Suppose you were stranded on a small, uninhabited island in the Pacific Ocean. Suppose you had no exposure to any of the world’s religions; that you know absolutely nothing about God, Jesus, and Christianity. Suppose you only had one book to read: the Protestant Christian Bible. Not a study Bible or a Bible with explanatory notes. Just the sixty-six books with verse and chapter numbering.
Suppose you sat underneath a palm tree and started reading the Bible. You have no understanding of Christianity or Trinitarian theology. You have never heard of Jesus, Jehovah, the Holy Ghost, Moses, Abraham, John, the Baptist, Mary, Joseph, Paul, or the apostles. What conclusions would you come to about what you read? Would you naturally come to the same conclusions as Christians do today?
Try to divorce yourself from past indoctrination and conditioning. What conclusions would you come to after reading the Bible? Would your conclusions remotely resemble what Christians commonly believe or what Evangelicals believe, in particular?
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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“Try to divorce yourself from past indoctrination and conditioning. What conclusions would you come to after reading the Bible?”
I would probably see it as fiction, as really weird fiction.
Wow! That literally happened to me! (Or do I mean figuratively?). Anyhow, not an island in the Pacific but sort of an island, and I had only a Gideon Bible to read and nothing else to do. So I read it cover to cover and I had no idea what I just read. I mean there was all the incest and the begatting (Aram begat Aminidab etc) and quite a lot that might as well have been in Greek. I didn’t and don’t know what to make of it. Another time I found myself with nothing to read and time to kill and there was the Book of Mormon so I read it. Same result. I didn’t and don’t know what to make of it. Oh well. Perhaps I’ll read the Koran next time I am stranded somewhere?
I hear ya man, as having not just begat Aminidab, I’ve also read the Bible through, memorized much of it thanks to my ACE school demanding scripture for privileges. Also, upon exiting the fold, took on the Book of Mormon and the Qur’an out of curiosity, and gotta say, those two books make the Bible look positively thrilling in comparison. I suppose a book written over a thousand years has a leg up on books spouted by simpleton charlatans alone. (Mormon Apologists are hilarious, trying to make like all the extant newspaper stories detailing Joseph Smith’s grifting ways are nothing but a frame-up job!)
I’m really not sure what I would think. The trouble is that in trying to wonder how I might approach the bible had I never previously encountered it, I’m stuck with a natural bias, created to a large extent by my exposure to it over 70 years! In reality, of course, the problem is the other way round. The bible appeals only to those who have been brought up to it, with a pre-conceived notion that it represents some higher order. It doesn’t. It’s interesting to read (though I’ve never made any attempt to read it cover to cover) as a reflection on how previous writers sought to make sense of a very puzzling world (they didn’t even know there was a universe!), and attempted to bring some sort of order to groups that had never considered restraint. Everything that is wrong is there – a ridiculously naive creation story (that wasn’t even logical in its own right), historical events completely invented, or at the very least based on the flimsiest circumstance, prophecies that are so vague that they could be used to predict anything from Dr Who to Lady Gaga, or else fraudulently interpolated after the event, a morality that was based on a natural desire for hateful revenge by subjugated populations, morality that reflected the times (slavery), and then the fanciful stories of virgin births, miracles, and resurrections in the New Testament.
If the bible naturally vanished from existence overnight, with a corresponding memory wipe in our consciousness, society would not lose in the slightest. In fact, I think it would overall be a great benefit to us all.
I grew up Catholic and we had prayer books but no Bible in the house as in many Protestant homes. Reading the Gideon was my first exposure to it as a physical book I could read for myself. Later on, studying law I observed everything makes sense if you weigh all the relevant facts. That being so, when something makes no sense I assume I just don’t have all the details yet. Keeping in mind the world was assumed to be flat in Biblical times does rationalize much that is written in the Bible as well as (probably) in other writings from that time. I plan to read the Koran and once I consume and reconcile enough religious writing, perhaps some coherence will emerge.
Would the Bible be missed if it never existed? Some wisdom, albeit, cryptic wisdom, would be lost, but perhaps any such loss can be replaced with more coherent and accessible modern ethics.
do give that “wisdom….cryptic wisdom” that is no other place other than this bible’s various books.
conclusion? This “god” is invented by committee.
Invented by committee. That’s the bottom line. And it’s a committee of Catholics to whom, interestingly enough, the IFB Bible worshippers owe a great deal.
oh dear, that gives me such a mental image. 🙂
I grew up with the Bible represented in fundamentalist evangelical white Sputhern American terms, so I really have a hard time separating it from that framing. However, my kids don’t know diddly-squat about the Bible stories I grew up with. When they were in high school, they took a literature class on mythology, which included Christian and Jewish myths. To my kids, Moses is “the guy with all the blood and flies”, and they don’t get people’s fascination with Jesus. Granted, they have never read the Bible, and I doubt they have any interest in doing so, but they weren’t very impressed with Moses and Jesus compared to other myths.
I can’t imagine that I would think of the concept of a Trinity – that isn’t completely clear in the Bible. I might understand that in John, Jesus claims that he and God the Father are One somehow, even though Jesus talks to God the Father. But the Holy Spirit? I doubt I would consider it part of the Big 3-as-one.
After 60+ years of Bible propaganda, there’s only one lasting takeaway: The Golden Rule.
Beside watching South Park, reading the Bible from cover to cover is the best cure for the sickness of Evangelicalism.