Sacred Writings - Quo Vadis?

© 1997 Mike Strong

So Many Bright Folk Seem to Have Burned-Up Brain Cells When it Comes to Scriptures

The way we treat scriptures differently from other works on which we base our lives drives me right up a tree. People whose judgement I respect, perfectly sensible and very intelligent people, good reasoners, people who demand evidence of verity and quality when purchasing a car lose all sense when reading scriptures. I've been no exception. To understand what we are failing to see we should remove these writings from their sacred wrappings. We need to imagine these stories as if they were in today's news about another country or our local shopping mall.

To really listen to them we need to read these writings as if we were editors or literary scholars and as if these works had just been handed to us by an unknown local author. Suddenly we can see content and structure and voice where before we saw only what we remembered we were supposed to see - based on expectations of good.

How many times have we heard "read the Bible" as a mantra meaning "blank check which magically solves all." There is seldom ever a caution regarding content. Yet there are numerous uncritical stories of what heroes did and which, by implication, we should take as examples, which are horrific and just plain twisted. I don't mean the stories about heroes doing bad and then repenting.

Even when people memorize passages the story content is passed over again and again. It is a good thing we don't "follow the bible" more. Our own morals are often superior to what we find presented as examples. Try deciding what you think of various stories while "black-boxing" the source of each story. Take stories from the bible and imagine that they had just happened in your local shopping mall. What would you think of them now? Or take stories (of any kind) which are in today's news and ask yourself whether you would think approvingly if you changed their setting and said, "This is from the bible."

If you saw Abraham in the shopping mall raising his arm to kill his son, don't you think you would try to stop him? Wouldn't you call him a bum, a creep, and more? Don't you think you would want him put away so deep in a cell he'd never see daylight? Do you really think that if your neighbor said God told him to kill his kid you'd say, "Oh how wonderful!" You mean you wouldn't at least call 911 and get the cops and child protective services after such a bum? You wouldn't get the kid out of there as fast as you could?

Do you really believe that it was okay for the Israelites to take over the Canaanites and make them servants, slaves, etc. - to wipe them out - all because they were supposedly descended from the son of Noah who, on seeing his father passed out drunk and naked decided to laugh at him. Since when is it okay to punish future generations for deeds of forefathers? (What kind of people would do that?)

Even if that were acceptable, isn't this punishment way over the top? Does Noah bear no responsibility for his personal behaviour? A little derision and let it go, assuming the derisive incident ever happened. True there is the bit about human (including infant) sacrifices but as horrible as that is it doesn't seem all that different from other nastiness of the time. Indeed, I somehow wonder whether that was added in to build up the charge against them.

Doesn't this sound a lot more like a BS excuse that someone dreamt up to justify a horrendous crime? They did wipe out the Canaanites whose only (real) crime does seem to have been that they already lived where the Israelites wanted to live. Pretty much like "Manifest Destiny." Would genocide (or "merely" ethnic cleansing) be too difficult a term? If they already conquered the place couldn't they just outlaw the practice of human sacrifice? Like they really had to kill the entire population of Canaanites? I guess if you kill all the people they will never have to be killed in human sacrifices. Nothing like pre-emptive killing of a whole population to stop a few sacrifices. Come on, use the same BS detectors you use for every thing else.

In any case don't forget who is writing this history, not the Canaanites. But there is a lot of mention of them. We just don't have the Canaanite version of the story. Same for the Philistines. Same for a variety of folks who get villianized in these writings. We need to be suspicious of any such accounts whether written as journalism, propaganda or scripture.

To really study these works don't just read and re-read current translations in a bible class. You need to go back to histories of these documents. There are outright fabrications in what so many insist is the unaltered word of God. In the Pauline writings a passage in Corinthians has been used for centuries to suppress women's voice in Christian churches (still is). This is in a passage about everybody taking turns when talking in tongues so that all can be understood (Don't we have this admonition in every grade school class? Are we really holding on to such a great pearl of wisdom for 2,000 years?). Suddenly, the subject diverts to say that women should wear headgear and should not speak up in church. The record of documents does not show the passage about women in the earliest-known pieces. This was added later. For this passage alone Paul has been seen as anti-women.

But a letter in Romans shows that Paul himself doesn't seem to have real problems with women in authority positions in his congregations. At the end of Romans he sends a letter of high recommendation with a woman named Phoebe who is identified as a deaconess. This biblical inconsistency is another clue that the Corinthian document represents outright fraud by using someone else's name on a document to sneak in your own personal agenda. Not uncommon in those times.

