Disclaimer: For my 100th chapter, I figured I'd put something up there that was sure to make a splash. What's more splashful than a talk about the highest grossing, most influential, most successful book ever written? This is bound to turn some heads and heat the blood, so let's just put a disclaimer here. This chapter doesn't seek to undercut (or glorify for that matter) the bible and what it means to people. This is simply an argument hoping to shine a little perspective in something that has been around a long time. Alright, let's get this over with. Pray for me, I'm going to need it.
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Some time ago I wrote a chapter on page length and used the Bible as an example. The Bible consists of 66 "books" over roughly 800,000 words. Despite the modern trends in the computer era, books rarely exceeded 20,000 words back in the days before the printing press. Anyway, this statement ended up eliciting comments, more like arguments, and some of the arguments suggested a lot of people just don't know what the Bible is.
I won't confess to being an expert on the Bible, and I've hesitated to host this chapter for a while simply because there are people on both sides that get so very worked up if anyone even mentions it (the comment thread in question eventually got deleted). Wattpad 101 is hardly the place to discuss things like religious issues, but since several dozen people decided they wanted to discuss it here, I think presenting my point of view couldn't hurt either.
I'll approach this from a slightly different angle than you are used to. Specifically, I'm going to treat the Bible purely as a book. I'm not going to argue whether the Bible was written by God or not. This is a writing website, so I'm going to do something few people do, talk about the Bible based on it's literary merit. Whether you are a hardcore religious fanatic or atheist, I mean no offense. I'm not defiling your beliefs on either side of the spectrum. I'm simply offering a unique side to the argument you may not have seen before.
Full disclaimer, I'm not someone who believes in the Bible as a work of absolute truth. To make my arguments in this chapter, I will simply treat the Bible on the same merits as any other book ever written. Because I think if you put your prejudices and faith aside, and simply see the Bible as a book for a moment, you might find you can get a lot more out of it. Here's where things start getting a little offensive, my apologies in advance.
Now, I wouldn't find it at all surprising that most people on either side of the Bible debate have neither read the Bible, nor even know what the Bible actually is. Most people are just parroting the things they've heard. You either like to make fun of the Bible because it makes you feel smart, or you respect the Bible because it makes you feel spiritual. Of course, other people exist, but I'm referring specifically to the Atheists and Christians who feel the need to make these arguments online every time the Bible is mentioned. I see you there in the comments section. How you doing? Good? Already wrote a comment? Bitching me out? Yeah... figures...
To these Atheists, I'm betting you imagine crazy people thinking they talk to God or corrupt religious people selling their BS and making a profit on lies. You imagine a history of stupid people compiling together all of this crazy work of "fiction" in order to steal power and money from a stupid and unsuspecting public, a demographic that you yourself just happened to not be a part of. Unlike the majority of the human race, you are uniquely somehow more intelligent then all of those "sheep". How good for you.
To a believer, I'm betting you imagine people being spoken to directly by God, a group of special people who were "chosen" to "write the words of God" as he intended them to be written. Those words happen to contain the exact meaning you were taught they do, and that makes them indisputable facts that can't be argued with. The hundreds of offshoots of Christianity and Judaism all descending from different interpretations of the same book are lost on this fact.
Now, here's the first issue I think needs to be dispelled on the Bible. Despite the words used, the Bible isn't a book at all. It's a collection of documents. Ever written a bibliography? Bible literally means a collection of works. This collection included pieces written over long periods of time by many different people in many different ages. Each book is NOT written the same way. Some exist in poetic language, some as allegories, and some as history. Some books are literally just letters written to people. There are compilations of supposed eye witness testimonies from people who ought to be considered reliable at the time they occurred.
The Bible doesn't consist of every major religious text. It consists of the handpicked documents that the head rabbis and Christians at the time of compilation liked the most. These were the ones they felt were the best, most influential, most impactful, and more important to know. Whether you think their hand was guided by God isn't really important, the point was that they picked the stories, letters, books, and essays that mattered the most to the people at the time.
And they seemed to have picked well, because the Bible wouldn't have lasted as long as it did or impact as many lives as it has if it wasn't very good. If you think it was merely the Pope and his evangelists pushing the Bible that converted so many Christians and spread an otherwise unreadable book all over the globe, you apparently don't understand how information spreads. For information to spread, the people have to want to repeat that information. In that sense, the Bible was perhaps one of the most successful pieces of information ever compiled. It spread across our population and lasted thousands of years. If you can accept nothing else, at least accept that it was successful. Christianity spread because people wanted to read the Bible and got something out of it.
