Why
not? What’s so great about it?
First
of all let’s remember that the Bible doesn’t work as history or science: the
creation story, the Garden of Eden, the flood, Abraham the would-be child
killer, the enslavement of the Israelites and the escape across Sinai where
they received God’s commandments, Joshua’s genocide in the Holy Land, God
punishing the Israelites when they disobeyed the Torah, Jesus rising from the
grave and flying off into outer space….are all lies. Never happened.
The
Bible doesn’t work as a moral guide: God approves genocide, ethnic
cleansing, killing your children and/or selling them into slavery, subjugating
women, killing gays, and the absurdly widespread use of the death penalty.
God’s followers commit murder, bigamy, adultery, incest, rape, theft, fraud.
And the Song of Songs is pure porn.
The
Bible doesn’t help in the quest for wisdom: it says specifically that the path
to wisdom is…obedience. The lesson it teaches is that even if you obey God’s
absurdly arbitrary and capricious laws, he is still going to screw you over and
kill for fun. The few worthwhile bits of wisdom in the Sermon on the Mount are
the bits that today’s Christians do their level best to ignore, all that hippie
commie stuff about loving your neighbor, meekness, tolerance, forgiveness,
caring for the poor and the sick. The hell with that!
It
doesn’t work as fable: many of the little lessons it teaches are about God’s
whimsical cruelty. Occasionally they teach a neat lesson about David taking on
Goliath or the good Samaritan, but those are few and very far between.
It
doesn’t work as prophecy: the Old Testament promises over and over that God
will watch over the chosen people, and time and again they are invaded,
slaughtered, scattered to the four winds. A key message in the New Testament
was that everybody needed to get ready because God was going to establish his
kingdom on earth within a man’s lifetime...two thousand years ago. Tick tock,
tick tock.
It
has few good characters, because most of them are just people waiting for God
to punish them, like hogs in a slaughter pen. And few of them are sympathetic,
because as a group they are not very nice people: David arranging for a
romantic rival to be killed, a number of “Bible heroes” handing over their
female relatives to be raped or killed, Jacob deceiving his father and brother,
the endless whining of Jeremiah. And of course the most unpleasant character in
all fiction, Jehovah himself.
It’s
not even well-written: it has plot holes and logical leaps, and it is often
boring. Jeremiah and Isaiah should not be read while operating machinery. It’s
so badly written that artists as varied as Dante, Milton and Andrew Lloyd
Webber have pulled out their Bibles and tried to rewrite the stories so that
they’re actually, you know, good. And invariably the only way to make the
Bible good is to turn the whole story on its head: in Jesus Christ Superstar
the most interesting character in Judas, and in Milton the most fascinating
character is Satan.
It
is badly edited. Even a novice editor would have sliced about 300 pages out of
this monster. All the repetitive passages about dietary laws and
idol-worshipping kings, the book of Isaiah which could be cut in half without
losing anything of value, the porn in Song of Songs, the lunacy of Revelation,
and a lot of sheer silliness like the miracles.
And
very repetitive: Genesis has two conflicting accounts of the creation, and the
Gospels have four conflicting accounts of Jesus’ life. The Books of Chronicles
are a rehash of the stuff in Genesis and Kings. So at least five books of the
Bible are redundant.
A
perfect example of the bad editing occurs in the Book of Numbers. Balaam is a
sort of repeat of the tale of Moses’ agonizing and his reluctance to carry out
God’s will, so that the Israelites can attain victory and finally end their
wandering in the desert. And right in the middle of the story, the author
inserts…a talking donkey. Script doctor! Code Blue! It’s as though Orson Welles
was working on the script of Citizen Kane, and Herman Mankiewicz, drunk as usual,
shouted out “You know, Act Two kinda drags, how about we stick in a scene with
Mickey Mouse and Pluto?”
If
an author were to walk into a publishing house today (or, worse, Hollywood) and
submit the Bible for publication, they would either reject it outright, or
slice it in three and market it as a young-adult trilogy starring the Witch of
Endor as a teen rebel out to save Israel from a dystopian, totalitarian future.
And add vampires. Who solve crimes. Can we get Emma Stone as the Whore of
Babylon?
The
Bible does work as a cultural touchstone: it has been rammed down our throats
for so many centuries that everyone is familiar with its stories and its
slogans. Everybody knows the Pharaoh, Goliath, the Ark, Peter’s denial, the
prodigal son, spare the rod and spoil the child, money is the root of all evil.
Generations of bad writers have tried to tart up their bad writing by opening
their works with quotes from the Bible, just like they do with Shakespeare. It
confers a thin layer of borrowed panache upon the semi-literate. Hurray for the
Bible! But alas, to be well-known is not to be well-written.
The
book is so old and so revered that no one has the guts to say that it’s not
worth keeping in our lives anymore. It’s a 1370-page effort by ancient priests
to sell lies to stupid people, in order to enslave them. It’s time for modern
civilization to move on, to toss it into the bin with all those books we’re
supposed to revere but are essentially unreadable: James Joyce, the
“Silmarillion” sequel to the Lord of the Rings, Waiting for Godot, Catcher in
the Rye, Thomas Hardy, Tom Clancy and John Grisham after they got rich and
lazy.
Not long ago a friend
said his young daughter was an atheist but wanted to read the Bible – not the
whole thing, since she is young, but the key passages. I told him to have her
read these.
Genesis, which totally
undermines the doctrine of literal interpretation of the Bible, establishes
Jehovah as a psychopathic character unworthy of worship, establishes that life
begins at birth and not at conception, and proves that God’s plan for marriage
really consists of bestiality, incest and polygamy. And absolutely read the bit
about the Flood, which undermines the credibility of the whole book.
Exodus, in which a
supposedly all-knowing God can’t figure out who the Jews are in Egypt, forcing
the Jews to paint their doors with blood.
Leviticus, which says
nothing about lesbians, contrary to what the evangelicals say; it also says
life has no value before a baby is a month old.
Numbers and Hosea, which
advocate abortion; Numbers also tells us that Moses married an African,
something the Baptists don’t want you to know.
Deuteronomy, which
proves Moses didn’t write the Torah, and therefore the claim that Moses got the
commandments from God is fraudulent; it also says that anyone who has a bastard
in his family tree, even going back ten generations, can’t go to heaven, which
means….all of us are damned. Also…women and girls can’t wear pants. And you can’t
divorce and remarry, which means millions of Christians who wave the Bible in
our faces on the gay marriage issue, are hypocrites.
Joshua, in which Jehovah
approves genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Samuel, in which we
learn that the first great king of the Jews was gay.
Song of Songs, which is
pornographic.
Proverbs, Ecclesiastes,
Ezekiel, which tell us to take care of the poor.
The later prophets who
warned against war.
Jeremiah (and several
other books), about being kind to immigrants.
Matthew, in which Jesus
invalidates Torah law by saying we must not listen to men who claim they talk
to God.
The Gospels,
incidentally, raise thorny questions, such as how a virgin could have eight
children, and why Jesus hasn’t returned for 2000 years when he promised to
return within a man’s lifetime, and how Jesus saved us all by dying for a day
and a half when the rest of us must die for all eternity. Some sacrifice.
Roman, Galatians,
Collossians, Ephesians, Hebrews, in which the founders of Christianity say we
can ignore Torah law, which includes the alleged ban on gays.
Corinthians, which
proves that gay people were really born that way. “However that may be, let
each of you lead the life that the Lord has assigned, to which God called you.”
James, telling us not to judge other people.
Timothy, Luke, Nahum, Habakkuk, James and
Matthew, the rich cannot enter heaven.
Revelation, which is
clearly a psychotic hallucination.
