There are also different versions of the ten commandments across religions. (The Catholics had a problem with the ban on graven images, especially given how many of those they had been erecting).
I don't know how this works, given that anyone can pick up a Bible and find the ten commandments. Maybe the Catholics print their own modified version of the Bible?
The reason is that the commandments are not clearly numbered, so it is a matter of interpretation when one commandment ends and the next begins. Different ways of splitting the commandments leads to different interpretation.
In Jewish interpretation the second commandment starts with "do not make an image...", in Catholic and Lutheran interpretation this is part of the first commandment, giving it less emphasis. The numbering of the rest of the commandments are then one off, until the ninth/tenth, which is two separate commandments in the Catholic interpretation.
Interestingly, the catholic church had HUGE problems with the orthodox church during its inception for just that. If you get the chance, you should give "Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire" (http://www.amazon.ca/Byzantium-Surprising-Life-Medieval-Empi...) a read. Its a fascinating glimpse into not only the early church, but the rise, and fall, of an empire.
It started with the Bogomils, I believe it was on some doctrine about whehter we were born in sin, or not. I haven't check wikipedia, trying to type what I remmember from school, but the orthodox church believes that you are born in sin, while the catholic does not. Off course there are other differences.
Atheist myself, I got married in a orthodox church to make my family happy (grandmothers especially). I carry my wedding ring on the right hand (orthodox rules).
But, I wonder what's the point? Such simple differences, and off course others were the cause of wars (real, and cold) between the sects (to be objective, they are all sects) of the christian church.
Ok, so some fights might've been okay - for example our Bulgarian church (orthodox) "fought" against the Greek (also orthodox) to have the sermons told in bulgarian, not greek, because... people did not understood greek. Or to have the bible written in bulgarian.
But now the bulgarian church is fighting within itself, for stupid things like - whether the black monks (I think those are strict monastic monks), can get married vs. the one carrying white. Again, not going to bother checkin the wikipedia on this one. It's just stupid :) Allow them to get married, and continue...
There have been a lot of research into this, and the hypothesis is that genesis was assembled from (at least) four different sources or oral traditions. The two creation stories are clearly from two different traditions, one calls the creator-god "Yahweh" (somewhat misleading translated to "The Lord" in English), the other uses the name "Elohim" (translated to "God" in English). The differences hints to different cultures: "Elohim" separates the waters and creates the dry land, "Yahweh" creates a spring in the desert. This could indicate that the one tradition originates from shore-dwelling people (water is the primary element, land is the exception), the other is from desert nomads (the dry land is primary, water is created by God).
Note that the primary difference between the two psalms when seen in the diff view, is that one uses "God" one uses "The Lord". Hence they are probably the same original song filtered through two different traditions. When the Bible were assembled, the editors took pains to include all traditions, even when the content was overlapping.
That's stupid, ask any orthodox jewish scholar, or hell, read the passages yourself. The first section is 'foreshadowing' for lack of a better term, and the second is the accounts in detail.
They're not exactly the same. Genesis 1 places the creation of animals before humans, whereas the natural reading of Genesis 2 has the reverse:
"And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them"
(Admittedly some modern evangelical Bibles make this "God had formed every beast". But this seems to be motivated by a desire to harmonize rather than honest translating.)
We should probably distinguish between two levels of explanation: The religious explanation, and the historic/scientific explanation.
The "foreshadowing"-explanation is a religious explanation. The historic/scientific explanation is that the two versions are from two different oral traditions that have been merged into the same book. Both kind of explanation are interesting, but they are also largely incompatible, and I think it always should be made very clear which perspective one is arguing from.