For that matter this technique is still used. Most commonly this is used when someone picks out (isolates from context) a passage from their (Christian, Jewish, Muslim, any etc.) scriptures to support an argument they wish to make. An argument they obviously don't have enough confidence in without claiming a higher authority.

The misrepresentation in Corinthians would be bad enough by itself but it is an outrage when one realizes the use and the effect of this passage on women for centuries. Very, very ugly. And what about the moral integrity of biblical scholars who know the record of such documents but who allow the later addition to remain in current texts?

Or how about this story? Imagine this as one of those mindless attack movies. A man traveling with his wife stops at a small town and is put upon by a gang which wants to have sex with him. This man diverts the gang by offering them his wife who subsequently dies as a result of rape and other abuse all night long. This husband doesn't bother to do anything until the next morning when he comes out of the front door to find the wife he sent out to be raped. She's dead and he decides that this means he has been insulted. So he sends for his friends, several groups of them.

In sending for his friends he wants them to realize how he has been insulted so he chops his wife into pieces, and sends these pieces, one piece for each group, to the friends. The friends gather together and rip apart the small town in which the gang resides, killing all the males and unmarriagable females, keeping the women they want for themselves, as wives.

I do hope this sounds twisted to you. It is the story in Judges 19. I had read this previously and passed right over the content until it was pointed out to me in a book by Gina Cerminara. When alerted to the story line I was amazed at what I had missed. Note, this story is not about a someone identified as a bum of the bible. This is one of the hero good guys. His actions are written about as commendable. Or in other words, this might well be an example to follow.

By the way, before he offers his own wife to the gang to be raped the owner of the house in which this man is staying offers his own virgin daughter to the gang for rape because he (the house holder) doesn't want to be inhospitable to the traveler. It is hard to imagine how anyone in such a culture can claim they value women. [Mar 2002: But then persons who can claim that porta-prisons (burkas) represent freedom and respect are screwed up anyway. Beats keeping her in prison cell, only allowed to look out of a slit in the door. Much better to put her in a PPPC (personal portable prison cell) where she can look out of a slit in the cloth.]

Also note that the owner of the house had offered a meal and a place to stay for the night to the man and his wife. One assumes that in wiping out this small town as retribution for insulting the man by raping his wife and leaving her to die that all the good people were wiped out as well. That is certainly the indication we are given.

That's barely even a starter. It is a better thing we don't follow this book all that well and that we override really knowing what is here in favor of our own expectations of right and wrong.

We should not limit our readings to any particular translation or to study classes within any particular congregation or religion. How would you handle a review of any literary material? Would you not compare it to other versions of the document? Would you not check for internal consistency and structure? If you were reviewing another book which changed life for hundreds of millions of people such as Das Kapital would you not do research on the conditions at the time, social, political, industrial and more? Would you not look into the life of Karl Marx? How did this book fit into the period when it was written? How was it a reaction to events and how did the life of the author mold the content? For whom was the author writing?

If you studied Das Kapital with members of the American communist party you would certainly get a different picture of it than if you studied the book under the guidance of an FBI agent or a Catholic priest or a philosophy professor. Someone raised in a communist country and someone raised in the USA would read the book differently. If you studied it in the original German (mid to late 1800's) or in a translation various passages would be different.

If you value your life and your conduct why would you let someone else tell you 1) this is the good book to follow 2) you may not question anything in in the book 3) what we tell you about what is in the book is what is right regardless of how you may read it.

If the Oklahoma bombing were to be reset as a biblical story would you think all those deaths were wonderful? That those people deserved what happened to them? Think it is strange? There are a lot of massacre stories in the bible. We are usually told how the victims deserved it because they were sinning. Sounds not unlike a militia diatribe. Or, from yet another school, we hear explanations such as "We have to understand this metaphysically." Tell that to the victims of those massacres so many centuries ago. It wasn't meta-anything for them. It is just conveniently distant in time and place for most of us.

[NOTE: Mar 2002 - The paragraph above struck me, looking again at this piece. I haven't looked at it since 1997. Remember what Pat Robertson said immediately after 9-11 about why the World Trade Center was allowed - by God - to be attacked? I don't remember anyone ascribing the Oklahoma bombing to moral decrepitude in life style. I just imagined it (as unimaginable), in the paragraph above, as a way of comparing the excuses invented for massacres in the Bible. But now we have a real-life TV-to-the-nation example. Typical shoot-from-the-hip vomit-mouthing from these sorts. The usual suspects: ho-mo-sex-uals, divorces, abortions, etcetera, True, he recanted very quickly, but only after realizing what an idiot he was for voicing those thoughts openly on the air. This, in turn reminds meof the recent revelations about Richard Nixon and Billie Graham privately, in the White House, talking about those Jews (the usual Jewish control and Jewish conspiracy type of stuff). Downright creepy.]

