The Bible is not the literal word of God. This attitude is what causes so many to despise and condemn fundamentalist Christians. The Bible was written by men who did their best to try to explain extraordinary, natural phenomena in a way that made sense to them. They also laid down standards based upon a patriarchal society that is not relevant to today, and has nothing to do with God’s relationship with man.
Those who believe the Bible to be the inerrant word of God are no better than the Taliban of Islam. They are equally intolerant, just relying upon different texts to justify their own form of bigotry and judgmentalism. There are parts of the Bible that demonstrate instances where men have encountered the divine and tried their best to explain those experiences. But you have to deconstruct the literal words and read it as a whole. It is full of ignorance, inaccuracies, contradictions, incorrect history, and a variety of other mistakes.
Its power rests in its description of the way that men from time to time have encountered, and been used by God. It gives us glimpses into his true nature, and what it means for each of us. To understand it properly requires knowledge of the cultures which existed over the thousands of years it was written by a variety of authors. To understand it in context requires a certain amount of blind faith deconstruction.
Actually the Bible can be summarized easily. I have said this before other places, but it essentially boils down to Love. No Buts…. No judgmentalism. No condemnation. No claim to a perfect knowledge of the truth. No rejection. No claim to moral superiority. No guilting. Just acceptance of everyone. Get that right and then you can talk about the incidental details. Until then you would be well advised to actually educate yourself as to the true meaning of scripture. Getting it in the pews from the church may create knowledge of what is written in the book, but it is indoctrination, not knowledge. True knowledge comes from studying the culture, the language, the literary style, and trying to read through the clutter that is blindly accepted by most denominations for the purpose of control, not to communicate the nature of God.
