At least three sets of scribes labour with the lusty zeal of New York gangs to bestow their God with the hyperbolic language of fascism. A motley crew of parchments and papyri cobbled into a patchwork compendium of fables and fantasy.
The Bible is not worthy to be prized as a guidebook for the Meaning of Life. Dr Robert Beckford asks, ‘If the Bible is less than literate, what is there to hold on to?’ The Bible does not become more convincing but more apologetic the more we turn each excusable outburst of fascism into the mush of metaphor.
Those readers harping for a fascist empire-building God and wishing to wade knee-deep in blood may unearth inspiration by digging up Appendix A, a circumcised summary of the misadventures of the fascist empire-building Elohim.
It is time we admitted, from kings and presidents on down, that there is no evidence that any of our books was authored by the Creator of the universe. The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology. To rely on such a document as the basis for our worldview — however heroic the efforts of redactors — is to repudiate two thousand years of civilizing insights that the human mind has only just begun to inscribe upon itself through secular politics and scientific culture. We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself. Sam Harris
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