Rape, sodomy, genocide...

[chris]

...and still they call it the Good Book...

Here's a potentially interesting series of articles over at Slate about the Bible read freshly by someone who's ignorant about most of it:

www.slate.com/id/2141050/
www.slate.com/id/2141712/entry/0/

[Tyler]

I'm beginning to think that if a work of literature is so complicated as to be capable of being used to justify negative behaviour, that it is too complicated to be the basis for a religion.

[Jeff]

I am interested to know what you mean by "basis for a religion." What is that and why does it exclude certain "complicated" beliefs? Finally, what is the relationship between religion and morality? In the Bible God commands Abraham to kill his son. That's definitely immoral and the story is definitely religious.

[Tyler]

I'm beginning to think that if a work of literature is so complicated as to be capable of being used to justify negative behaviour, that it is too complicated to be the basis for a GOOD religion.

Basis for a religion, you know, like the bible is to christianity. Like the Torah is for Judaism. Like Smokey and the Bandit is for Republicans.

I've always thought that religion was a set of moral guidelines for how a person should live their life...

[Jeff]

Here's something for you, Tyler:

from Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection:
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is lead forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action—
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

[Jeff]

And here's the motivating insight:

God's Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.