Secular New Year

The first day of 2011 and the Archbishop of Canterbury is trying to get me to read the King James version of the bible on the one hand, while members of one religion are bombing and murdering members of another religion on the other hand.

It is no surprise that a churchman recommends bible reading. But the evidence of the terrible damage that uninstructed bible reading can do is plain to see. It is a collection of writings from many periods, informed by many and various prejudices but zero knowledge, representing a variety of autocratic and misogynistic attitudes that, when filtered by Enlightenment sensibilities is not absolutely without merit. Reading it intelligently and profitably requires specialist education, sadly lacking in most believers. The best modern translations come with introductory notes, and are made with a knowledge of the original languages that has only been available comparatively recently. On the other hand the King James version, now 500 years old, was made with comparative ignorance, especially of Hebrew, and into a form of English so different from our own that many of the sonorous phrases it contains themselves require translation.

So one has to suppose that Dr Williams is recommending bible reading for its literary value. Some passages do read very well, not least the more dramatic, and blood-thirsty, stories in the Old Testament. But these do not exemplify the values I'd want any children of mine to acquire. Or there is that ever-popular passage in the New Testament for reading at weddings in which St Paul extols love. I could once have given an hour's lecture on the meaning of the Greek word agape which St Paul uses, which has little to do with what is going on in the minds of most of the couples whose weddings I have conducted.

But it does read well aloud: the structure of the prose is marvellous. I sincerely hope that is what Dr Williams had in mind. But I doubt it.

I had met and worked with many thoughtful Christians who were willing to study to understand the relevance of the Bible for today and whose moral values were empowered by their sympathy, their empathy and their rationality. Their faith somehow withstood the shocks that such a courageous approach will give it, and I have nothing but admiration for them.

Unfortunately I have also been confronted by others whose ignorance was only equalled by their arrogance, and these have sadly been the majority. These are people whose instincts are closer to those of the Bronze Age authors of the Old Testament and who are temperamentally inclined towards intolerance and bigotry which does not stop far short of violence if at all. It's shocking when two apparently sweet old ladies call at your door to bring you good news about the love of Jesus and, when opposed in argument, inform you of the punishment that awaits you after death with ill-disguised relish. I forget which of the ancient sages of Christianity it was who taught that one of the joys of Heaven was watching the damned suffer in Hell - but he has his followers today.

Religion encourages believers to see themselves as different and better than others. At one place where I worked there were 3 Baptist churches. The regular, main-stream, Baptists joined in with the other local churches and while they generally held stricter views than the others, were pleasant enough people it was easy to associate with. The other two were splinters of the first, and one a splinter of the other, though I forget which was which. These were the Full Gospel Baptists and a group rejoicing in the name of the Strict & Peculiar Baptists, which was extremely apt for them. These two small congregations kept themselves apart from all other Christians, and from each other, as they each thought that they alone were saved, and the rest destined for Hell.

The militants of every faith are prepared to underwrite tactics that would be condemned as war crimes by anyone else. There have been examples of this in 2010 that made my blood run cold. And from there it is only a short step to those who find in their Scriptures not just permission but encouragement to slaughter innocent men, women and children. Sometimes this is because of a disagreement about matters of belief which are unsupported on both sides. Religious belief always boils down to a matter of opinion. Sometimes it is out of passion for the perceived will of God and in callous disregard for whoever finds themselves a victim. Thus worshippers at a church today, and at several mosques and religious festivals throughout last year have been viciously butchered, just as God ordered his prophet Elijah to butcher the prophets of different god, and his people to indiscriminately slaughter the citizens of Jericho, according to the Old Testament.

If religion were solely a matter of reason and rationality, only the most evil people of today would have anything to do with it. Unfortunately it is an emotional matter, and adherence to a religion almost as gut-level as sexual preference, and therefore beyond the reach of reason most of the time. That way even good people get caught up in it.