Biblical Ignorance from Two Directions

Most religious conservatives are ignorant of the Bible. Anyone who can think that everything in the Bible can be taken literally must not know very much about it. Literalism can only be held as a vague belief by people who are unfamiliar with the details of scripture. Now, the preachers and God-appointed political leaders who tell everybody what the Bible says must actually study it, and know that what I am saying is true. But the average fundamentalist in church does not read the Bible very much. They may read the passages that their preachers tell them to read—especially the book of Revelation—but they certainly do not read the passages about social justice or taking care of the land or, especially, the agnostic passages in the book of Ecclesiastes. In my evolution class, when covering the friction between evolutionary science and religion, I mention that one of the big problems is why a good God would use heartless natural selection as his method of creating. And I point out that this is not a new problem; the book of Ecclesiastes addressed this problem thousands of years ago. (See early 2010 entries in this blog.) I read to them from the book of Ecclesiastes, and none of the students in my class recognized it. One of the class creationists asked for an exact reference so she could (to her credit) look it up, and I just said to read the whole thing. I suspect there are many things in the Bible that fundamentalist preachers do not want people to actually read. If they made a movie out of the book of Joshua it would be rated R for violence and explicit sex, sometimes in the same scene. Fundamentalists suffer from Biblical ignorance. They should read the Bible. They would find to their astonishment that the Bible does not say that Obama is the antichrist, and that it presents a social model that is closer to socialism than it is to free market capitalism.

Of course, there is also a lot of Biblical ignorance among the agnostics and atheists. This is regrettable for several reasons. One is that lazy agnostics and atheists (unlike thoughtful ones) have no idea what they are rejecting or why, and they can make themselves look stupid if they criticize religious people. But the other is that the Bible is a rich source of some of the greatest literature, in which some of the most important questions of the human spirit are investigated. The stories! The Iliad and Odyssey are excellent both in the quality of stories and the way they address eternal issues of the mind and spirit, but the Bible has them beat, easily. There are hundreds of millions of people in secular western culture who have no idea that Jesus saved a woman from being stoned by saying, “Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone.” They have to reinvent the idea for themselves as if the world just now began, with their generation. This is just one example. The people of the past were not just a monolithic pile of dirty violent morons. They struggled with the same important questions that we struggle with, and the Bible is a record of some of the most glorious struggles and beautiful insights.

If I were dictator, I would have everyone in our western society learn about the Bible, without insisting that they assume any particular theology. This would immediately raise the level of mental experience in both fundamentalists and the non-religious people.