One can argue that the Bible is a good book. But it’s not good all the way through.
We can
reject the Bible as a moral code because its laws are numerous, often silly,
and often outdated. Long lists of “crimes” requiring the death penalty, to
include the incredibly cruel punishment of death by stoning: one crime even
requires the stoning execution of a wild bull, which clearly was not ordered by
anybody who ever tried to do it. Long lists of food restrictions including ham,
enjoyed today by many Christian families and churches. Long lists of
requirements for the pampering of priests, to including the golden glory of
their synagogues and the waistline-busting list of meats which must be
sacrificed for the priest. No interest on loans, no skyscrapers, no tattoos, no
trimming of sideburns, no blended fibers, no gay sex, few rights for women,
circumcision for all men. Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy are regularly
violated by Christians every day.
We can reject the Bible as a moral code because nobody even
knows where the damn thing came from. First of all, even if you believe in
revelation, “divine revelation” is only revelation to the man receiving the
revelation: to everyone else, it’s just hearsay, or hallucination if you
prefer. Second, most of the Bible can’t be divine revelation: a lot of it
involves reporting on earthly history, Aesop-like fables and proverbs, poems,
songs, a little pornography (see Song of Songs) and sheer weirdness (see
Revelation). None of which is revelation from any divine source: clearly man-made.
And all of the Bible was written down by anonymous sources and adulterated with
a thousand changes, errors, interpretations, translations, contradictions,
human choices: not only do religious leaders argue about what it all means,
they can’t even agree on what should be in the Bible, or what they mean when
they call the Bible “infallible”. Is it infallible just on religious doctrine,
or on science and law too?
We can reject the Bible as a moral code because the people
who are identified in the Bible as the leaders of the faith are often the most
morally repellent of all. Jehovah himself, jealous and paranoid, regularly
murdering a man or a city or all of mankind, just because he didn’t get enough
love to suit him, and then killing his own son to drive the point home. Joshua
committing genocide, ethnic cleansing and mass rape with Jehovah’s approval.
Abraham prostituting his wife to save his life, and Lot doing the same with his
daughters, who later got Lot drunk and seduced him. Abraham and Jephtha
planning infanticide. Solomon writing Song of Songs which is essentially
pornography. David arranging the killing of his mistress’ husband. A priest giving his concubine
to a gang which raped her until she died, and then cutting up her body.
Slavery, senseless cruelty, intolerance, racism, masturbation, voyeurism,
adultery, bestiality, polygamy.
This
was in time followed by centuries of celibate priests lecturing us on what
normal sex is while raping altar boys and molesting their “housekeepers”. And
along the way murdering and torturing thousands who were suspected of wavering
in their faith, or accused of trying to demonstrate that man is an animal and
the earth is a satellite. Three thousand years of moral crimes committed by men
holding Bibles in their hands. And above all, the terrible moral crime of
teaching fear, hate and ignorance to a hundred generations of children. Again wielding
the Bible as the instrument of torture.
All of these reasons to view the moral precepts of the Bible with suspicion suffice on their own. But we don’t need to rely on such logic. Because even the people who founded Christianity told us not to follow the Bible.
After
the crucifixion, the men who build the Christian church, Peter and Paul and the
others, did the usual apostolic stuff: preaching, working miracles, arguing
with priests, getting thrown in jail over and over. But the first important
thing they did, when they got together to discuss what Christianity meant, was
to declare that they would not require followers to go back to the old Jewish
Bible and follow those rules, even though they were Jews by birth. They
realized that Mosaic law could no longer be interpreted literally as the will
of God which must be obeyed without exception: those rules were the laws of man,
and other men could decide for themselves whether they were valid, which is
exactly what Peter and Paul did.
Paul
even criticized Peter when he wavered on this point. Peter, under the influence
of the old hardliners, refused at one point to eat with uncircumcised Gentiles
because it would anger Jews, but Paul argued that Peter shouldn’t reject people
for ignoring a Biblical code which was, by their lights, no longer valid. Paul
accepted that some people would follow Mosaic law and even followed it himself
sometimes, but did not want anyone coerced into it, or punished for violating
it.
In
fact, the main story of the birth of Christianity, the Acts of the Apostles, is
dominated by a single plot line: Paul’s endless clashes with Jewish leaders
over doctrine, observance and ministry. The first great chapter in Christianity
is the story of the founders of the faith casting off ancient Biblical law and
squabbling with the defenders of that law. When Paul spoke before the Jews and
the occupying Romans in Jerusalem, he specifically referred to his past life as
a vigorous enforcer of Jewish law, and to his subsequent conversion and
abandonment of that life, which he implied was sinful.
Not
only did the founders criticize overzealous adherence to religious law, they
also criticized organized religion, just as Jesus himself did throughout his
ministry. Something that the leaders of today’s churches don’t like to
emphasize.
When
Peter and Paul went beyond the Holy Land to spread the word, they preached what
Jesus preached: love one another. They were not tramping all across the
Mediterranean basin demanding that the Greeks and Romans circumcise themselves,
give up ham and shrimp, and grow side curls. In part this was because they knew
the locals would beat the hell out of them. They left Mosaic doctrine behind in
Jerusalem and preached Jesus instead. Particularly, they did not want their
flocks across the ancient world divided into circumcised and uncircumcised,
pork and not pork. And they didn’t want earthly “referees” standing between the
devout and the Almighty.
