Blog of the Day: Reading and Critically Reviewing the Bible in 365 Days

This blog is more interesting than its title makes it sound. It's written by an atheist who is attempting to do just what the title implies, while also providing social commentary, etc. etc. I quite like it, and I also have a lot of respect for anyone who reads the whole Bible front to back without pulling their hair out. It's not exactly Harry Potter.

Anyway, make sure you check out the blog. It really is a pretty good read.

You've got to be kidding me

From Reuters:

Afghanistan's Taliban have urged Afghan Muslims to resist anyone trying to convert them, after a television network aired pictures of U.S. soldiers in the country with bibles translated into local languages.

Qatar-based Al Jazeera television showed footage on Monday of a bible studies class on a U.S. base in Afghanistan where a soldier had brought a stack of bibles translated into the Afghan languages Dari and Pashto.

The U.S. military bans its soldiers from attempting to convert people to any religion while on active duty. It said commanders confiscated and destroyed the bibles, and they were never distributed to Afghans.

A statement posted on a Taliban website, alemarah1.org, said converting Afghans to Christianity was part of the U.S. war plan.

OK, Commander-in-Chief, you need to put a stop to this right now. Any action that makes the United States look like religious fascists, and makes the Taliban look like the reasonable ones, is not a good idea. In fact, it's a really, really bad idea. This is not a "holy war." There is no such thing as a "holy war." We cannot hope to ever make progress in the tortured Middle East if we answer the behavior of religious fundamentalists with behavior unique to religious fundamentalists. We are there to change the political situation, not to spread Christianity. This has got to stop.


And since we're on the subject, why on earth would these people ever want to convert to Christianity? Assuming some of them are unhappy with Islam, as it was partially their brethren's ideology that got them into this mess in the first place, what on earth could make Christianity (from the mouths of American soldiers) seem like a better alternative? Are the soldiers calling it a religion of peace? I'd imagine they'd have a hard time convincing anyone of that, seeing as they're SOLDIERS... in a WAR. Are they calling it a religion of love? I think they'd have a tough time convincing anyone of that either, what with the acts of torture in which the American military has engaged. The fact is, calling America a "Christian nation" gives Christianity a really, really bad name. If you're going to insist that Christianity is superior to any other religion, you're going to have to demonstrate it. I do not believe that these soldiers are at all capable of doing that.

Psalm 120 says:

I call on the LORD in my distress,
and he answers me.

Save me, O LORD, from lying lips
and from deceitful tongues.

What will he do to you,
and what more besides, O deceitful tongue?

He will punish you with a warrior's sharp arrows,
with burning coals of the broom tree.

Woe to me that I dwell in Meshech,
that I live among the tents of Kedar!

Too long have I lived
among those who hate peace.

I am a man of peace;
but when I speak, they are for war.

Romans 12:14-21 says:

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited.

Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everybody. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written: "It is mine to avenge; I will repay," says the Lord. On the contrary:
"If your enemy is hungry, feed him;
if he is thirsty, give him something to drink.
In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head." Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Tell you what, crazies: I will let you call America a "Christian nation" as soon as it starts acting like one. WTFWJD?

(Thanks to Dave for the pic!)

The American Patriot's Bible

From examiner.com:

The American Patriot's Bible is a combination of a New King James Bible (and all the helps that come with it) and a history of the United States, looking through the lens of Christianity.

Is it far-fetched to say that this is likely a very dangerous book? Discuss.

David Plotz - Blogging the Bible

(From JTA)

Like many lax but well-educated Jews (and Christians), I have long assumed I knew what was in the Bible—more or less. I read parts of the Torah as a child in Hebrew school, then attended a rigorous Christian high school where I had to study the Old and New Testaments. Many of the highlights stuck in my head—Adam and Eve, Cain vs., Abel, Jacob vs. Esau, Jonah vs. whale, 40 days and nights, 10 plagues and Commandments, 12 tribes and apostles, Red Sea walked under, Galilee Sea walked on, bush into fire, rock into water, water into wine. And, of course, I absorbed other bits of Bible everywhere—from stories I heard in churches and synagogues, movies and TV shows, tidbits my parents and teachers told me. All this left me with a general sense that I knew the Good Book well enough, and that it was a font of crackling stories, Jewish heroes, and moral lessons.

So, the tale of Dinah unsettled me, to say the least. If this story was strutting cheerfully through the back half of Genesis, what else had I forgotten or never learned? I decided I would, for the first time as an adult, read the Bible. And I would blog about it as I went along.

