(October 11, 2013 at 1:11 pm)apophenia Wrote: The bible has a few virtues, but many, many more faults. And as Esquilax pointed out, those virtues would still be virtues whether or not they were 'god-breathed' or not.
If you believe the bible is good literature, I have to suspect it is you that haven't read the thing. Most of its value as literature comes from the creativity of the translators of the King James version, as well as a hindsight bias from our cultural aesthetics gaving been strongly influenced by its influence on literature as a whole, largely by virtue of its ubiquity and religious centrality. I rather suspect its literary virtues in the original Greek or Hebrew are largely unknown to any but experts. As a work of pure literature, it is easily outdone by any modern classic of fiction. As an example of wisdom literature it is perhaps worthwhile, but the bulk of it isn't wisdom literature, and again, we have a bias towards it for reasons having nothing to do with its virtues as wisdom literature. And again, even restricting it to wisdom literature, it is easily matched or outclassed by, to my view, the Tao Te Ching, Sun Tzu's Art Of War, the Bhagavad Gita, the poetry of Rumi, and many others. The Eloquent Peasant is far more compelling in its simplicity and given its source. No, the Christian bible is shit, and holding up the opinions of a few people who are either too polite too say so, or are simply wrong, doesn't change that.
I was just going to respond with "fuck you," but what you said is so much better.
Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own - Bertrand Russell
