A couple of recent tweets got me to thinking about atheists' attitude toward the bible compared to the attitudes of theists. Your average American non-Catholic Christian seems to think that the bible supports his/her beliefs simply because they are able to cherry-pick verses that support their forgone conclusions. For instance, they love Leviticus 20:13 "If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination" because they have already decided for themselves that homosexuality is a sin. But there is a myriad of other laws in the Old Testament about which they are completely ignorant and/or unobservant, such as Leviticus 19:19 which admonishes against cross-breeding cattle or wearing blended fabrics.
Granted, for an observant Jew, homosexuality is a more serious offense than cross-bred cattle. But since when does a Christian care about how Jews interpret their own scriptures? One of the very premises of Christianity, it seems, is the unwarranted presumption that Jews misread their own bible. Take Exodus 35:2-3 (which my friend Peter expounds upon quite well on his blog). Any Christian would agree that it is a highly important moral imperative that we remember the sabbath, but what about not kindling any fires? That would include driving, cooking, and heating one's home, and I'd hazard to guess that most Christians do all of these. So, the point remains, Christians insist on the literal observance of the bible when it suits their forgone conclusions, and they simply gloss over anything inconvenient.
Tweet #1:
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MissRaissa God's Daughter
You just gotta love how the #Atheists use the scripture to make a point, my goodness I think we getting somewhere, praise the Lord.
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@FizlowskiEric Fridrich
@MissRaissa Now, if we could only get Christians to use logic to make a point, that would truly be a miracle.
No, I didn't change the names to protect the innocent. Of course, the topics that @MissRaissa and others had been tweeting about was god, religion, and the bible. So, it comes as a surprise to no one that atheists were quoting the bible
Far from being consistent and inerrant, the bible shows itself to be a very human and flawed piece of work. It contains contradictions: for instance, Jairus daughter was dead in Matthew 9:18, but only at the point of death in Mark 5:23. Or, as another example, David was the great grandson of Ruth (a Moabite woman), but Deuteronomy 23:3 states that no Moabite may enter the assembly of the Lord even up to the 10th generation.
The bible also contains inaccuracies: 1 Kings 7:23 tells us that Solomon built a "sea" 10 cubits from brim to brim and 30 cubits around. Now we could let this inaccuracy slide if the biblical "inerrantists" weren't so keen on insisting that the bible is always right. But even if the author of 1 Kings was simply rounding off the value of pi (as he would have had to, since I don't believe Hebrew numbering allowed for fractions), these numbers are found in the context of a chapter all about the measurements and sizes of Solomon's Palace, so we should expect a better rounding off of the circumference to be no less than 31.
Not inaccurate enough, for you? Try this one. In Genesis 30:25-43 Jacob fleeces Laban out of his livestock. Laban agrees that, as payment for tending his flocks, Jacob may separate any speckled or striped sheep. Jacob then goes about breeding Laban's flocks for speckled and striped phenotypes. How does he do this? He places stakes of striped wood near their feeding troughs. Huh? So, if sheep mate near striped sticks, their offspring will be striped. Well, if it's in the bible, it must be true. Take that, Darwin!
Why shouldn't an atheist familiarize herself with and quote from the bible? The more Christians insist on its inerrancy, the more foolish they look.
Tweet #2:
@pcsanderPeter Sander
@pastelprincess1 can't a "non-believer" still be a "Bible geek?"
I mean no offense here to @pastelprincess1 (unlike the offense that I do intend towards @MissRaissa above). It's just that this tweet stands as a good example of an attitude that I observe often enough among atheists: the anti-bible attitude.
I think this attitude stems from outrage at the the things that happen in the bible. For instance, God floods the world, killing all but Noah's family and the selected animals inside the ark.* That means that God murdered babies and children and elderly and infirmed along with all the evil people on the planet. Even if they were evil, does that justify killing them? But, as we already know, it's just a story. Our anger should not be directed at the bible, but at the people who think that this is literal truth. Not just believe it's literal truth, but think it exemplifies God's justice and love.
Nobody reads Vergil's Aeneid and cries out in outrage at all the Trojans who died at the hands of the Greeks. It's just a story, but it's a story that nobody is insisting is historical fact. Nobody is trying to get it taught as science in public schools or is trying to have Zeus's name printed on U.S. currency.
So, anger at the bible is misplaced. The bible is a hodge-podge anthology of myth, and law and literature written over the course of hundreds of years from a variety of sources who held different beliefs about God and morality. We do not have a single original text in its entirety of any of the books of the bible. It didn't descend from heaven complete in its current form, but has been rewritten, edited, argued over, edited some more, and it wasn't compiled into a canon of scripture until the Synod of Hippo in 393CE. And even since then it has gone through many changes.
Why shouldn't an atheist familiarize herself with and quote from the bible? The more Christians insist on its inerrancy, the more foolish they look.
*As a side note, I'd like to point out that Noah's ark was supposedly a wooden ship 150 meters in length. Modern engineers are unable to build wooden ships 2/3 of this size without metal reinforcement, and even then they are leaky.
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Thanks to Peter for pointing out a couple of misquotes. They have been corrected and the post has been republished. As he said, I never claimed to be inerrant.
ReplyDeleteThe footnote regarding the upper limit of wooden ships is disputed. I had originally read about this upper limit at www.talkorigins.org. However, the page containing this information is now blank. Furthermore, there is was an objection raised in the talkorigins.org feedback section (http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/feedback/oct00.html) indicating that longer wooden ships had been built. Sorry.
ReplyDeleteI've thrown scripture in the face of Jeebus-lovers to refute their bullshit, knowing that it likely wouldn't shake their faith in the "Eye In The Sky". For all I know, maybe it reinforces their hallucinations. It's just hard for me to watch, like seeing a school bus on the train tracks with 40000 tons of steel barrelling toward it.
ReplyDeleteI grew up in the midst of the hallucination, brainwashed with Biblical myth. This could have been a healthy experience given the proper context, which is that it should in no way be taken literally. The central message of the Jesus character is a good one, if you excise the half about worshipping God.
Christopher Hitchens said recently (paraphrased) that humans inherently know the Golden Rule, and even most small children would agree. Surely we don't need an Eye In The Sky to tell us that, right?