The Good Book

David Plotz of Slate recently wrote and published the book: Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible.

I got the book for free because I listen to the Slate Political Gabfest podcast, and they had a one week trial period where they were trying to get you to try their sponsor Audible.com's audiobook downloading service (for a fee). If you jumped on right away, and filled out all your personal information, you got David Plotz audiobook free. Which I did.

By the way, when you go to the library and check out audiobooks on CD, then download them for listening on your iPod, you typically see 3 to 5 minute long files. So a book might consist of 150 to 200 individual files. If you loose your place or accidentally allow your iPod to continue playing while you're not listening, you can fast forward through the various individual clips until you are close, then fast forward through a 3 to 5 minute clip to find your place. Plotz's book through Audible was 2 huge files which were over 4 hours each. I lost my place every time I plugged the iPod in to recharge, and had to forward through the whole file several times. It was a minor annoyance.

The book itself was about as far from minor annoyance as you could get.

The premise is that Plotz was a casual Jew, one who observed the Jewish holidays and went to temple only occasionally. He was at his cousin's bat mitzvah and was bored, so he picked up the torah and opened it at random and read a story he did not remember ever hearing before. In the story, the jews trick their rivals and slaughter them after one of them raped a daughter. They tricked them into thinking that they would be forgiven if they converted and that they needed to be circumcised to convert. While the men were all incapacitated from the procedure, they attacked and killed them all, selling the women and children into slavery.

He was amazed that there was this fascinating and grisley story right there in the bible that he had never heard of before. He decided to read the bible in it's entirety and write about what he read.

Most of the bible was new to him. He remarks that people of both Jewish and Christian faiths often profess strong belief in their faiths, but rarely actually read their bibles.

He said that he went into the project as a hopeful agnostic, hoping to find a deeper faith and meaning in the teachings of the bible. He went away from it confused and a little angry at what he found to be an arbitrary and vindictive god. He commented that he hoped that god was not really like that, as he did not want to believe in a god that could be so petty and punitive.

The book made me think a lot about faith in America. I seem to always get into discussions with hard core Christians that are completely convinced that the Earth is 6000 years old and Evolution is a lie being pushed by the devil. They often profess to believe every word in the bible and unashamedly admit that they've never read it. This puts them in the position of complete trust in religious authorities that vascillate between misinformed and willfully deceptive. Plotz talked about biblical illiteracy today, compared to years past when many people were well read on their faith. As an aside, the fracturing of the Catholic church into the myriad of Protestant faiths was a direct result of people actually being able to read the bible themselves and no longer having to trust and rely on religious leaders that were spoonfeeding an incomplete version of their own faith to them.

I had in depth discussions with my nephew and my brother about the book, and how surprised I was about learning that God's first instructions to man were about how they should treat their slaves. It makes you understand better how the Civil War had people on both sides saying that they were supported in their actions by god. I used to hear that and wonder how slaveholders could ever have the impression that god supported their despicable actions. That was because I didn't know what was in the bible.

My nephew is interested in reading the book now, as he is very distressed in growing up and learning that there are huge portions of the population that are perfectly happy discounting science and following in blind faith their religions. I told him that I can't understand why people cannot see the bible as a document written and passed down by men with all their flaws and agendas. If it did actually start out as the word of god, how can we expect that it was not watered down and explained to early man in a manner that he could understand. Perhaps if the stories were passed down accurately and intact, they are still not meant to be interpreted literally.

I personally believe that the stories in the bible emerged around the same time that man was becoming civilized. He was just starting to form cities and write down his history. Of course this seems like the beginning of man, because it is in one sense. It is the beginning of the record of man, of man being remembered accurately rather than stories drifting in meaning and detail over time.

By the same token, people of faith often believe in an end of times. While I have told many faithful individuals in my life that I believe end-timers need to stay out of politics because they have no incentive to plan for the long haul, I think that there is another aspect of end-timers that could be a self-evident truth. What happens if people begin to reject Christianity in large numbers? Everyone used to believe in the Greek and Roman gods and now everyone thinks that is ridiculous. What if the end times are the end of religion?