UtB: the warning - flee if you will

I've been wanting to do this for a long time, but I kept putting it off because I couldn't decide whether to create a whole new blog for it or not. I've decided to blend it in with this one, and leave it to you, the reader to skip the posts with this topic.

The danger is that some of you may be so intolerant as to abandon this entire blog (or me personally) for taking a direction that offends you. So I'm going to trust you to be at least open minded enough to stay with me, but to just avoid the posts with UtB in the headline.

So from time to time, I will take that risk, and if you leave me, that's OK. I won't leave you... I will still read your posts as I have before.

So... the topic is Understanding the Bible, or UtB. Now, if you are intractably opposed to Christianity, monotheism, Biblical literalism or any branch of Gospel doctrine - read no further in this post, but please read the other posts just to make me feel good. If you believe that Fundamentalists are a scourge unto the earth - though I am personally not a fundamentalist in the normally understood sense - then you can stick around if you want to, but you've been warned.

Not that you have to share my beliefs to be reading this. But it would help if you are at least sort of agnostic. Or maybe firmly in the camp of atheism, but tolerant of others' spirituality. Thing is, you won't get squat out of any of this if you don't at least have some curiosity about what's actually in the Bible, other than the stuff they tell you in Sunday School.

Bottom line: don't give me any grief about what I say here if it's just "You Christians are idiots, and only fools can fall for that crap." If you want to point out something I missed in my reasoning, sure, go for it. But I'm not doing this so I can argue with you.

My guidelines for understanding scripture are fairly simple.

I start with the assumption that all scripture is true in its originally written context, either literally or metaphorically. By that, I mean that scribal errors happen, and holes in the papyrus happen, and translation is often woefully inadequate. Here are some examples:

• Scribal errors: There are two history books in the Old Testament which Chronicle the history of some Kings of Israel, covering the same information. The numbers do not exactly agree. It is as if the equivalent of a decimal point had been shifted. But to me, the exact number of men in an army is not all that important.
  
• Holes: There is a letter in the New Testament in which a sentence makes no sense at all in its context (1 Peter 3:19). The narrative seems to jump to a bizarre utterance and then go back to the topic at hand. Reading it literally, the writer, in the middle of discussing something normally and intelligently, suddenly suggests that Jesus went to hell to preach to the dead and give them another chance (in conflict with the plain meaning of other passages), in a way that jars the reader if he's paying any attention to what he's reading. But if two adjacent words in the original language were to have added a letter to the end of one word, and another letter to the beginning of the next word, it would suddenly make sense, and the flow of the narrative would be normal. This suggests to me that there was a hole in the paper.
• Translation inadequacies: The English word "love," tragically for our understanding, is forced to take on duties for the Greek words philos, eros, and agape, which mean respectively "close, loving friendship" and "sexual or romantic love," and "sacrificial unconditional love." Most of the New Testament is translated from Greek, which is an astoundingly rich language, with many terms that simply do not translate easily. This comes into play when trying to choke down the Revelation of the Apocalypse, as an example.
  

I also make the radical assumption that since the Word of God is truth, either metaphorically or literally, that when I see a contradiction between two passages in the Bible, it is because I don't yet understand one or both of the passages.

I also make the assumption that my five senses, as flawed as they are, are given to me as a set of tools to make sense of the world. If what I experience in my world conflicts with the Word of God, then I have misunderstood the word of God, and I reconsider what I thought was the truth in it. Note that I do not reject the word itself - I reject my flawed understanding of it.

These assumptions have served me well. Remember that logic is a tool, and requires that you begin with some assumptions that you consider to be reliable. If your assumptions prove false, then logic requires that you abandon them rather than following a chain of reason based on bad data.

And it's OK to make leaps of logic, and consider theories that you cannot prove, and follow them to a conclusion of some kind. The important thing to remember is that if you base your conclusions on them, they are not necessarily true either. You have to keep in mind which things are assumed, which are proven, and which are merely hypothetical. This is not always easy to do. What is possible, what is proven, what is likely, what is unlikely? Confuse these and your logic will take you to nonsense. (Nonsense can be fun, and often is, but you can't plan your life around it, and you can't find truth in it. If you do find truth in nonsense, then it isn't really nonsense by definition).

So bear with me, don't worry about agreeing with me, and feel free to contradict me as long as you're respectful about it.

The first installment of UtB may not follow immediately. That will give you time to insulate yourselves against the horrors of anything I might say.