My Methodist upbringing mostly lacked the dramatic elements of more demonstrative religions. The only parts of it that were at all compelling were the bits that came out of the bible.

The Christian Bible has, for all its faults, some pretty good stories, especially for a young boy. Natural disasters, bloody battles, amazing miracles, even some naughtysexiness. And it’s written in such an archaic manner (or translated so inaccurately, depending on the version) that the constant slavery, rape and infanticide are hardly noticeable.

Even for adults, there are some valuable fables and parables. Many portions of the text, especially in the New Testament, contain sound moral and ethical lessons. I wouldn’t look for advice on gender equality or race relations, but if you’ve been hit by a car and you’re bleeding out at the bottom of a drainage ditch? Well, there’s a reason why someone who stops to help is called a Good Samaritan.

For me – and, I suspect, for a lot of less rabidly fundamental Christians – that’s all the bible was. It was a collection of interesting stories, with the occasional moral lesson thrown in for good measure. In church, the bible study we engaged in reinforced the selective use of the bible. We studied individual parables and stories. We were referred to specific verses that were supposed to impart wisdom regarding tricky life situations. It wasn’t a coherent whole, read and studied for any wisdom larger than the punchline to a particular parable.

For the average person, deep, critical study of the bible as a text is nearly as impractical as building a supercollider in the basement in order to double check those squares at CERN. Sure, you can read the bible cover to cover and take meticulous notes, but after you wake up with your trusty King James Version stuck to your cheek, you’ll still only know about the contents of the particular translation. Learning archaic Greek, Latin and Hebrew, reviewing ancient documents and placing the text in its historical and cultural context isn’t exactly a project for the weekend hobbyist. Whether you’re looking for theology or literary criticism, you’re going to be relying on a credentialed expert of some sort.

It wasn’t until college that I was exposed to a deeper analysis of the biblical text. The class I took – to fulfill some long-forgotten, arbitrary requirement – was all about Genesis as literature, and it was a major eye-opener. There was the obvious stuff, like the contradictory creation stories. But there was a lot of other stuff that, absent the insight of a trained scholar, I might never have discovered.

There were two bits that really stood out for me. The first was the ubiquity of ancient flood myths. As an example, the flood story in The Epic Of Gilgamesh mirrors the biblical account to a degree that makes it just silly to supposed that the story was original to Genesis. But the big one was the widespread scholarly opinion about the authorship of Genesis. Far from being authored by Charlton Heston while he trudged through the desert on a Paramount back lot, the first book of the Bible was actually written by at least four different ancient authors over a period of several hundred years.

I hesitate to use the word epiphany; there weren’t any bright lights or euphoric feelings. It was more of a soft whooshing sound between the hemispheres of my brain, as I realized that I’d suddenly found a rational hook on which to hang my casual disregard for the religion I’d been taught for my entire life.

Next Time: You’ve just found out the truth behind a lie bigger than Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and Compassionate Conservatism combined. What do you do?

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Tags: apostasy, bible, boring, Christianity, deconversion, divine, drama, false, Genesis, Methodist, United Methodist Church

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Panic!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.