Now, the Bible isn't the only impactful book that has ever existed. Many other books have been written and created a following of loyal advocates, and I'm not talking about just religious texts here such as the Quran. On the Origin of the Species... ever heard of that one? For any scientist, this seems like one of the most important texts to read. For many, this is history. It is the forefront of a scientific discovery that governs much of how biological science has proceeded in the last couple hundred years. More recently, The Selfish Gene is another book that has garnered similar popularity.
Just as the new testament spawned believers of Christianity, The Origin of the Species spawned believers of their own movement, Darwinism.
And I have to say, On the Origin of the Species is not correct. It misses some of the story. It makes no mention of DNA (the writer having not known of it at the time), and has led to social Darwinism, a horrific interpretation of the book that lead to a great deal of brutal classism in the early 1900s. In the book itself, Darwin uses racial slurs, referring to certain cultures as savages and he even speaks of "favored races".
However, even though the book has led to some bad stuff, displays dated and some downright racist comments, makes comments not even applicable to modern day, and even scientifically makes mistakes and omits sometimes instrumental aspects of the theory, it still is revered today. Understanding where we came from helps us understand where we are going, and understanding the Origin of the Species has helped many scientists see how biology has developed, and where biology has yet to go.
If you're not getting the correlation at this point, I guess I'll just spell it out for you. There is another book that has led to some bad things when people misinterpret it for their own convenience, makes dated comments, and is often not applicable to many of the things we experience today.... Yes... it's the Bible.
Even if you don't respect the Bible on religious grounds, you need to see the Bible for what it is... a snapshot into the history of what makes humans human. Anyone who wants to claim that the Bible has not affected them is an outright liar. The Bible has been a massive bestselling book in the world for the last 2000 years. It has shaped human morality, human diet, and the human outlook on the world for equal amounts of time.
Some people like to think of religion as something that goes against science. It isn't. Science and religion are linked, and everything we know about science has been in some way influenced as a result of the continuing existence of our religious beliefs. The original scientists that wrote the theories we base everything on contained many Christians, and even the atheists were influenced by church. This influence wasn't always conflict. The church was the place most people learned to read (often using the Bible), and many religious figures conducted science to ask the same questions we want to know. The pushback religion gave on new ideas wasn't all that much different than the pushback academia gives to new science ideas nowadays, and although the reasoning might have been different, it wasn't any less flawed.
Both science and religion set to answer the same question, why? I'd go so far as to say that the Bible is one of the oldest, highest conserved recorded science books that exist. Of course, at the time the Bible was written, science didn't really look like science. We had yet to conceive the scientific method and most science took the form of philosophy and observation, and the Bible is filled to the brim with that sort of thing. It offered people information on how to live and how to live happily in a time when that kind of information wasn't easy to obtain.
A lot of things in the Bible we pan as flat out silly now a day, like bans on pork, made sense at the time they were written. To the rabbis who put together these chapters, they frequently saw people die from sickness. They knew nothing of bacteria and parasites, but they did know that people needed to avoid certain foods as they were prepared in that day and age, so that was the information they continued to pass on.
It's fascinating to take the Bible and the advice the Bible gives, and put it into context. You'll find that it turns out to not be all that different from health reports, general surgeon warnings, and self-help advice you'd see in modern days. Therefore, it seems odd to me people attack the Bible so over the top. In 66 books, spanning millennia, written by different people at different times, and you get so worked up because 2 lines in it say something you didn't like? Should we toss away the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because it uses the N-word and the black characters are considered a bit racist? Should we ignore On the Origin of the Species because parts of it don't fit our current understanding of the origin of the species?
Look, I'm not arguing the Bible only delivers truth or that there isn't anything in it for a modern human to not like, but I am saying I think you can choose to interpret the Bible however you want. I think that's the point of the Bible. You take from the Bible the things that you want/or need from it. And while some things seem dated, there are just as many lessons that are timeless.
We interpret everything we read however it is convenient for us. That's why when I read a one direction fan fiction, I have a radically different opinion on it than when a one direction fan reads it. You will read health reports, and maybe you'll eat more vegetables for a while, but if you want to smoke, warning aside, you'll smoke anyway. You'll pick some of the information you want to apply to your life, meanwhile ignoring other large aspects simply because of your personal preference.
Everything in life is made up of stuff you choose to acknowledge or ignore. You may trust doctors on getting vaccinated, then not trust the same doctors when they tell you to take your antibiotic all the way through. We have antivaxxers, flat earthers, climate change deniers, all believing what they want despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. We're told to eat healthy but that doesn't stop the obese man from picking up that next piece of pie. How about vitamins? Vitamins not only don't help you, they may actually harm you, yet there is a billion-dollar industry profiting off your continued consumption of vitamins. Someone might avidly work out every day because health is more important than anything. For another person, that isn't important to them at all, they just want to enjoy life.
