No More Mr. Nice Guy!

Who needs the bible?

I recently read two interesting books. One was The Reason-Driven Life, a humanist response to Rick Warren's execrable "The Purpose-Driven Life". TRDL is by Robert Price, a former fundamentalist pastor who overcame his conditioning. He hesitates to call himself an atheist, and has an obviously deep affection for the bible, which he knows far better than most fundamentalists, along with a wide knowledge of other religious traditions and of secular philosophy (and Cthulhu). The book shows Price to be a decent, common-sense person with a ready and sometimes devilish wit, so it's no surprise that the fundamentalism didn't permanently "take".

The other book is The Year of Living Biblically, by A.J. Jacobs, a secular Jew in New York who decides to spend a year following the bible as literally as possible. He lets his beard grow, throws all mixed fibers out of his wardrobe, and scours the scriptures for obscure rules to check off his list (such as whirling a chicken over your head and having it slaughtered to take away your sins). Though he starts out as an agnostic, he forces himself to pray, observe the sabbath and so on, and gradually finds himself slipping into a theistic mindset despite the sometimes bizarre and disturbing behavior he observes among ultra-orthodox Jews and Christian fundamentalists.

My overriding impression on reading this book is that Judaism is an incredibly anal religion, at least if you are at all fastidious about following it to the letter. Shouldn't morality - or rather, ethics (see this post for the distinction I make between the two) be all about how you treat your fellow creatures, rather than how slavishly you follow some ancient, irrational and pointless set of taboos?

But it seems that for many Jews who rigidly follow the hundreds of laws that are given in the bible without explanation, the sheer pointlessness of the laws is the point. Yahweh is testing you, and if you obey the laws without question or complaint, you have passed the test. I would say you had failed, but that's just me. Still, I can't understand why a vast, cosmic, eternal being who created this incredibly complex universe, of which the earth is an insignificant part, would get his nose out of joint if some guy eats a cheeseburger.

Jacobs, to his credit, recognizes that some commandments in the bible are just plain barbaric and should not be followed, e.g. the commandment to beat children. (He tries to discipline his two-year-old with a nerf bar, and gives up after one attempt.) But I started getting annoyed as he devoted more and more effort to finding excuses for the bible. He feels bad about shunning his wife because she is menstruating and therefore "unclean", but rationalizes that he is sitting shiva for a lost potential life. I'm sure that makes his wife feel special!

A disgusting example of the degree to which rationalization can be taken is when religious leaders discuss the notorious passage in Deuteronomy commanding the Israelites to subdue other cities, slaughter all the males and non-virgin females, and take the virgin females as sex slaves. (That is, if the city isn't on Yahweh's list of cities given to the Israelites as an "inheritance"; in those, you just slaughter every living thing.) Some religious teachers simply take the opening words commanding the Israelites to use the ploy of "proclaim[ing] peace unto" the city, focus on the word "peace", pretend the rest of the passage doesn't exist, and claim that this proves the biblical god is a god of peace!

Admittedly, there are places where it's possible to find wisdom, poetry and beauty in the bible - though I would say that in the vast majority of cases, it's more a question of what you read into the bible than what you find in it. I'm sure you could find wisdom in Mein Kampf if you put enough effort into interpreting it and twisting it to say what you want it to say.

Why not simply admit that we are trawling and cherry-picking the bible to find passages that validate what we already believe? Why not acknowledge that we have outgrown the threadbare and moth-eaten security blanket that is the bible? Even Robert Price seems reluctant to make a clean break.

Sure, we can enjoy the bible as a historical document. We can admire the few nuggets of poetry in the slag-heap of savagery, violence and ignorance. But, come on, what kind of person needs to consult some ancient dusty scroll to know that murder, theft, and lying are wrong? The bible has nothing to teach us about morality that we can't figure out for ourselves, and it becomes more irrelevant every year as technological advances pose problems that the bible's authors could never have imagined.

Here's to a lifetime of living a-biblically!