While there are some good things in the bible, I don’t think there is anything that is uniquely good in it – nothing that isn’t found in other books.

The old testament is an adventure story, and while things are pretty good if you’re an israelite, they are pretty bad if you are (for example) an Egyption. I don’t see much to like from the old testament – it’s a record of a tribal time.

The new testament has some okay stuff in it, but it’s also not unique, and the vast majority of christian sects that I’m aware of follow the parts that they like but not the other parts.

Posted: May 24th 2009

See all questions answered by Eric_PK

For me the bible is simply an interesting insight into how people thought and lived 2000-4000 years ago. In places it is also beautifully written. Much of it is tedious and banal and pointless and obsessive. Much of it (including, by the way, the notions of virgin birth and resurrection after three days) simply regurgitates motifs that were current in other Middle Eastern traditions at about the same time.

As we should expect, our knowledge of the world and how it works has improved considerably since then, so the bible is not a useful resource in helping us understand the world around us. Our understanding of human psychology, what prompts us to behave as we do, has also improved considerably, rendering biblical explanations based on 'original sin’ both obsolete and actively unhelpful.

As our understanding has increased, we have less to fear and therefore less to hate: biblical exhortations to kill our children for answering us back; to stone gays to death; to consider menstruating women 'unclean’ etc are rightly considered grotesque these days. As are the accounts of genocide allegedly commanded by God. Disgraceful stuff. Our morality has improved, along with our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

Christians often point to the teachings of Jesus – aren’t they worth hanging on to? Well, some of them no doubt are. But the point is, it didn’t take Jesus or Christianity to hit on them. As Victor Stenger has pointed out in his book God: The Failed Hypothesis, the key moral teachings for which Jesus is best remembered (entreaties to turn the other cheek and to love your enemies, for instance) can be found in Taoist, Buddhist and Hindu texts that all originated up to 500 years before Jesus was even born. He quotes Joseph McCabe as saying, “[The sentiments attributed to Christ] were familiar in the Jewish schools, and to all the Pharisees, long before the time of Christ, as they were familiar in all of the civilizations of the earth – Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian, Greek and Hindu.”

And please don’t imagine that religions were required for people to be concerned about morality: Socrates was asking how we should live long before Christianity came into existence, and there were no supernatural beliefs underpinning his worldview.

Morality is important to humans because it gives us the rules by which we can live together with maximum harmony and therefore safety and security. So it has occupied human minds in all cultures and traditions: it does not require a belief in God and it certainly does not require the bible. The bible is just a subset of teachings on morality across the ages, right up to and including the present day. Our current secular age has tackled injustices such as discrimination against women and gays, physical abuse of children, acceptance of racism, and disenfranchisement of the poor in ways that would have been unthought of in the bible-believing societies of 150 years ago.

So the bible holds SOME of the wisdom and morality that humans have acquired over the ages, but it is by no means the original source of it, nor in any sense the best example of it.

Posted: May 24th 2009

See all questions answered by Paula Kirby

The Bible is very good ancient literature, partly because regardless of the subject matter it’s had very good translators over the years. The King James Version is one of the great works of the English language.

It holds plenty of good advice and wisdom, because its authors were generally very intelligent and were also good people. Unfortunately it also holds some bad advice and even some outright lunacy. Getting the good stuff out requires a certain amount of cherry-picking by the reader.

Posted: May 23rd 2009

See all questions answered by SmartLX

Those of us raised in a culture dominated by various Christian sects, such as that of the United States, are accustomed to think of the Bible as a single document, standing alone and unique, when it is actually a collection of tales fashioned around the mythic strains that were dominant in the cultural milieus in which it developed.

When the Bible is appreciated for what it is, then it becomes useful. Human myth reveals much about human nature. The stories told by the ancients and shaped and refashioned by succeeding generations contain much that is of interest, much that is important to the understanding of who we are and how we got that way. Paradoxically it is the biblical literalist who robs the document of its vitality and its usefulness. In insisting on the inerrant accuracy of everything in a book filled with variant retellings of the same stories, historical inaccuracies, contradictions and fables, the literalist destroys its value and forces it into a rigidity that subverts any credibility it might have as a record of human longing and aspiration.

I am most familiar with the King James version of the Bible because it is the translation I grew up with. In spite of some rather egregious translation errors, I can still enjoy the poetic quality of some of the language. But it always must be remembered that the Bible most Christians read has been through translation piled on translation. The original sources of the texts we now have simply do not exist in any form. The Bible, especially the King James version, is a necessary resource for studying the culture of Western civilization, especially literature.

When all is said and done, however, my opinion of the Bible is best reflected by the words of Tom Paine who described the Old Testament this way: “Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my own part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.”

What I dislike most about the book is the perverse ways in which it has been used to justify the promotion of ignorance, the oppression of people based on gender, race, and creed and the moral blindness of authoritarian absolutism.

Posted: May 23rd 2009

See all questions answered by George Ricker

The bible is a very interesting artifact. I am very pleased that there are secular scholars who specialize in it, condensing its features and aspects concisely because I certainly am unmotivated to plow through acres of unfertile ground which are contained in many pages of the bible just to come away with a bit of mental/artistic nourishment.

For me the Bible holds three attractions:

1) It does give us a glimpse, however foggy, of how ancient desert tribes lived and thought, including how they codified and borrowed from other cultures little bits of wisdom, like the Golden Rule.

2) It contains some lovely bits of literary phrases/expressions: the salt of the earth, man shall not live by bread alone, go the extra mile, wolf in sheep’s clothing, den of thieves, I wash my hands of it, Physician heal thyself, lost sheep, the root of all evil, a law unto himself, and on and on and on. In fact, you can’t appreciate much of Western literature without realizing the Bible’s literary influence.

3) It provides a precious and indispensable basis for humor, as in the Monty Python film, The Life of Brian. And because of the delicious humor contained in that film, I am so glad that the bible is not copyrighted.

Posted: May 23rd 2009

See all questions answered by logicel