Orange Catholic Bible/DE



The Orange Catholic Bible (OCB), also known as the Koranjiyana Zenchristian Scriptures, the Accumulated Book, or the Zenchristian Navakoran, was one of the most important religious texts in the known universe.

It was supposed to be a fusion of all significant religious thought in human history, with a strong emphasis on religious beliefs originating on Terra. These included the Maometh Saari, Mahayana Christianity, Zensunni Catholicism, and Budislamic traditions. It was produced by the Commission of Ecumenical Translators.

Content
Its supreme commandment was "Thou shalt not disfigure the soul."

It came packaged with the Liturgical Manual and the Commentaries.

Prophets LXXXIX, 24-26 which was Paul Atreides/DE favorite, concerns the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the coming and cutting off of the Messiah. 3 groups of weeks are given, 70, 7 and 62. The OCB Commentaries, suggests a substitution of years for the stated weeks.

Title
The title itself was one of the hardest decisions for the CET; the title had to be brief yet broadly descriptive and reflect the ecumenical spirit without appearing narrowly exclusive. Bertoli refers to it as the Koranjiyana Zenchristian Scriptures, or Zenchristian Navakoran, but after the fourth year it seems that Orange Catholic Bible' was to be the name.

"orange" and "catholic" seem to have established themselves as reflecting the more innovative and rational as opposed to the more conservative and traditional schools of thought, sometimes used quite lightly. The origin of the term Orange as applied to a religious sectarian is obscure but its religious significance is so overwhelming nowadays that few remember it as the fruit later called portyguls.

Origins
The Butlerian Jihad, with its generations of chaos where the god of machine-logic was replaced by the concept: Man may not be replaced." sponsored by the BG which removed from men a rival power of futurological control. Men of insight looked at their gods and their rituals and saw that both were filled with fear over ambition.

The Spacing Guild and the Bene Gesserit (who foresaw increased opportunities for furthering their own plans) encouraged the leaders of religions whose followers had spilled the blood of billions in planetary purges and interplanetary wars to exchange their views.

Out of those first ecumenical meetings came two major developments:
 * 1) The Commission of Ecumenical Translators
 * 2) The realization that all religions had at least one common commandment: "Thou shalt not disfigure the soul."

The OCB was a revised amalgamation of the ancient holy scriptures, a considerable extension of the traditional canon, and it also abridged and reordered it.

The CET guaranteed labor for the next generation of scholars, who were engaged in assembling the Azhar Book, which preserves the great secrets of the most ancient faiths and traces the received texts to their origins.

Testament
In the former Old Testament and New Testament, there was in general a great simplification, evident in the reduction of the number of books that remain from them, as well as the compression of their contents, when this can be observed in the unmelded texts.

All the historical books of Judaeo-Christian scripture were harmonized as far as possible (if not farther) with the Quran.

The included books are:
 * Genesis,
 * Exodus,
 * Laws, (augmented by the Tawrah, Quran, Confucian traditions)
 * Promises,
 * Kings,
 * Refugees,
 * Job, (passed through the furnace almost unscathed, for some reason)
 * Psalms,
 * Proverbs (assimilated to Taoist and Socratic dicta)
 * Preacher,
 * Prophets,
 * Gospel, (Jesus' life was reduced but was established with immense historical scholarship.)
 * Apostles,
 * Epistles,
 * Revelation. (quite unchanged, whether because of C.E.T. exhaustion once the last book of the old Bible canon had been reached, or because of the dire threat in the last chapter, remains uncertain.)

Canticles (The Song of Solomon or Song of Songs)was omitted but has nevertheless survived and is to be traced in other OCB texts, cf. Blake Skul Visions and the Saari).

Bertoli Memoirs say that Bomoko hated the text which made Sheba say, 'I am black but comely' since his own wife was brown and remarkably ugly and suspected, more or less jokingly, of a secret attachment to Obeah rituals after she was once seen chasing a chicken into the jungle."

When they saw the effect of this claim in cold print, however, it is noteworthy that the Sunislamic faiths were as shocked as the others by what their representatives had perpetrated in their names.

Quran
The pure Quran was represented by the books:


 * Saari
 * Kalima
 * Siret text (it is suspected that this was in part augmented by the CET themselves who numbered some well published poets among them)
 * Masnavi and Traditions (books that seem largely Islamic in composition)

Hindu/Buddhist
The following books composed the OCB:
 * Upanishads
 * Vedas,.
 * Puranas,
 * Gita,
 * Sutra,
 * Bodhisatvara,
 * Avatar a;

Zensunni

 * Koan Answers,
 * Ohashi,
 * Hui-Neng
 * Tao

Other ancient religions

 * Analects
 * Pahlavi;

Newer religions

 * Arran,
 * Blake Skul Visions
 * Revelations are
 * the book of Hymns (both ancient and modern).
 * Holy Lives
 * Testimonies

A controversial but most helpful feature is this addition; the histories of many saints, martyrs, sectarian founders and missionaries, and the records of miracles as remarkable as any of those recorded in ancient scriptures. The ordeals suffered by the faithful and their mixed experiences of sin and redemption.

Reactions
Ninety generations later, the O.C. Bible and the Commentaries permeated the religious universe, but before that, the reactions were even disastrous.

The OCB spread out through the worlds. Some interpreted this as a sign from God, an omen of unity. But the CET delegates when they returned to their respective congregations 18 of them were lynched within two months and 53 recanted within the year.

They were likened in the Space Times to archeologists of ideas, inspired by God in the grandeur of rediscovery. The editor of the ecumenical column of the Church Standard nnocent Msgr. D. Macsutoc, in his last contribution, said that the CET had brought to light "the vitality of great ideals overlaid by the deposits of centuries," that they had "sharpened the moral imperatives that come out of a religious conscience."

The writer in the Suns, denounced the OCB as a work produced by "the hubris of reason." "Its pages, filled with a seductive interest in logic." (The review was a star item on the second page, opposite a seductive holograph of the latest Miss Universe.)

The holovisual interview with Blue Bishop, Halloway who labelled CET's 7-year effort as "Galactophasic Determinism" which beamed throughout the galaxy. The initials G.D. were interpreted as "God-Damned."

The immediate demands for an Authorized Revised Version were doomed to failure, since no ecumenical body of sufficient authority could again be assembled. This did not prevent the appearance of various Revised Versions that catered to popular bigotry. The original OCB, in one or other of the special planetary or Guild editions that were soon distributed, was the version that everybody bought and everybody read.

It awakened a new interest in scripture and in religious issues unprecedented since the first translations of the Bible into the vernacular.

The reactionary revisions leaned on accepted symbolisms (Cross, Crescent, Feather Rattle, the Twelve Saints, the thin Buddha, the horned Goddess, and the like) and it soon became apparent that the ancient superstitions and beliefs had not been absorbed by the new ecumenism. The compilers of the Azhar Book traced many of these beliefs back, even to discredited pagan faiths.