There are simple reasons to reject Biblical authority. Very simple. One above all others–the Bible assigns people to roles from which, by virtue of divine mandate, they cannot abandon. It accords thinking beings no grant to be other than what the Bible says they should be.
Now, a lot of people treat this in one of two ways. The benign way is to simply ignore these restrictions until such a point where the deviations cannot be ignored. For instance, in the case of gay marriage. There has been a sliding metric of tolerance leading up to the point past which those professing a christian character simply cannot go. They sort of make these restrictions cases of, well, in an ideal, christian world these laws would hold, but we don’t live in that world, and since we all have to get along, well, we’ll just pretend they aren’t there for the most point. Because, you see, if they took them seriously, there would be a lot of public executions.
Which leads to me to the malign way of dealing with them–extremist posturing. These rules are god’s rules and we ignore them at out peril. Such people condemn people who are different, rail against the establishment, and actually work toward putting these rules into practice, either through mainstream legal institutions or by joining cults who leave mainstream society and set up little compounds here and there. The leaders of such groups become right vicious little tyrants and a peak inside their precincts shows what would be in store for all of us were they to get their way nationally. Some go so far as to commit murders (god spoke to me and said kill the woman!), blow up private property, and generally harass anyone who disagrees with them.
Both kinds of folks feed into the periodic resurgence of religiosity that muddies our political waters and gets us all in a froth over individual rights, civil rights, and various other community issues which we ought really to have figured out and solved by now.
The question is asked how I can have the chutzpa to claim the Bible should be ignored. Good question. And I don’t say it should be ignored. There’s history there–some of it bad, some of it apocryphal, some of it outright fable–but history nevertheless. There are examples of law making, of civic institution building, of all manner of human endeavor we would do well to study, if only as counterexample. But as a moral guidebook?
Some of what Jesus said is pretty good. But it is when he is speaking about the nature of community and the worth of individuals that he’s at his best. Some of his life lessons are fascinating. As I’ve noted before, whoever Yeshua bar Joseph was, he was a pretty fair philosopher, and a lot of what he had to say was radical.
Iterestingly enough, when he made his claim about bringing a sword and pitting son against father and so on, he was right. Look around. Families often dissolve over differing interpretations of his words. His philosophy has been divisive. He wasn’t doing individuals of conscience any favors by giving them a program that would set them at odds with the society in which they lived. But to me, these were not the words of a deity telling us what he wanted, but of a savvy political thinker who knew the consequences of his philosophy. It was a warning–follow my teaching at your peril.
So most people claiming to be his followers don’t actually follow his words. They substitute belief (faith) for change. They get to go on living peaceably within their communities while feeling they have a good bead on how to get to heaven. That’s how many of them can support Bush and still claim to be good christians–because they believe, not because they’re doing anything Jesus told them to do.
My problem with the rest of the Bible, though, is twofold. One, it is based largely on the national epic of a nation that, in spite of the fact there is today a country by that name, no longer exists. Israel is not run the way it was under Saul and David, Solomon or the Macabees. The essence of that nation is long dead. At best, modern Israel is an homage. So the question I have is, what does the national epic of a country two millennia gone have to do with me? The answer is, about as much as Rome under Caesar does, or Babylon, or Thebes under the Seven, or the Mogul Empire. What we are today is part of the long, twisted road of history, but I am not a Roman, a Mogul, a Hittite, a Celt…or an eighth century B.C.E. Hebrew.
The other reason is that the human program advocated throughout most of the Bible is, to my mind, unethical and immoral. Slavery is a given throughout. Even Paul supports it, going so far as to tell slaves to be good and make no trouble. Women are chattel. People are stoned for personal insult (a son or daughter who disrespects their parents can and ought to be put to death; my question is, what if mom and dad deserve the disrespect?). Rampant, bloody nationalism is the rule–the modern day butchers in Darfour are the natural political descendents of Joshua and his band of invaders.
In short, the worth of an individual is sublimated by ideology, and that, we have seen from Columbus to Chechnya, is a horrid, ghastly state of affairs.
Jesus, by the way, said several things that suggest he felt otherwise, but they get mixed with a latent kind of demagoguery which may or may not have been grafted onto his words later. (I have always believed that the lesson of the woman at the well is not that her adultery and fornication were so bad, but that Jesus couldn’t abide her lying about it. Novel interpretation, I know, but he also spared the prostitute from stoning, and he treated Mary and Martha with as much respect as the men. According to Bart Ehrman, Mary’s status among the disciples has been consistently weakened by later chronographers.)
But very simply, to make someone a slave and therefore less than yourself–to treat a woman as something less than a human being (the standard for human being, being a man)–to be willing to slaughter your own child because of the commands of a voice in your head, unquestioning as to how your child might regard this usurpation of his or her right to live–to sort people, even their children, by virtue of a difference in their ideas and then condemn them to death for it–this is patently immoral.
Might we not recast the Bible, then? Not as a series of examples to embrace thoughtlessly, but as a compendium of stuff that doesn’t work? That maybe, along with the supposed lessons of proper behavior, these are also examples we must reject?
Implicitly, we do. I’ve said elsewhere that we live in a Post-Levitical World, and that not even most of the most extreme fundamentalists would assent to living according to those rules. Without actually saying out loud “That’s absurd!” we have moved on from the Pentateuch.
But maybe it would be a good, healthy thing to say “You know, there’s a lot worth paying attention to in the Bible, but there’s also a lot of real garbage. I wouldn’t treat a dog that way.”
I have a standard. I see people as people first, and accord them ALL the rights and privileges I expect for myself. Everything else about them comes second, third, or not at all–whether they be women, gay, different races, nationalities, or philosophies. I don’t judge based on any of these things.
Didn’t Jesus say something about a beam in the eye…?
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