The Alter Bible

The difficulties translators have with any text should be a reminder of how painfully inadequate any language is as a mediator between two different brains. So much depends in context.

> Perhaps the first person to openly suggest otherwise was Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century Jewish philosopher, who daringly wrote that the books of the Bible ought to be studied in just the same way we would study Greek and Italian poetry.

This, 100 times. I am not a religious person at all. However, it makes me extremely sad if self-proclaimed "atheists" make fun of the the Bible / Torah / Koran by pointing out how unrealistic almost all of the texts are. Of course they are unrealistic - but so are the works of Shakespeare, or Dante, or Goethe, or any great poet in the last 3000 years. Yet nobody would ridicule Dante for assuming that hell lies in some cave in Tuscany. If you just dismiss these religious texts as opium for the dull medieval masses, you might miss some deep poetical truths about mankind that just cannot be stated explicitly because of the shortcomings of any human language described above.

The idea of engaging in a dialogue with the Bible is very important. It should not be viewed as books set in stone, but as living documents that speak to us today.

'Then said he unto them, Therefore every scribe which is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old.' (Matthew 13:52)

I don't think atheists would have a problem with anyone treating the Bible (or any religious text) as literature, since there would be a lot less religious violence in the event that religious doctrine couldn't be cited as an absolute authority.

But, many modern Christians insist that the Bible must be taken literally, and that it should be taught as science, or presented as an alternative to science. Those are the people atheists are making fun of, and they deserve the ridicule.

> If you just dismiss these religious texts as opium for the dull medieval masses, you might miss some deep poetical truths about mankind that just cannot be stated explicitly because of the shortcomings of any human language described above.

What Karl Marx meant by that is not that religion makes people stupid and compliant (although sometimes it kind of can,) but that people use religion to soothe the burdens of life in an unjust and cruel world... and that the illusory comfort offered by religion often stands in the way of making real societal progress. People who believe that God alone will punish the wicked and reward the righteous and that every event, no matter how capricious or unjust, is part of some divine plan, will simply tolerate the world and trust God to change it, rather than try to change it themselves.

And yet much of what could be considered progressive moral change in society has occurred in spite of religion, either through secular or scientific ideas pushing against religious authority and supernaturalism, or through reform within the religious community itself.

I generally agree with your take on how we should read these texts.

However, nobody (that I know of) has been using Shakespeare to justify preventing me from buying whiskey on a Sunday.

These texts are read as literal truth by the people where I live (rural Texas) and used to justify some pretty heinous things.

So at the same time that we might wish to read these books as literature, I understand the impulse to dismiss certain modes of reading these texts as harmful.

I don't know many folks who hate the literature itself, though I'm sure they exist somewhere; however, dismissing some exegetical modes seems reasonable to me.