The Most Confusing Story Ever Told

I used to think of the Bible as the ultimate guide to being a good person, with the uncanny ability of a Magic 8 Ball to answer all life’s questions. I remember one time when I was little and feeling rather troubled I grabbed my Bible, let it fall open in my lap, and began reading, expecting some sort of divine intervention. Although I can’t remember the exact book it opened to, I remember feeling a little let down when all it talked about were preparations for war. I didn’t see how that could possibly pertain to my playground issues.

This is the first venture I can recall that opened my eyes to the other areas of the Bible. It isn’t all about loving your neighbor; quite a bit of it in fact details how to punish your neighbors for various crimes. I became curious about what other information lurked within the revered iconic pages and made a brave decision: to read the Bible myself.

An Unexpected Journey

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Around 5^th or 6^th grade I took it upon myself to try reading the Bible cover to cover. Sunday school classes and church sermons had highlighted the juiciest and most didactic verses, but I wanted to know what else filled the pages of my Good News Bible. If you’ve ever tried to read the entire Bible yourself you may be able to better appreciate my ambitious endeavor, especially at such a young age.

I made my way through the beginning of Genesis (no pun intended) but couldn’t get much further. The old-time style of writing was too hard to make sense of at eleven years old, not to mention the fact that the long lists of lineages were downright dull. I was content to wait until I was older to try again, and trust in the sermons of others in the meantime.

I attempted again as a teenager in high school thinking, “if I can understand Shakespeare and Jane Austen, I can get through the Bible!” Sadly, I yet again didn’t make it very far. I was still confused with not just the wording, but the meaning as well. 

"Why does God seem so different when looking at the Old and New Testaments?"

"Was I interpreting everything correctly?"

"Should I stop eating “unclean” meats?"

"Do I really need to kill people who work on Sundays (Exodus 35:2)?"

"Was I not a good enough Christian to instinctively just KNOW what the take home message was?"

I felt like I just wasn’t getting it, but instead of talking about my uncertainties with others I kept my thoughts to myself. I didn’t want to be the one heathen who couldn’t wrap her mind around it. So many people I respected revered the Bible; I must be doing something wrong. Since I was scared of getting the interpretation wrong, I relied on others’ interpretations. I found that I often wasn’t a fan…

“All Human Knowledge Takes The Form of Interpretation” – Walter Benjamin

Do you remember playing the telephone game when you were little? After whispering a sentence in one person’s ear, the line had to be relayed through the entire group, more often than not coming out humorously twisted into a different sentence entirely in the end. This is how I’ve come to roughly equate passing on Biblical interpretations over time.

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As the biblical scriptures were passed down, they were changed by personal modifications and translational inferences. The Bible is just one big book of interpretation. Reading about the Bible’s origins helped bring this to light for me, and with that things started to make more sense. I was finally able to read the Bible without shorting a fuse in my brain.

As I discussed in my previous entry, the Bible is not the literal word of God but a conglomeration of human writings that should be taken for what they are: personal accounts and opinions of the authors that are filled with their own personal partialities, prejudices, and biases. The Bible, like any other great literary work, should be open to personal interpretation and inquiry.  It’s not a black and white list of what to do and what not to do. It’s not even a law book, or a guide to morality; there are too many contradictions and atrocious acts condoned within its pages to accept it as such. It was written by human beings, and none of us are by any means perfect. Therefore, the Bible is not perfect.

That being said, I believe everyone is entitled to their own opinion when reading the Bible. It’s when people start using the Bible as a means of divine justification for their hateful actions and prejudices that I have a problem. Many hate-inspired interpretations of the Bible are centered on the individual; they make one person feel better about themselves and their lifestyle, which gives them a sense of superiority over others. It’s our actions towards others which determine whether or not we’re a good person: not our race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or whether or not we eat bacon (Deuteronomy 14:8).  People need to realize that they can't just pick and choose which prejudices they should follow in the bible. Anyone who uses the Bible to condemn homosexuality (Leviticus 18:22) should also forbid wearing composite clothing (Leviticus 19:19).

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My respect for the Bible, though it has changed in form from iconic reverence to intellectual curiosity, remains to this day. I no longer consider the Bible to be the answer to all life’s questions, but I still find it to be one of the most influential and complex books in the history of mankind.

In the Beginning...

Jesus never owned a Bible. In fact, he never saw a Bible at any point in his lifetime because there was no such thing as a Bible while he was alive. When I say "Bible" I'm talking about the fixed canonical writings bound and presented as a uniform holy scripture that we're familiar with today.

