The Bible: Literal or Not?
I noticed a tweet earlier from an individual that I follow who posted about another person’s blog post. This blog was a story about Fr. Barron. Mr. Barron (I call him Mr. because the whole parental structure they use is just a ploy to grant them authority that they do not have) was tearing down parts of Christopher Hitchen’s book, “God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything“. Unlike Hitchens, who debates regularly, Mr. Barron did not did not debate anything. He does like he always does, he preaches to the choir. He had on there some videos from this guy basically making excuses for all the atrocities depicted and condoned in the bible.
I looked Mr. Barron up on youtube and found a bunch of videos including one discussing Bill Maher’s movie, “Religulous” (Entertaining Movie by the way).
In the video Mr. Barron said:
“He’s obsessed with biblical literalism… The bible is not a book, the bible is a library. So do you take the library literally? Well, it depends on what section you’re in. If you go into the journalism section or you go into the strict history section (as opposed to the sorta history section?) yea, you’d take that pretty straight-forwardly. But if you wander into the poetry section, you wander into the section about religion mythology, you wander into a section about… um… political opinion, it depends on what genre you’re dealing with. The bible is not ‘a’ book, it’s a collection of books from a wide variety of literary genres. Therefore you have to know which lenses to wear.”
Well… that sounds all fine and dandy Mr. Barron except for one thing. In a library, those sections are clearly marked. Suppose the library was like your bible and you told a child to go in and teach themselves. You’d have people planning trips to visit historical parts of the shire, being sure to avoid Dragons and Goblins, all the while searching for Morpheus so that they can be unplugged from the matrix.
Mr. Barron would have us believe that all that violence in the bible, all those horrible morals, “oh… that’s all just story telling, but all the good bits, that’s Jesus. The bible isn’t bad, you’re just not reading it with the right rose colored glasses with the blinders strapped to them.”
How do you know which parts are story and which parts are literal? Will you do us (and the rest of the human race) a favor by reading every religious book out there and telling us which parts are to be taken literally and which parts are to be taken metaphorically? If you could do such a thing, by what means would you determine what was moral or immoral? Couldn’t we just cut out the middle man and go straight to what is intrinsically moral?
Perhaps if there was a disclaimer on the section that says “gay is an abomination” we wouldn’t have so many issues in America with gay marriage.
Just another note, his argument speaks nothing to prove the existence of god. He’s only saying the bible isn’t as evil as atheists are making it out to be. Wow… kind of a weak argument for god there wouldn’t you say padre?
His argument is like saying we should let kids read playboy, so long as they’re reading it with the right “lenses”. There are books out there from which people can obtain good morals, the bible is hardly one of them.
Do people really want to believe in something that requires so many justifications, so many mental back-flips JUST so it doesn’t come off as pure evil? C’mon people… think about this, please!
Video after the break…
