Q: "...digital technology might somehow dilute the sacredness of a religious message. Is something important lost in the 2005 translation of the entire Bible into SMS, when the first passage in Genesis becomes: 'In da Bginnin God cre8d da heavens & da earth?'"

Wagner, Rachel. "Sacred Texting: When Religious Writ gets Wired." Religion Dispatches. 23 Oct. 2008.

C: In this passage, Wagner questions whether or not modern, electronic adaptations of religious messages can corrupt or dilute the original text or the religion as a whole. She cites the SMS translation of the Bible, which translates the Bible into text-speech, and refers to Tweeting services which send out Biblical passages to those who follow them. Whether or not this corrupts religious texts is not necessarily important to the author, but the implications of changing a text at all is a subject worthy of study when we are analyzing both religions and culture.

Now, to put in my 2 cents on the matter: I think there definitely is a certain degree of corruption that occurs when one tweets a Bible passage, or when one translates the Bible into SMS. However, this corruption does not occur because it is technological, but because by nature it respectively removes the context of the passage, and presents the reader with possible translation errors. When analyzing the Bible, it is important to understand the context in which the text occurs; a tweet removes this, creating an island of text. This sort of "corruption" can occur with a physical Bible, for example, if one is asked ONLY to analyze one passage from the Bible to prove a point, without looking for the context. With SMS translation, we are essentially seeing a copy-of-a-copy; a translation from English, which was derived from Hebrew/Aramaic. So, one must wonder what Bible this SMS was copied from.

Ultimately, these problems with technology are not new, but the medium through which these problems occur is.