This past week, there were news stories ad nauseam about Paster Steven Anderson of the Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona, and the sermon wherein he suggested that we could have an "AIDS-free world by Christmas" if the "gays" were exterminated, as God commands.
On top of that, I have been engaging in a debate with my dearest friend, a girl much younger than I who struggles to understand the world and what she believes. Things came to a head following a discussion of "facts" she has been taught by her church youth leader.
As all of this swirls around in my head, I write these words.
We are each free to choose what the Bible means to us (if anything at all) and, more importantly, what it means. Despite what some would have you believe, it IS open to interpretation. If it were easy to understand, there wouldn't be multiple Jewish sects, the Islamic faith, or the 41,000 Christian denominations which exist.
But the fact is that it is not easy to understand, and that makes sense when you consider that the first half of it is the transcription of thousands of years of oral histories shared by multiple people in one generation with the next and the second half consists of an anthology that includes FOUR different versions of the life of the same man, some of which contradict the other versions. To this anthology is added a dubiously accurate account of that man's followers and the correspondence of a man who never met Jesus, never heard him speak, and NEVER READ THE GOSPELS. What's more, it is the belief of most biblical scholars that many of the epistles weren't even written by the historical figure known as St. Paul.
Most important to remember is that all of this was written down in languages where many words and phrases then had different meanings than they do today. What's more, each copy of these texts was laboriously and tediously copied by hand by countless unknown scribes up until the invention of the printing press (roughly one and a half millennia after the most recent of the books was written), and there are very few versions of these copied texts which are identical. Errors were made in transcription both intentional and unintentional, and much was added or tweaked due to the political beliefs of the scribe or his employer.
And then, on top of that, after more than a century of being written and shared in Latin only (so that the common person couldn't read and understand for him- or herself), it began to be translated into the common languages. (One must remember also that the version of the Bible that exists does so only as a result of a political conference.) Of these versions, there are so many with differing interpretations (based on the personal interpretations of the publishers and translators) that it is impossible for anyone to truthfully say that their Bible is "accurate" in any honest sense of that word.
Ultimately, I believe that the only way to truly understand or interpret the Bible is to try as best as you can to read it for yourself with as open a mind as possible. Read. Study. THINK. If you are left with an understanding of the Bible that makes you uncomfortable or goes against what you believe about life and people and the world around you, READ IT AGAIN. It's up to YOU and YOU ALONE to decide what it means.
The Bible is like a million-sided prism. Each person will have a different perception of it relative to how they are viewing it. If you want to truly see everything it can possibly show, you must look at it from all angles - and that, my Loves, will take a lifetime.
I, myself, do not believe any of it to be literal. Neither Heaven nor Hell exist as realities in my biblical worldview, and I do not believe in an anthropmorphized creator being or the concept of sin as it is taught or the need for redemption as preached by many Christian sects. However, whether I believe in it or not does not change what the concepts mean to me. Should you believe in them, should you believe that there is a place of fire and eternal torture, and should you be comfortable believing that not only will I end up there if I don't believe in God the way you do or, even worse, if I live my life according to the way I was created, that hurts, and it hurts as deeply as any wound possibly can. The Bible is open to as many interpretations as there are minds to do the interpreting. However, when I tell you that THIS IS WHO I WAS BORN TO BE, that's open to one - and only one - interpretation.
Amen.