An Atheist Reads the Bible Part 248: Concluding Thoughts.

Concluding Thoughts

Welcome to the penultimate instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Bible version).

In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the King James Bible, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.

For more detail, see the introductory post http://bit.ly/2F8f9JT

For the online KJV I use, see here http://bit.ly/2m0zVUP

And now:

The End

Over the past year I’ve posted chapter by chapter summaries and discussions of the King James Version of the Bible on pretty much a daily basis. As mentioned in the introductory post, I chose the KJV in part because I knew that a lot of common idioms came from there, and also because, having read the New English Version of the NT, I find the language in the modern versions rather flat and uninteresting. That meant that at times I encountered sections that were all but impenetrable, but then that’s a risk I knew going in. Besides, the website I was using had verse-by-verse links to alternative translations, and a lot of the time the modern versions were no better. Beyond that, sometimes I reverted to looking up obscure words or verses in secondary discussions but for the most part I wanted to keep my impressions purely based on how I interpreted the text.

I fully admit that compared to a scholarly exegesis my interpretation is probably very shallow, but again I wanted to get the sense of what one can take away from a general reading with no attempts to uncover specific allegory or subtext. And with that in mind….

What Did I Learn?

The short answer is … not a lot. At least, if one considers the Bible to be a source of wisdom, I found nothing in there that made me stop and rethink my life, and precious little coherence in the way of any kind of underlying message. In some ways perhaps it’s a bit difficult to unpick my own system of ethics that I’ve learned from other sources over the years from whether or not they picked them up from Biblical teachings, but for the most part these lessons are for people to tease out of the text for themselves. On the one hand, this perhaps can be seen as a better way of getting wisdom, on the other it also leaves it open to abuse by interpreting the text to reinforce one’s own preconceptions.

Apart from that, most passages that were highlighted as “wisdom” tended instead to give rather trite or nonsensical advice that I fund deeply underwhelming.

Best Bits?

Beyond the search for wisdom, then, I did find it generally entertaining; a mix of mythicised history and historicised myth, intermixed with theological musings, building instructions, poems, songs, letters and some interminable genealogies. Some bits were well-written, a lot was dreadful.

My favourite parts were those where the author was making a very personal search for faith; mostly in the Psalms but also sometimes in the Epistles and a few of the prophets. Second to that were those parts with a very definite forward narrative, largely the historical parts, with various demented kings.

The prophets became a bit repetitive after a while, and prophecies are my least favourite bit, particularly when they become overly allegorical to the point of uselessness. It all seemed a way to me of saying a lot and meaning very little.

Did it Convert Me?

Again, the short answer is, no. I’ve seen the argument presented that if one “just reads the Bible” then all will become clear and Christianity will beckon. I’m afraid not. For one thing, as I pointed out in the introduction, the God argument never seemed to take hold in me anyway, for another; there really isn’t a very compelling argument for God, or Christ, presented in the Bible. The best it can do is assert things, which is not an argument. In fact, by presupposing certain aspects of God it in fact undermines itself. Witness, for example, the mental contortions that the authors of Kings and Chronicles have to go through to justify why “God’s Chosen People” keep losing battles, or why nobody seems to listen to God’s prophets, and not to mention the Babylonian Exile. All of these events make a lot more sense if you look at them with the assumption that God doesn’t exist (or at the very least, exists but is utterly indifferent to the Israelites).

And as for Christ, things get even murkier. On the one hand you have a man Jesus who is teaching His followers to give up material attachment and follow him, but also to be charitable, and something about a “Kingdom of God” which is supposed to come in His follower’s lifetime so is perhaps a new age, either spiritual or political or both, but is also interpreted as life after death by later followers. And then the mystical figure Christ which is supposedly this Jesus died and reborn that either cures sins or grants everlasting life, depending on which Apostle is writing, based on nothing more than assertions that this is so. As I mentioned at the end of the gospels, it’s an intriguing mix of mythical motifs with a charismatic character, but unless you go into reading this with the assumption already that it is true, there’s nothing there to convince the reader that it is anything more than assertions.

In summary then, sorry Christians, but I gave it a fair crack, I think. I understand the Bible better now, but I’m no closer I think to understanding the mind of the believer, nor why one should pick this mythology over others.

Coming Next

Up next, I’ve got a readthrough of the Qur’an set and ready to go. After that, if I don’t get deleted, I’m back to the Bible with the Apocrypha, before moving away from the Middle Eastern Monotheisms for a bit; probably into the Bhagavad Gita.