Penn and Teller did a Bullshit! On the Bible. I really enjoyed it, although I was uncomfortable with Penn constantly referring to it as “The Damned Bible”…but that’s just my hang-up. It was pure and simple button pushing for no reason other than its own sake, and that makes me uncomfortable…which I believe was the point.
Anyway, at the end, Penn urges everyone to read the Bible from cover-to-cover. He says this is because “we need more atheists”.
And it got me thinking about how I came to reject the idea of the infallibility of the Bible and the general usefulness of the revealed religions.
Well, I’m not an atheist, but I come pretty close. I guess the best description might be “Deist.”, although that just might be because I haven’t spent enough time really digging into Deism yet to find out where I disagree with them.
But we were talking about my long, slow fall from the state of grace that is Theism (general lumping of the revealed religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam…or the “Abrahamic traditions”)
It started with “Christian” behavior. With judgment and hypocrisy and outright religious abuse where the abused were supposed to bear that abuse as a testament of their faith. Even a child should be able to see that is sick.
So, confused; I went to the source. I figured I’d had enough of people handing me little slices out of the Bible and telling me what they meant (and sometimes telling me that they meant the opposite of what they appeared to mean, as if it was “profound”.)
I have read the Bible from cover to cover several times in the course of my life. OK, so I skimmed the begats (you know, Bob begat Joe, who begat Fred, who married Latisha and begat Leonardo, who was the Father of the Nation of Whogivesashit) and lists of Israel’s rulers and judges and stuff…but I’m pretty sure I didn’t miss anything. My eyes physically traveled over all the words, and my brain woke up for the important parts, like the genocides, suicides, the idol worship, prostitution, mutilation of corpses, and conditions under which God wants you to stone your children to death, or when it’s OK to sell your daughter into slavery and such.
What I learned, is that there is a reason why we have devotionals and sermons and a liturgical calendar. It’s because the Bible is at its best with a sober, semi-sane, fairly modern editor who can sift out all the stuff that is self-contradictory, warped, sick, irrelevant, confusing, and in direct contradiction of what Christians believe their religion is.
Christians have a very solid system of filters in place to make the Bible a coherent, cohesive moral guide. The different denominations each have a separate system of interpretive filters, but they all pick-and-choose what parts of the Bible they think are important, relevant, or even should be read at all. They all leave out a lot of inconvenient and unpleasant stuff.
But the system of interpretive filters contributes many times more of the meaning than the source material does. That is probably why I was told, by a Sunday School teacher, that I should not read the Bible on my own, but should always read it with a parent, or a teacher, or a pastor…someone who could help me interpret the Bible correctly. It was stressed that a person should not rely on their own understanding to interpret the Bible, because they were not trained to do it correctly.
This seemed odd to me, as I had been told that one of the things that made Protestants better than Catholics was that Protestants had the advantage of a personal relationship with God, while Catholics had to go through the church and through their saints, ect. (confessing sins to a priest rather than directly to God, “praying” to the saints rather than directly to God, etc.)
It seemed odd that I could have a personal relationship with God, but I needed a pastor to read the Bible.
Fundamentalists will often criticize “lukewarm” (AKA mainstream, AKA relatively sane) Christians for “picking and chooseing” which parts of the Bible they will listen to…and thus flouting Biblical authority.
And yet, the fundamentalists do the same. They pick-and-choose all the stuff about how they get to judge and condemn and berate their fellow man, and leave out all the stuff where they are told to be modest, and to not make public demonstrations of their faith, and not to act holier-than-thou (hint: telling people what God says and what the Bible says they should do, when there is just as much support in the Bible for their viewpoint as there is for yours…is the very soul of holier-than-thou).
I am continually shocked, when I reference the Bible in an argument with various “Christians”, at how little knowledge they actually have of their own holy book. I often find that they have not read it from cover-to-cover even once, but instead have gone through a Bible study or devotional series that guides them through their particular denominations interpretive filter. My general impression is that there is an inverse relationship between the amount of the Bible they can quote from memory, and the amount that they have actually read.
But I HAVE read the Bible cover-to-cover several times, and I have come to the conclusion that it is a human document, with all that it implies. It has human flaws, contradictions, and failings. Its stories and commandments and precepts are by turns as wise and foolish, as flawed and perfect, as freeing and as cumbersome as the human condition itself.
Which is not a condemnation of the Bible. It is what it is. It can be nothing else. I would urge you to read it if you haven't already. And when you are done, like anything else you encounter in life, take from it what is good, leave what is useless, damaging, or unhealthy behind…and reach for what is better, using the reason, judgement, and freewill that are your natural gifts as a human being.
If you belong to a Christian denomination, I would urge you to recognize that your church has already made some of those choices for you, and to ask yourself if that is the role you want them to play.