is because an evolutionary advantage is conferred through this bias. Even if the device is triggered in error, we still get to survive.
As humans evolved shared communication became possible, and as a result, we began attributing agency to the weather (e.g. a drought means that the rain god is angry), and cases of good and bad fortune (e.g. my bad luck is the result of a god being displeased with me). This belief in supernatural agents is therefore a by-product of a device which is otherwise highly adaptive. Revelatory texts eventually emerged from this milieu.
I'll leave it at that.
There's one other thing: given the rather wonderful Mark E. Smith's tendency to run The Fall like an authoritarian cult leader, the irony of interacting with someone who posts using the name of one of Smith's alter-egos on a thread about a notorious new religion has not been lost on me.