Before books came scrolls and codices. Since Gutenberg's printing press was a long ways away any scrolls or codices of scripture a household/church would own would be a handwritten copy. You can logically assume that there wasn’t just one universal scroll shared by the masses. They weren’t even just rote copies of an original. People had different versions of the various stories that had been passed down to them through many generations.

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One scroll could contain different translations or accounts than another when they supposedly originated from the same source. Errors or liberal translations from scribes could have caused these discrepancies. Different households had different collections of scripture, with their own biased emphasis on what was important. They had no uniform Old Testament. No standard or original edition of any of our modern day "books of the bible" were circulating during these ancient times. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls helped bring to light the fact that, the farther back in time you go, the less uniform scripture is.

Jerome's Magnum Opus

Pope Damasus commissioned St. Jerome (a theologian and grammarian of the time) to go through all the different versions of scripture in circulation and to compile a single definitive Latin edition. He was charged with sorting through all the different versions of all the biblical stories and determining which of them had merit. His work became known as the Vulgate, and began circulating around the 4th century. It still wasn't the dominant biblical text of the time though and was added to over the years by many people after Jerome's death.

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The Vulgate eventually resulted in the Codex Amiatinus: the earliest complete "Bible" discovered dating back to the 8th century. Even then the text was not fixed. Books were still being added, subtracted, and altered.

Different Authors, Different Endings

With so much alteration and so many different opinions on what is and is not important to include, it's not surprising that in many incidences the modern day Bible contradicts itself. A good example of Biblical contradiction is the death of Judas. In the book of Matthew he returns the silver he received for betraying Jesus and hangs himself from a tree out of guilt. Contrarily, in Acts he uses the silver to buy a farm, then falls and is disemboweled. Could these have been just two out of many different tellings of his death? We may never know.

The Bible As We Know It

The book The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book by Timothy Beal (a professor of religion at Case Western Reserve University) served as an excellent source for this information. In his book he states, "...the texts that we now have from this period are but the tip of an iceberg of early Christian writings that were important to a tremendous variety of Christianities." What began as a diverse collection of scripture has been simplified down into a single entity: the modern day Bible.

This is the main reason why I can't and don't take the Bible as the literal Word of God. It is also why I refrain from using the Bible as a means to condone my own actions. The Bible may have origins as divinely inspired testimony, but it has undergone too many revisions, translations, and interpretations to be used as a book of laws. Even any original writing from a prophet is created by man, and no man is by any means perfect.

The Dark Side of Religion

I've noticed that whenever God is brought up in a conversation, I start to feel uncomfortable. Before it was because I didn’t know where exactly I stood on religion, but now it’s for a different reason.

I Hate, Therefore I Am

 

When you start looking into religion, it’s disturbing to see how many groups of people justify their hateful actions in the name of their God: the Westboro Baptist Church, the KKK, terrorists, Christian crusades, etc. I’m not just talking about extremists, but people who use God as a weapon for persecution as well.

Some of these are well-meaning people who are using their faith as an excuse to hate something they're afraid of (or conditioned to be afraid of), whether that be uncertainty, guilt, death, inadequacy, or simply different ways of thinking. Although many wonderful things are done in the name of religion, the religious world is full of ignorance, veiled hate, and hypocrisy and I often hesitate to associate myself with these people and their way of thinking. 

A Common Thread

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I would be ignorant if I claimed complete separation from these other believers; the common thread that holds all these different religious views together is the practice of devoutly following the writings in a holy book: Christians have the Bible, Muslims have the Qur'an, Jews have the Torah, and so on. I can only speak for the Bible, as I have not researched as deeply into the other religious texts, but next week I will review the history of the Bible and voice my opinions on its incorrect interpretation as "the word of God".

The Problem With Intelligent Design

After much research and self reflection on the matter of God and science, I finally came to the following fundamental conclusions: Darwin’s theory of evolution is true, the big bang theory is a plausible explanation for the beginning of the universe, and the bible is not a literal history of the origins of life but a man-made guide filled with parables and divinely inspired testimony. As I mentioned in my last post, I didn’t know what to call myself. Although I have no great fondness of labels in general, I felt uncertain and alone in my beliefs without having a group of peers to share thoughts with.