This is such a great idea. I know that I'm not as well educated about the Bible as I'd previously assumed I was. I find new stuff in there every day, even in the Gospels, which I thought I had down. Reading it straight through would be something. I mean, time-consuming and tedious but also probably really fascinating and enlightening.

Plotz says something else in this interview that I found really fascinating:

Christians have the New Testament, which softens and explains and cleans up a lot of the messiness of the Hebrew Bible. Jews don't have Jesus to fall back on. The result, I think, is our amazing tradition of argument. We have a holy book that is full of immoral heroes and an erratic, vindictive God. How do we grapple with that? My Bible reading, though deeply ignorant and naïve, is very much in that Jewish tradition of addressing the holy book by arguing with it, rather than simply accepting it, sheep-like.

I've often wondered how the Jews could seem to be such reasonable, intelligent, hilarious, nice people when their God is the same God that those fundies running around quoting the Old Testament pray to. I mean, Leviticus is a Jewish book. The Hasidic Jews (like my cousin the Rabbi) pretty much follow it to the letter. But this idea of arguing with the Bible... I have to confess, I love it. Not only that, but I totally do that. Just as much as I take my morality from the words of Jesus Christ, I often try to make the words of Jesus Christ fit with my morality. Who knew there was an entire religion full of people who do the same thing (only, you know, without the Jesus part).

And speaking of Jesus, wasn't he Jewish? Wasn't what he did while he was preaching just arguing with the Old Testament? His words were simultaneously steeped in the Jewish tradition yet completely opposed to so much of it. Who's to say that we can't do the same thing today? I think this idea is certainly food for thought. If we see the Bible not as a dead set of laws that we must follow or perish, but a living organism with which we can have a conversation, then we can find ways to make our faith work in this new world. Oh, and we can also stop giving gay people shit all the time. Just sayin'.

Literal Interpretation is Pretty Much Impossible, Guys

From a letter to the editor in The Observer:

Ms. Arseneault (letter to the editor, "Bible and science can actually co-exist," The Observer, Feb. 9, 2009) may believe in her Bible literally, but believing literally in the Bible, or any other religious text for that matter, is a poor foundation upon which to build an understanding of our world.

Any objective reading of the Bible reveals it to be a cobbled together mess of contradictions and inconsistencies. Literally interpreted, we start out with only Adam, Eve and two sons. But shortly, we're into a long and detailed episode of begatting, without any explanation of how all those generations of begatters and beattees could result from a mother, father and two sons.

All we can say with historical certainty about the Bible is that it selectively reflects only those writings and beliefs in accordance with the prevailing orthodoxy at the time, when Christian power was being consolidated in Rome in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, ignoring or suppressing other threads of early Christian thought or belief.

And we can somewhat excuse the confusing nature of the Bible as it is the "template" for a religion whose god, like the god of the other two main monotheistic religions, revealed himself or herself primarily to members of illiterate nomadic desert tribes in the Middle East, in an era when accurate record-keeping was problematical at best.

You can read the rest here.

And since we're on the subject, the question of whether or not to take the Bible literally is one of the great dividing forces among Christians. The irony, of course, being that nobody actually literally follows the Bible (except this guy), not even those who claim that literal interpretation is the only way to salvation. Thus the existence of this blog.

I do find it really offensive that fundamentalists have hijacked Christianity. With their behaviour and archaic rhetoric, they not only make the rest of us look bad, but they make Jesus Christ look bad, which really pisses me off. I know that the Bible is a flawed document; I know that it is not literally true; and I know that in order to have the Bible in your life, you really do HAVE to pick and choose which parts of it you're going to follow. But even with all that in mind, I really do believe that the underlying message of Jesus Christ was one of love. Two thousand years after this man lived (let's assume he actually did, even though I do think it's ultimately irrelevant), we still know that the message he spread around for the few short years he was preaching was "love your enemies, treat others as you'd like to be treated, and don't judge people." To me, that is the spirit of Christianity; that is what it means to strive to be Christ-like; and that is why people like Fred Phelps are douche-tards.

Rather than a quote from the Bible, I'm going to leave you with a conversation my grandma had with her sister when my grandpa's wife (on my other side) died.

Grandma: "I don't know what to say to him to make him feel better. Normally I'd say that she's in a better place now, but they're both atheists so he won't believe me."
Grandma's sister: "I don't know what you say to him either, but boy is she in for a surprise because God loves everybody."