the good book

KBW is just Ken’s Better World, the place where everybody has a crucible in their living room and spend their evenings subjecting all their beliefs to the gem-like flame of reason, and thus walk tall in the world and all the women are strong and all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average.

I think it’s safe to say that whatever you saw about Noah’s Ark was not on PBS. Kind of peculiar that these people had found pieces of the ark but later couldn’t remember exactly where they found them, and you have to wonder what they would have found, some hunk of old wood, and how would they know where it came from?

Well, you did it Beagles, you sent me scurrying through my bookcases for my Elsdon Methodist bible, and according to mine, which is the esteemed St James Version, all the fountains of the great deep were broken up and the windows of heaven were opened, not a word about floodgates. Who knew heaven had windows. Well I guess maybe you could say those fountains of the deep were the waters below, comparing the windows of heaven to some canopy sounds a bit shaky, and then you have to wonder if God meant to say canopies, why didn’t He just say canopies?

Here’s the thing about the bible, it is made up of all these books that were lying around and some were added and some were discarded, and then there were various versions of all these books so only certain versions were incorporated. And those books in turn were written in several different languages so those all had to be translated into English by mere mortal men, ah but the fundamentalist says, God guided their every step so that the resultant book is His word. Then why are there so many different versions of the bible, did He guide certain translators one way and certain translators another way. And even among people who swear by the inerrancy of the bible, they have all kinds of disagreements with each other, so what the fuck?

I wouldn’t call the bible logical in the sense that math, oh and science, and maybe law are. It is full of inconsistencies and contradictions and paradoxes, and people study it all their lives and still don’t agree on what it means.

Actually I think that is what you are saying in your last paragraph. You have this clever method of starting out to say something, but as you expound you make these subtle shifts so that by the end you are saying something else and the unwary reader, like me, who is already formulating his arguments against your original premise, doesn’t notice the shift and prepares his argument but when he rereads what you’ve said, it turns out you were saying something else.

I wonder if that is a dig at me, people who think the bible is bullshit, but have never read the bible. Let me just say that it’s a long Goddamn book, and it’s not like an argument, like a scientific theory, say evolution. The theory of evolution is pretty short, you could probably encompass the whole thing along with corroborating evidence in less than fifty pages, and it is all this therefore that therefore this other thing. The bible is just this happened and then that happened, and there are just a bunch of barely connected stories and there is no clue that this paragraph in Exodus 39:8 is more important than Isaiah 10:11.

And not that any of that means much to me anyway because, as you know, I dismiss the bible out of hand.