I first remember hearing the words “intelligent design” in my early college years. I thought all this meant was a belief in a higher being or consciousness who had an input in creating and shaping the universe. I did not realize the loaded meaning these words had, and went about telling people who asked that I believed in intelligent design. Looking back, it’s a little embarrassing that I jumped aboard a bandwagon when I had no idea who was driving or where it was headed…

Evolution and Intelligent Design... They just don't mix

 

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While I was going about associating myself with this new dogma, I was blissfully unaware of the fact that I was a walking contradiction. Intelligent design is essentially an idea used to counter the theory of evolution: a theory I was very firmly convinced of its truth. I’m unsure of its origin, but the debate between evolution and intelligent design came to a head in Dover, PA.

Darwin Discrimination in Dover

 

Some members of the Dover school board were upset by a perceived imbalance in the high school science curriculum. They wanted an emphasis on the fact that evolution is a “theory” and not a “fact” and proposed teaching alternative theories to give the students the tools to explore the options themselves. This seems like a reasonable and secular request on its face, but they had ulterior motives.
 

Since creationism was banned from science classes after a court case decided it conflicted with the separation of church and state, those at odds with evolution needed something else to push for. They thought that intelligent design would give them a legal loophole for discounting evolution and having a voice in the classroom, while subtly promoting the idea of a creator.
 

The basic reasoning for intelligent design is this; some life processes and systems are too intricate to have been derived naturally. Those who follow this line of thinking champion the idea of irreducible complexity. This describes objects thought to be so complicated that if one component is removed the entire system is rendered useless, hinting at a designer. This means they believe all species appeared abruptly and are unrelated.

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 A NOVA documentary describes the entire Dover case. The main outcome of the case was that the school board's desire to teach intelligent design was based in promoting their religion, and was therefore found unconstitutional. The expert testimony, very soundly in my opinion, denounces the views of intelligent design and shows that even seemingly complex processes can be traced back to simple and/or different original purposes.

Is Anything In Science Absolute?

After classes in genetics and evolutionary anatomy I can say I am a huge supporter of Darwin's theory. The argument that it's "just a theory" is rather weak when you look at the actual meaning of a scientific theory. Although most things in science aren't considered "facts", that doesn't mean they're based on a passing whimsical thought. To paraphrase a segment of the NOVA documentary, a theory in science is backed up by a very large body of information and evidence and has been subject to much testing and refining. It consists of many different hypotheses and lines of evidence that all point to a uniform truth.  So perhaps, if those purporting the truth of intelligent design can gather evidence of their theory, they have a chance at having a voice in classrooms.

The nature of science is to question, and nothing is ever an absolute. In this sense science remains a humble practice where no theory is truly regarded as concrete truth, and room for improvement and further understanding always remains.

My Stance On Faith and Science

I was raised in a loving Christian home. My parents would routinely take my siblings and I to church on Sundays, and we would sit as still and silent as young children can. For a long time I never questioned the teachings of my Sunday school classes. I was able to accept all the stories in the bible as fact without truly wondering whether or not it was true; all the adults accepted it, so why shouldn't I?

Insatiable Curiosity 

 

It wasn't until I started learning about dinosaurs in grade school that I really started to wonder  how science class and religion overlap. One question that buzzed in my head was, "Why weren't the dinosaurs mentioned in the bible"? Surely such huge creatures would have made life in the Garden of Eden a nightmare? I can't remember getting a memorable or convincing answer to this, despite asking several Sunday school teachers and a pastor. Looking back now, I can pinpoint this unanswered childhood question as the beginning of my search for a compromise between faith and science.

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As I grew up and started to question things, I was under the impression that belief in a higher power and acceptance of scientific facts could not co-exist. I was torn between what I believed to be true and what I knew to be true. I tried listening to both Creationists and Atheists, and ended up with a headache. I've come to realize this is because the people who voice their opinions the loudest are often the "extremists" on both sides of a debate, with no apparent room for a middle ground. Over time though and with some extensive searching I have seen that you CAN have a foot in both camps.

Finding A Compromise

A history class in ancient Mediterranean civilizations taught me the similarities of the bible to other stories and myths of the Mesopotamians (http://www.icr.org/article/noah-flood-gilgamesh/), as well as possible evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ. As a student in the field of life sciences I have been constantly exposed to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, and I can firmly say that I believe evolution is a fact of life. I have also come to view the bible, not as a factual account of the history of the world, but as a book of parables aimed at explaining the nature of man and life on Earth.

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After coming to these different conclusions I didn't know what to call myself. For a long time I found no apparent niche or label for scientific Christians who believed in evolution, the big bang, and a higher being. I then heard the words "Intelligent Design", and started identifying myself as a person who believed in such. But next week I will address the idea of Intelligent Design, and explain why I no longer associate myself with this way of thinking.