This week (November 21-27) is National Bible week. Just to be clear, this is not an official government endorsed holiday, but rather a kind of “awareness week” sponsored by the National Bible association. Part of their work is funded by the Templeton Foundation. I picked up this story based on these posts, I saw on Reddit. I think that for the most part, they are right. However, I disagree slightly with them slightly. The below BBC Documentary below is an excellent introduction to two of the most important theories of how to understand the bible: the documentary hypothesis and redaction criticism.
So, why do I disagree with the two atheist authors I linked? (Despite the fact I generally agree with the idea that the bible has a lot of bad moral lessons, violent stories, and bad science). Because I refuse to believe that fundamentalist Christians and Jews “Own” the bible. The bible belongs to all of humanity. It gives us deep insights into how ancient people thought. Many of our cultural allusions from Shakespeare to Toni Morrison and everywhere in between are from the bible. It is a mistake for us, as atheists, to simply “quote mine” the bible for violent quotations. Rather, we should read the bible, understand who wrote it and why, and carry that knowledge with us when we discuss the bible with the fundamentalists.
Let me end with an analogy. What if a young man told us that he had a vision in which Hermes appeared to him and told him that Zeus was the one true god and Achilles was the one true prophet an that the Iliad was the “word of god” spoken through the divinely inspired Homer and the he now has a “personal relationship with Zeus.” Would we immediately go to the Iliad and look for stories of misogyny, violence and bad science? Of course not. We would say “that guy is crazy,” and continue studying the Iliad because it contains beautiful poetry and insight into how the ancient Greeks thought.
Many of my ideas about this topic have come from Dr. Robert Price who is a great guy, a wonderful bible resource, and a great Billy Graham impersonator. The analogy comes from his interesting article, Is the Bible Mein Kampf?
