Blogging The Bible

It took me several days to finish David Plotz's very funny blog, "The Complete Blogging The Bible":

http://www.slate.com/id/2150150

Plotz's posts summarises the stories from the Jewish Bible (i.e. the Old Testament of the Christian Bible) for modern readers. By reading his posts, you get a pretty good précis of many of the bible's stories without having to trudge through them yourselves. The bible stories are written in an archaic and tedious style that most modern readers do not have the patience with. That is the reason why many so-called Christians do not actually read the bible themselves, but are contend with what their preachers tell them every Sunday during church service - if they attend church service. But this is a problem. The preachers only tell the "good" parts of the bible to their congregation, and never the "bad' parts. It is when people start reading the bible stories for themselves that they realised that they've been hoodwinked. The merciful and benevolent god that answers all their prayers is actually nowhere to be found in many parts of the bible. Instead, one often finds an angry, jealous, vindictive god that is so cruel that you might as well believe and pray to satan, if they both exist.

I was previously uninterested in the goings-on of the religious. My philosophy of life is that if you want to believe and pray to your god, it is fine with me as long as you don't force me to believe and pray to your god too. However, 9/11 change all that. Suddenly, I saw that religion KILLS. And it is not with Islam. A more serious reading of history, such as the Christian Crusades, the Burning of Witches, the persecution of Galileo shows that Christianity was just as bad as Islam, except that the barbarism of Christianity has been tempered with the benevolence of the Enlightenment. It takes knowledge and reason in science to clear the superstition and ignorance of religion.

But the bible is a very interesting book of history and literature. It is important for both religious and non-religious folks to read it, especially in light of modern day fundamentalist Christians who seek to overturn the fruits that the Enlightenment has brought to society, and who want to bring society back to a barbaric world where rules of morality are determined in books written by misogynistic and ignorant shepherd folks from 2500 years ago. It is important that Christians read the bible in its entirety, so that they know exactly why non-Christians do not like the morals written in that holy book. It is important that non-Christians read the bible, so that they will know why it is so important that we cannot allow our society to be ruled by religious fanatics who seem to believe in fairy tales like talking snakes and virgin births.

David Plotz's series reminded me of Isaac Asimov's "Guide to the Bible" which I have also read recently. However, Asimov's tome covered both the Old and New Testaments, whereas Plotz's blog posts only covers the Old Testament (the Jewish bible). Also, Asimov covers the bible from a historical context, whereas Plotz's posts are like Cliff Notes summaries. Most people would prefer Plotz's treatment, and to his new book, the "Good Book", which is a fun and light treatment on the same subject which he compiled from the material he garnered while doing "The Complete Blogging The Bible" posts.

In the promotion of his new book, Plotz made the following blog entry, "What I learned from reading the entire bible", which is also an interesting read:

http://www.slate.com/id/2212616/pagenum/all

If you find this post interesting, you should at least glance through "The Complete Blogging The Bible". Many of the entries are informative, and very very funny.