On struggles regarding reading the bible

This is a response to Beth Demme’s thoughtful post, I’m Normal And I Read The Bible.

I was raised to believe that the Bible held all the answers I would ever need in life.  At ten years old I watched my father — a preacher in a small fundamentalist congregation — search for a way to prove the book’s divinity to potential converts, and then to himself. When he failed to find proof, he left the ministry and abandoned his belief in God. In my exploding teen years I came to see the text as arrogant, overdemanding, blindered… how could it blanketly deny all those other spiritual paths that maintained just as vehemently to have their own revelations?  Talking to other members of the church about my concerns made me feel like I was trapped in an asylum of Stepford wives and that I would never get straight answers there.  I determined to study more of the world’s religions and make peace with God on my own terms… In university I denounced the concept of a personal God (the “old man in the clouds”).  I studied cognitive science, artificial intelligence, philosophy, eastern mysticism, and meditation.

My heart remained convinced  that this existence matters profoundly, and that even the vicious brutality of things like bone cancer in children — which speakers like Stephen Fry use with great effect to make YHWH look like an evil psychopath that only a mind-control victim would have any interest in following — could somehow be redeemed by love.  Passages from the Bible resonate with me as speaking deep and honest truth about the nature and purpose of this existence we find ourselves in, and so I can’t stop delving into the “Word” for direction on who to be, and how to be.

My sweetheart, in trying to understand what I meant by insisting I still place a high importance on faith, asked me “how do you know this isn’t just brainwashing from all the indoctrination you received as a child?”  I can’t prove that it isn’t.

There are things in the Bible that fill me with horror.

If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them: Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear. — Deuteronomy 21:18-21

My blood runs cold.  Let me tell you about abusive parents whose children turned to rebellion and drunkenness to self-medicate and preserve any sense of self-worth in the face of soul-crushing gaslighting from their (also abused) parents.  Should these kids be murdered to preserve the smooth functioning of a tribe that doesn’t know how to love its children?

Now go and smite Amalek and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.’” — 1 Samuel 15:3

????? 

 And there are the oft-trotted out proscriptions against both homosexuality and the eating of shellfish as “abominations”. Some argue that the Old Testament law no longer applies to Christians, whose message of grace supplants the legalism of the brutal early days of Jewish tribalism. There are a lot of separate issues here.

I don’t expect to ever find an intellectual algorithm which I will find authoritative in justifying the cherry-picking of any subset of passages as Law…. and my (God-given?) intelligence rebels vehemently against accepting the book whole-cloth according to the democratic interpretations of any denomination or school of thought.  If the Book is divine, I have to see it as divinely appointed to be wrestled with by each of us, the way Jacob wrestled with the angel for his blessing and his revelation.

Passages like those quoted above compel me to treat the Bible to this day as an unfathomable mystery, something that screams out to me constantly that it contains THE TRUTH, but which presents itself to my intellect as more of an angelic sparring partner than a guru I can submit to.  My childhood turned me into an anti-authoritarian.  A libertarian.  A masochist seething with rage against those who would dominate me.

And yet when I read so much of the Bible my heart sings out in resonance and says YES, this describes life more accurately than any ideology I’ve ever heard put forward.

I believe that the story of Jonah tells the dead truth about the consequences of not following the dictates of our conscience.  As long as we’re not doing what we feel we need to be doing, not just our selves are in danger, but violent storms are ravaging the lives of all those around us.

I believe we are not fighting against flesh-and-blood enemies, but against evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against mighty powers in this dark world, and against evil spirits in the heavenly places.  I believe that selling one’s soul to Satan, so-to-speak, (setting one’s will on a goal and to hell with the consequences) is the de facto way to get ahead in this world, and the ultimate consequences of it are every bit as bloody as all of Western literature depicts.  Take Dorian Gray for a godless libertine’s take on the same old old story.

I believe that we can choose to make a commitment that you could call “being born again in the spirit” as a real and only option for breaking all the symbiotic vampiric contracts by which we trade our innocence and honesty and ability to see each other clearly for various concessions, secrets, ways of hiding our selfishness, embarrassment, and moral ugliness, though we can never hide it from the real innocents who like children still see in an instant which emperors are naked and which are wearing clothes.

The Bible is not the only place I find vistas of wisdom.  I’ve written about some of these on this blog (e.g., Orpheus, the Bhagavad Gita).

But as for reading the Bible…

Though the rewards of reading the text are great, I don’t do it very often.  Out of pride, out of not wanting to be allied with arrogant ideologues, out of fear of getting sucked back into a mental box where I feel under obligation to parrot a party line.

There are very few sections that I am presently reading with any intensity.  The skeleton that holds my studies in place is Matthew 22:36-40:

³⁶ “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

³⁷ Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’^{[a] 38} This is the first and greatest commandment. ³⁹ And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’^{[b] 40} All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

That’s one I can get behind whole-heartedly and I try to let it inform my actions daily.

But I feel guilt about not reading / wrestling with more of the Book, because I also believe that the description of the “Full Armour of God” in Ephesians contains the truth about how to defend ourselves spiritually in order to remain free and capable to do what is right whenever it is called for.  And the sword of the Spirit is said to be God’s word.  When Jesus is tempted in the desert he quotes scripture every time to escape the temptations of the devil.  So I do feel unarmed without a better understanding of this baffling, mysterious, mind-wracking scripture.

Here is what matters right now. I need you to know:

I will listen to you.
I will take your perspective seriously.
I will not ignore or stereotype the way you see religion or reality just because it doesn’t agree with this path here that I am on.  It is so important to me to keep comparing perspectives.

It hurts sometimes when I try to talk with people about this struggle that is such a big part of my consciousness and, well, a lot of people have a lot of very good reasons for not wanting to engage at all.  I feel utterly alone on this journey so often, and I’ve embraced that as probably an essential part of the business of living.  But if you want to tell me about the path you are on, I want to hear it.