Interpreting the Bible on Fundamentalist’s Terms

I came across this page in my random surfing yesterday and it got me to thinking. The page is maintained by a born-again Presbyterian who looks to have a slightly left-leaning political view judging from a glance around his site (Thanks to Riker from Prose Justice for pointing this out to me, I’d originally identified the site as being written by a snarky atheist.  Serves me right for not bothering to look around the site before pegging the author’s religious views). Some of the points ring amusingly true, such as numbers 1, 4, 8, and 12, but I do take issue with some, particularly number 11 on the list:

This is most important — insist, as heatedly as any extreme fundamentalist, that the Bible must be read in the most naively literal sense in all passages, and therefore the tiniest mistake or scribal error invalidates the whole thing and any religion based on it.

My problems with religion are leveled squarely at the fundamentalist flavors of every major world religion out there today. You can feel free to believe the Dawkins argument that tolerance of moderate religion lends credibility to the more extreme elements of that religion, but I like to embrace a more live and let believe philosophy as long as that belief doesn’t involve suicide bombing, shooting up abortion clinics, kneecapping Catholics or Protestants for wandering into the wrong neighborhood in Dublin, or any other number of religious practices that wouldn’t be considered acceptable in polite company. Religious fundamentalists, unfortunately, are usually the source of most of those nasty glorifications of God that I just mentioned.

And where does this absolute certainty in the goodness of suicide bombings and religiously motivated murder come from? A literal interpretation of the Bible or whatever holy book you prefer, of course! So here is my proposition to religious groups out there who are tired of hearing from atheists who insist on a literal interpretation of everything in the Bible: We’ll stop taking everything in the Bible literally the instant that you afford us the same courtesy, and not a moment sooner.

(Of course even admitting that the Bible isn’t meant to be taken literally and attempting to “interpret” the good book can lead to some pretty wacky and wildly divergent belief systems, but it’s still a step above believing that the murder of homosexuals is justified because God said so in Leviticus.)

Biblical literalism is the root cause of a lot of the religious cancers that are currently poisoning an otherwise rational and secular Western society, so don’t think for an instant that I’m not going to give up the easy pot-shots that come from a literal interpretation of the Bible for as long as people insist on living their lives by that same literal interpretation.

Biblical literalism has led to dubious religious interpretations that glorify intolerance and murder. Biblical literalism has led entire segments of the population to reject scientific teaching because their pastor told them that God snapped the universe into existence 6000 years ago in a happy-go-lucky time when man and dinosaur coexisted in harmony. There’s a compelling argument to be made that our adventures in the middle east for the past half a century have as much to do with the belief that Jesus will be coming back there at any moment to throw everyone who doesn’t believe in him into a lake of fire as they do with oil supplies, as well as a whole host of other ideas that have no business in modern society.

So you can bet your crucifix that lampooning the practice of Biblical literalism wherever it rears its ugly head is going to continue to be a vital and justifiable part of the debate against religions that condone the practice. As long as religious sects that promote Biblical literalism continue to try and shove their beliefs down the collective throats of everyone around them, as long as religious groups try to legislate based on their own narrow interpretation of the divine, that narrow literal interpretation will continue to be justifiably dissected and refuted by individuals with a more rational mindset.

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