The Secular Case for Reading the Bible
By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country
Slate editor David Plotz, author of the just released Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible, makes a secular case for reading the Bible: that it's essential to understanding the modern world. Plotz joins a growing chorus of nonreligious voices decrying the scourge of biblical illiteracy
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.
Just as an exercise, I thought for a few minutes about the cultural markers in Daniel, a late, short, and not hugely important book. What footprints has it left on our world? First, Daniel is thrown in the "lions' den" and King Belshazzar sees "the writing on the wall." These are two metaphors we can't live without. The "fiery furnace" that Daniel's friends are tossed into is the inspiration for the Fiery Furnaces, a band I listen to. The king rolls a stone in front of the lions' den, sealing in a holy man who won't stay sealed—foreshadowing the stone rolled in front of the tomb of Jesus. Daniel inspired the novel The Book of Daniel and the TV show The Book of Daniel. It's even a touchstone for one of my favorite good-bad movies, A Knight's Tale. That movie's villain belittles hero Heath Ledger by declaring, "You have been weighed, you have been measured, and you have been found wanting"—which is what the writing on the wall told Belshazzar.
. . . .Not to sound like a theocratic crank, but I'm actually shocked that students aren't compelled to read huge chunks of the Bible in high school and college, the way they must read Shakespeare or the Constitution or Mark Twain.
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God knows yo minds
in facts He twist yo mind in any way He wants and no explation can take away His way of doing things
people how will never understand the bible are those with bad intentions because the one who explains it is the Holyspirit.a person in his own potential will never bring the meaning out clearly because the author is minised.
by God twisting some minds is to protect the power in His word, THE BIBLE.
Read it, but don't stop there
I disagree heartily with many of Plotz's claims about the significance of the Bible. It most certainly is not "the first source of everything". Much of the tales in the old testament are rehashings of tales that came before, including the flood story. Our first written laws (that we know of) came from the Sumerians. Moral codes have existed long before anyone thought of the name Yahweh.
So yes, ignorance of this book is bad, especially for those of you who profess to subscribe to its teachings, but don't also be ignorant of the rest of human history, of what came before the Bible, and what humanity was thinking and doing elsewhere in the world.
It would be great if there could be an objective study of the Bible in school, preferably a comparative study which would include other great "holy" books. Unfortunately, there's just too much temptation for such a class to be exploited by some educators as a chance to proselytize, and of course there are the parents who would object to their precious snowflakes being exposed to "heathen, devil beliefs".
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The Importance of Studying the Bible
It was not made clear just what is this one area of agreement between the diverse authors of the books that ended up selected to be included in which ever version of the Bible Dr. Shade is discussing.
I agree with Brad that the Bible sells lots of copies, and has lots given away. It still remains one of the least well read and understood of all books. It is more "read into" than genuinely read and studied. Many read their cultural, political, theological prejudices into the texts of the various books of their Bible.
Jeff draws a false contrast between reading for "literary value" and reading for "truths." In fact, I believe that if more people applied the skills of reading other classic texts--literary and otherwise--to the study of their Bibles, they would come a lot closer to discovering the truths to be found in those Bibles. By the way, it was well known long before the Torah was written that "it's wrong to murder, lie, cheat, steal." The problems have to do with that "etc.", which is where some less defensible notions show up.
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