I remember a priest in Catholic school actually telling us that we shouldn't have much of anything to do with the Lutherans down the road (many of us walked by the Lutheran school on the way to and from school). If a Lutheran said anything about religion which made sense to us and it didn't happen to agree with the Catholic catechism (book of instruction) then whatever was said was from the devil. I call that mind control, not only for those persons he wanted to teach but for himself that he could actually say that without feeling a need to vomit. In past centuries some publishers of bibles were burned at the stake for making bibles available to a wider range of people than the church's clergy.

[Mar 2002: Moral: If it makes sense and it is not what you have been taught, you know it is the DEVIL! Nothing like a little mainstream mind control. Demons are convenient.]

To revere writing for no better reason than the identification of its source is playing a version of Simon Says. As far as I am concerned if a writing isn't good enough to stand on its own then it isn't good enough. And if a piece is wonderful it shouldn't need to be someone's sacred writing in order to be revered. Nor should it be old to be revered. Good writing, fine ideas and spiritual experiences didn't stop centuries ago. Unless you wish to believe that God is a fossil. Or that God just plain stopped.

Then there are the translation problems. All translations carry errors. The Latin root of the word comes from a word meaning traitor. Language changes across the years and across the miles. English English is not the same as American English or Australian English. A lift in England means an elevator, not a shoe insert. A fag in England is a cigarette butt, not a scathing term for gay. Often it is tough enough to get meaning straight between two people who are talking fact to face with each other and who are repeating what they hear so that they can be corrected by the original speaker. The bible is a set of translations written down after many many years of stories handed down by word of mouth. The versions and what material is considered acceptable are not the same for all denominations.

Tons of protestants, especially fundamental ones, swear by the King James Version as the only right bible. I've heard clergy say they have heard some folks declare that "If King James English was good enough for Christ it is good enough for me." Dumb! Especially since English didn't exist 2,000 years ago. It is also dumb because this is the English (in 1611) of Shakespeare's day. Have you ever read one of the glossaries in the back of a Shakespeare play? The number of words you would never think to look up because they are words we use today but which have different, opposite or totally unrelated meanings is alarming. It means that you can't read English written in 1611 and expect to really know what you are reading or to even recognize for certain which words you don't know the meanings for. And of course our knowledge about biblical texts has increased since 1611.

[Mar 2002: Note for anti-gay types: This bible, so often used to justify homophobia was commissioned by a king who was among the gayer of England's gay kings! James I of England - who was also James VI of Scotland, son of Mary, queen of Scots who was Elizabeth I's nuisance cousin but nonetheless was appointed by Elizabeth to succeed her - was big believer in the divine right of kings - supporter of numerous young males of the moment and a particular adorer of George Villiers, Earl of Buckingham, who he once wrote to as "sweet child and wife" - nonetheless did his royal duty in 22 years and sired nine kids with his wife Anne of Denmark. What would the 700 Club think of all that!]

If you had a friend who sometimes spoke clearly and sometimes mumbled, who sometimes told marvelous stories and at other times horrible ones, who sometimes spoke the truth and sometimes lied and you were never sure about which was which and when, would you want to rely on that person for advice, or for accurate stories or for inspiration? How long would you list this person as your friend?

Try this analogy. Imagine that you are the new owner of a grocery store. After checking with other store owners you decide to get your food from the most used, most popular distributor. Almost everyone you know and respect recommends this particular distributor. After a few months of food deliveries you begin to notice that some of the food is rotten or wilted or damaged or coated with poisonous chemicals. In a few cases it is always food from the same growers or packagers. You complain but are told there is nothing wrong with the food. You just need to be more accepting of the deliveries. For that matter most of your customers say nothing when they purchase the bad food. In most cases they even praise the worst of the food.

In a real grocery store how many customers would either stop coming or would complain about the food. How long do you think this distributor would keep the contract? Let's say that you try several other distributors in succession. Each have somewhat different lines of food products but in the end they have the same problems accompanied by the same claim that everything is always good. When you corner them about the problems they say, "You should be more accepting of what we deliver to your store."

How long before you might decide to do your own purchasing or even your own farming and packaging in order to assure yourself that the best products, the ones you feel you can personally stand behind, are on your shelves?