When
the founders weren’t preaching, they were writing letters to their churches
across the Roman Empire. Again, they knew that the church leaders in Greece and
Asia Minor would laugh at the notion of being asked to follow dozens and dozens
of Jewish rules unfamiliar to anyone outside the Holy Land. So instead the
Christian founders wrote to the churches that Christians should stick to the
very basic precepts such as avoiding sexual immorality, which they didn’t even
bother to define.
The
founders of Christianity let people use their own judgment and follow a lot of
local customs, just as the Romans very wisely did when they conquered
territory. The Jewish priests of the day should have been thanking their lucky
stars that the ruling Romans weren’t as rigid about religion as the priests
were, because if the Romans had been that rigid, they would have killed the
priests and eradicated Judaism forever. Actually the Romans did wipe out
Jerusalem and the Second Temple a decade after Paul left the city for the last
time, in response to a local rebellion rooted partly in religious pigheadedness
by Jewish zealots. Paul would have been among the first to warn Jewish
religious leaders not to go down that dangerous path: adhering rigidly to any
doctrine without any thought or reflection is the short road to disaster.
Catholics,
Anglicans and Lutherans all argue that only some of the Bible is really God’s
law. Even Christ’s teachings are in question. Over the
centuries Christian leaders have asserted that even Christ’s words shouldn’t
always be obeyed literally. Some argue that Jesus was just exaggerating in some
of his admonitions, or that his suggestions were only general guidelines, or
that it was okay to modify his actual words, or that the New Testament
contradicts itself on some points, or that Jesus made those rules only because he
thought the world was going to end very soon, or that it was sufficient merely
to emulate Jesus’ attitude, or to obey Jesus only if you wanted to go beyond
mere salvation to attain perfection, or to apply his precepts only on spiritual
matters (that according to Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism). Some
argue that Jesus knew his rules were impossible to follow, which would lead to
sin, repentance, and stronger faith; others say that keeping Jesus’ rules
perfectly is impossible in an imperfect world, but adhering to that standard
would be possible in a better future. Paul himself, founder of Christianity,
not only said we could ignore ancient Jewish law: he also indicated that Jesus' words were not sacrosanct. In First Corinthians verse 7
he contrasts his own views on divorce, from those of Jesus. So there you have
Paul and Luther, the founder of Christianity and the founder of Protestantism, saying that even
Jesus’ own words cannot be taken literally. Jesus himself taught many of his
lessons in non-literal parables, and gave advice which in literal terms would be
insane or suicidal: if you see something tempting, pluck out your eye, let your
attackers hit you twice in the face, etc; Jesus clearly never intended his
words to be followed literally, as law.
In other words, the Christians of today who insist that their faith and their Bible force them to reject abortion and homosexuality as immoral are contradicting the very people who founded their religion. The founders said “don’t follow the Bible”. Or rather, don’t cling bitterly to it. That’s the stance which the founders chose for their new faith, that’s what they told the keepers of the old faith, and that’s what they told the Roman world.
Remember all this when evangelicals fulminate about
abortion and gays, and remember also that even the Bible is unclear on these
issues anyway. On the abortion issue, the Bible asserts repeatedly that a fetus
is not considered a human life with the same rights as a living person, that
God does sometimes allow the killing of fetuses, newborns and pregnant women,
and that God sometimes causes abortions himself – read the book of Numbers.
Something which Christian conservatives neatly leave out, when they are
carefully cherry-picking their Bible quotes.
Likewise the evangelical argument against homosexuality
is founded on two fallacies. First, they refer to Leviticus, which is part of
the Mosaic law which the founders of Christianity said we shouldn’t even be
following anymore. Second, they refer to Bible passages which they claim to be
condemnations of homosexuality, but which don’t really say what they’re
claiming, or are in dispute: the story of Sodom, and passages from Matthew,
Acts, Romans and Corinthians. Meanwhile – more cherry-picking -- evangelicals neatly ignore the story of Ruth
and Naomi, and the story of David and Jonathan, the love that surpasses the
love of women. This is why the Presbyterians, Lutherans, Congregationalists,
Episcopalians and Methodists are all helping fight for LGBT equality.
The dirty secret is that evangelicals who cite the Bible don't actually read the Bible very carefully. So to beat them in an argument, just be smarter and better-informed than they are. And how hard can that be?
PS,
just in case you forgot why this is relevant. Mississippi, led by these
Bible-misquoting evangelicals, is slated to become abortion-free in about a
month. Unless a federal court intervenes, the state’s last abortion clinic will
be forced to close its doors, in accordance with a state law requiring doctors
to apply for approvals which everyone knew were never going to be granted. This
effort works in parallel with efforts in other red states to illegally overturn
Roe v Wade by regulating abortion providers into submission and driving them
out of business. When Republicans are allowed to run amok with their fallacies
and Biblical bullcrap, real people get hurt.
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