You're always going to pick and choose the lessons you want from life, and just because it's the Bible and religion doesn't change that fact. You take the lessons you like, and form your own personal belief system around them. To someone who is racist or homophobic, they're going to take the parts of the Bible that reinforce their beliefs (they do the same for science). The Bible didn't make them that way, they already believed those things and simply used the Bible to justify their beliefs. And to someone who's never read the Bible... well... you've never read it, but you're picking the examples of every Bible thumper shoved at you on the internet and deciding that represents the entire population of Christians, a massive confirmation bias just as misleading as anything.
The Bible is a book that historical reveals how people were taught to live and many have lived for thousands of years. The interpretations have been lost to time, and new ones have been created. Modern interpretations have changed to fit the time. Just like our understanding of Darwinism and the Origin of the Species has changed over time as we came to understand things like DNA and genealogy, our understanding of the Bible and the things it means has similarly evolved.
Therefore, most modern Christians do NOT have a problem with divorce, homosexuality, equality for women, and many other things that people who are not Christians seem to think reflect the entire Christian population. A quick google search shows Christians make up 70% of the population of the USA. If those numbers truly thought the way the media often paints them, then all the progress we've made in recent years wouldn't have been possible.
And even if you do feel the Bible is still "bad", that doesn't negate the roll the Bible has played on human history. It IS the most influential book ever written. YOU HAVE been influenced by it. Some of that influence was negative, some of that influence was positive, but there is a little bit of the Bible in who you are, even if you didn't read it yourself. Maybe your kindergarten teacher read it, and because they read it, they taught you a moral they read from it. Maybe it's simply the fact that when etiquette books were written 50 years ago, they were written with groundwork laid out with the Bible in mind, so thus when you were taught etiquette, you inadvertently were taught using the groundwork of the Bible. Or maybe something else entirely. The point is that there is no possibility of separating human beings from the Bible. It is our history. Its morals have shaped us. And it has affected every aspect of our lives from government, to behavior, to science.
In science, we're always working toward the pinnacle of scientific knowledge. We always seek out understanding in all things. This can sometimes be called the universal law. It's the force or forces that accurately explain everything in the universe and why it works the way it works. Some scientists have expressed a concern. You can approach learning and knowledge from many different directions, and once you start, all of human knowledge is based on the preceding human knowledge. It's like climbing a mountain. You'll start at the base and climb to the top, but you could climb from the south, the north, the west, or the east. You could climb from the south, never seeing anything from the north, just because that entire way of thinking didn't coincide with the steps tooken prior, the history of science. Many argue that it doesn't matter which direction you start climbing, because when you reach the summit, you'll be able to see everything.
However, before we reach the tip of the mountain, the direction we started is important. Somewhere, at the base of that mountain, is the Bible. The reason we're climbing up the mountain in the path we started is because of influences of the Bible and the information within it. It's too late now to return to the bottom and start on another path. We're already halfway up the mountain, and we're using the knowledge of our predecessors to make the next step. That knowledge included and was influenced by the Bible. I'm not arguing whether the Bible is a better foothold. Perhaps a "nonBible" path would have allowed us to climb up faster, with less chasms and holes, less steep cliffs, more footholes... but that doesn't matter, because the Bible path is the path we took, it's the path we're on now. And if you want to say "Dark ages *mumble mumble* of course it held us back!"... Your belief is based on a bad understanding of history (the dark ages aren't as people assume), and your own prejudice. Certainly not something that adheres to anything scientifically proven.
Nothing I'm saying here treats the Bible as anything more than a book. A good book. The good book, if you will. It's the most wildly publicized and wildly influential book. Don't get me wrong. I get it. When something becomes popular sometimes you just get sick of hearing about it. When we have Twilight being talked about everywhere, it quickly gets to the point where you can just get sick of Twilight. That becomes even worst when you feel that Twilight is delivering a bad message, a message you don't agree with.
It's one thing for a piece of literature to get annoyingly cited and shoved in your face, it's another when that story seems to suggest things you vehemently are against. But how many of you who decide to cry and whine about Twilight have actually read it? I've read it. It's actually not that bad. It's not great, and perhaps that pisses people off too, that something "not great" is being treated as great by some people. Sadly, I'm defending Twilight here, but yes, I feel even Twilight has the right to exist.
However, Twilight has been around not even a decade, and already its relevance is shrinking. The Bible has been around thousands of years, and its relevance cannot be denied. I'm not telling you to agree with the Bible. I'm not telling you to respect the Bible. All I'm saying is that you ought to understand it. It will help you understand yourself, as well as the culture you find yourself in. When you simply try to minimize the Bible's roll in society, you don't become one of the "enlightened few" who escape from being sheep, you become the most willfully ignorant person of the group.
Sooooo... Merry Christmas?