Blogging the Bible: What happens when an ignoramus reads the Good Book?

[diana]

This has been out there a while, as you can see by the blog entry dates, but for those who weren't aware of it, this is an excellent read (http://www.slate.com/id/2141050/).

David Plotz, an editor for Slate and self-proclaimed unobservant Jew, decided to read the bible cover to cover to find out what happened when he read every word of the book on which his religion is based. His last entry in the series was 3 Mar 09 (http://www.slate.com/id/2212616/), where he talks about the book which came of his journey. I assume the book is based almost entirely upon what can be read in its entirety in his blogs. He's funny, insightful, genuinely ignorant of much of what is in the bible, and makes the sort of interesting connections only the person who is ignorant of the bible stories can make.

This blog is well worth your time.

d

[PostMortem]

I hadn't heard about it before, sounds great. Thanks!

[Garnet]

Interesting.

These two paragraphs really struck a chord with me and paralleled my own experience in reading the Bible from front to back:

And something like that happened to me five, 10, 50 times a day when I was Bible-reading. You can't get through a chapter of the Bible, even in the most obscure book, without encountering a phrase, a name, a character, or an idea that has come down to us 3,000 years later. The Bible is the first source of everything from the smallest plot twists (the dummy David's wife places in the bed to fool assassins) to the most fundamental ideas about morality (the Levitical prohibition of homosexuality that still shapes our politics, for example) to our grandest notions of law and justice. It was a joyful shock to me when I opened the Book of Amos and read the words that crowned Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

After reading about the genocides, the plagues, the murders, the mass enslavements, the ruthless vengeance for minor sins (or none at all), and all that smiting—every bit of it directly performed, authorized, or approved by God—I can only conclude that the God of the Hebrew Bible, if He existed, was awful, cruel, and capricious. He gives us moments of beauty—such sublime beauty and grace!—but taken as a whole, He is no God I want to obey and no God I can love.

[DMB]

Not many people read the bible. If you try ploughing through it you realise why. I like this anecdote about Randolph Churchill (Winston's son). It is from a letter written by Evelyn Waugh during WW2 when he shared quarters with Randolph.

In the hope of keeping him quiet for a few hours Freddy & I have bet Randolph £20 that he cannot read the whole Bible in a fortnight. It would have been worth it at the price. Unhappily it has not had the result we hoped. He has never read any of it before and is hideously excited; keeps reading quotations aloud "I say I bet you didn't know this came in the Bible 'bring down my grey hairs in sorrow to the grave'" or merely slapping his side & chortling "God, isn't God a shit!"

[diana]

Great quote, Diana. :) Thanks for posting it.

Garnet,

I also identified with those quotes. Here's my favorite of his from that blog posting, though:

When I complain to religious friends about how much He dismays me, I usually get one of two responses. Christians say: Well, yes, but this is all setup for the New Testament. Reading only the Old Testament is like leaving halfway through the movie. I'm missing all the redemption. If I want to find the grace and forgiveness and wonder, I have to read and believe in the story of Jesus Christ, which explains and redeems all. But that doesn't work for me. I'm a Jew. I don't, and can't, believe that Christ died for my sins. And even if he did, I still don't think that would wash away God's crimes in the Old Testament. (emphasis mine) Amen.

d

[Garnet]

That struck a chord with me too, diana. No matter how much I tried, I never really could feel much but horror at the sacrifice of Jesus. It's always seemed so primitive, brutal and unnecessary to me. Can you imagine what kind of mental discord that set up when I was trying really, really, really hard to be a believer?

[DMB]

The idea of sacrifice throughout the bible is horrible. I hate the Abraham and Isaac story. And it's supposed to be OK because a ram was substituted at the last minute for Isaac. But what about the poor bloody ram? And why does this god need so many sacrifices?

[Christina]

Not that I'm trying to criticize anyone for taking a while, but that cruelty was what closed my mind against it all as a child. It was too baffling and terrifying. I was such a wimp that I wasn't allowed to watch scary movies but in school I was learning about genocide and the slaughter of children and sacrificing your children and taught to glorify and pray to the one responsible for it. How did the rest of you reconcile that as children before you deconverted?

[Garnet]

That stuff was never really talked about when I was young. I didn't know the story of Abraham and Isaac until I read the Bible as an adult. Ditto for the genocides. Oh, Joshua's conquests were touched upon, but only in the best of lights and I never got the sense of the full on slaughter until I read the Bible itself.

ETA: Of course, I wasn't immersed in it either. My parents didn't go to church or make me go. I didn't have my conversion experience until I was in my early 20s and even then, it didn't last very long. I began asking uncomfortable questions in my very first church and in fact, got shunned for them. I was only able to maintain the facade for about 4 years.

[Christina]

They never dwelled on it too much other than Abraham. The smitings were never described in detail other than Sodom and Gomorrah but they never mentioned all the sex part of that. It wasn't hard to see that he was wiping out whole tribes at a time, though. We never did hear what happened to Noah and his kids. Of course when Pharaohs did it, it was evil. They spent a lot of time telling us about when they killed babies. The weirdest part was that no one ever acknowledged that the violence might scare us and needed to be put in some context we could grasp.

[diana]

Not that I'm trying to criticize anyone for taking a while, but that cruelty was what closed my mind against it all as a child. It was too baffling and terrifying. I was such a wimp that I wasn't allowed to watch scary movies but in school I was learning about genocide and the slaughter of children and sacrificing your children and taught to glorify and pray to the one responsible for it. How did the rest of you reconcile that as children before you deconverted?I don't know how to make this make sense to someone not raised in a cultish sect, but I'll try.

The only people with answers worth entertaining were my immediate family and the members of my congregation. I was not exposed to any other ideas intentionally; when it happened accidentally--like at school, or over the radio (we didn't own a television until the indoctrination was complete)--the people bearing those other ideas were dismissed. Their ideas, at the same time, were dismissed as silly and worldly.

The Christians who raised me never acknowledged that anyone who was slaughtered in the OT was innocent. Even with the flood, the fact that infants who couldn't possibly have done anything to sin against God was overlooked. The bible says "the whole world was wicked," so--by gosh--it was. End of discussion.

I basically grew up assuming that these stories made sense to adults and they would therefore make sense to me someday. Think of it as "faith on credit."

d

[Garnet]

They never dwelled on it too much other than Abraham. The smitings were never described in detail other than Sodom and Gomorrah but they never mentioned all the sex part of that. It wasn't hard to see that he was wiping out whole tribes at a time, though. We never did hear what happened to Noah and his kids. Of course when Pharaohs did it, it was evil. They spent a lot of time telling us about when they killed babies. The weirdest part was that no one ever acknowledged that the violence might scare us and needed to be put in some context we could grasp.



Yeah. I wasn't allowed to watch the movie "Moses" with Charlton Heston until I was well into my teens. My parents thought the slaughter of the first born was inappropriate for young children. Because I was prone to screaming nightmares, my parents were very particular about what I could watch. So, I may not have been as exposed as the other kids in my family and amongst my friends.

It's funny, though, they never really limited what I could read. But then, I tended to natrually shy away from stuff that scared me.

[DMB]

I laughed myself silly when I saw that film. The parting of the Red Sea was ludicrous. They'd do it better now with CGI.

[Christina]

I don't know how to make this make sense to someone not raised in a cultish sect, but I'll try.

The only people with answers worth entertaining were my immediate family and the members of my congregation. I was not exposed to any other ideas intentionally; when it happened accidentally--like at school, or over the radio (we didn't own a television until the indoctrination was complete)--the people bearing those other ideas were dismissed. Their ideas, at the same time, were dismissed as silly and worldly.

The Christians who raised me never acknowledged that anyone who was slaughtered in the OT was innocent. Even with the flood, the fact that infants who couldn't possibly have done anything to sin against God was overlooked. The bible says "the whole world was wicked," so--by gosh--it was. End of discussion.


I don't think that I could have grasped the cult mentality until I got to know some of the people from the Strong City cult and spoke with the young women that had been raised in it. The only image they had of the outside world was the portrayal of evil and misery that had been described to them. It didn't seem possible to them that the leader and their parents were wrong.

The concept of original sin never made sense to me. I could understand god being mad at Adam and Eve, but having the rest of us be born with some nasty sin that we had to work off didn't seem like a logical solution. If he was god he could have just nipped that talking back stuff right in the bud from the start. Statements like "mankind was evil" would make me wonder "all of them?" Catholicism was big on "mysteries". Everything could be explained that way.

I was a very literal child and allegory was wasted on me. I thought that the Tower of Babel story was pretty cool and that it would be funny for everyone to start talking in strange languages all at once around this big building. That was early on in the bible stories before I figured out that god doesn't ever laugh.

[diana]

I don't think that I could have grasped the cult mentality until I got to know some of the people from the Strong City cult and spoke with the young women that had been raised in it. The only image they had of the outside world was the portrayal of evil and misery that had been described to them. It didn't seem possible to them that the leader and their parents were wrong.Yep. Like that. :)

I was a very literal child and allegory was wasted on me. I thought that the Tower of Babel story was a pretty cool and that it would be funny for everyone to start talking in strange languages all at once around this big building. That was early on in the bible stories before I figured out that god doesn't ever laugh.Strange you should mention it, but none of it was taught to me as allegory. It was all literal and infallible, which meant its meaning was far more obvious and made digesting the stories that much more difficult. I'm convinced that if it had been taught to me as allegory, I wouldn't have had nearly the same difficulty with it.

I do believe the stories were meant as allegory, actually. They seem to make sense as your standard myths with embedded truths which are more important that literal truth.

d

[Christina]

I think that a bit later I cynically decided that they had to explain why all these descendants of Adam and Eve spoke different languages so they skipped a few thousand years of begats and migrations and did it all at once. The lack of continuity bothered me. Maybe it's clear when you read the bible but our stories jumped from Adam and Eve to Abraham to Noah fast. It gave you the sense that there were only about 15 families in the whole world.

[DMB]

Has anyone any idea of where the flood myth came from? Could it have been based on a catastrophic local flood?

[Garnet]

Has anyone any idea of where the flood myth came from? Could it have been based on a catastrophic local flood?

There's been some really interesting stuff about this. Almost every culture has some form or another of a flood myth. See this article in Talk Origins:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/flood-myths.html

I can't recall where I read it and I can't find the blasted thing now, but I did read quite a bit of support for the flood myths originating from disastrous local floods.

[David B]

Has anyone any idea of where the flood myth came from? Could it have been based on a catastrophic local flood?

It could have been based on folk memories of a composite of many local floods.

Tsunamis - big ones - are not unknown in the Med, nor floods. But a folk memory of the flooding of the Black Sea area as sea level rose after the ice age seems intuitively attractive as a part of it. It's pretty much established that that happened.

David

[diana]

Has anyone any idea of where the flood myth came from? Could it have been based on a catastrophic local flood?I always thought it was, like the creation story, based upon the Epic of Gilgamesh. (Wasn't the Pentateuch set to paper after the Hebrews were released from the Babylonian captivity? I seem to remember reading that somewhere.)

d

[DMB]

Yes, there is a lot of agreement that the Noachian flood myth came from Gilgamesh, but that flood story had to have an origin itself.

[His Noodly Appendage]

Has there ever been a more perfect phrase than "hideously excited"?

[DMB]

Old Evelyn had a neat turn of phrase.