Monday, May 12, 2008
Does Christianity need a hipster bible? Plus: Irrational fretting over cyberslacking; WTO articles discuss everything but trade itself.
Dec 6, 1999 | Second coming
BY JONATHON KEATS
(11/29/99)
Any attempt to get people to dust off the Bible and approach it in a new way is welcome, and I will be interested to see if the Pocket Canons will have as much impact on religious thinking as Jonathon Keats hopes. However, before he knocks the Gideons Bible again, Keats may want to be aware that the translation the Gideons use is none other than the King James Version that the Pocket Canon has repackaged.
-- Brendan O'Sullivan-Hale
Utter coolness. I have always thought that the Bible in small doses could reach more people faster. And with all that hipness that comes attached to it, maybe some people can get some spiritual ease. Whatever their religion or secularism.
When I first read the King James Version, I was about 6 or 7, and all those begets had me taking a doze. When I got older, though, I read it from time to time for inspiration and found none of the fundamentalist BS that subsequent preachers had told me over the years.
Though my religion has changed over the years, I still find the Bible a good read. So who knows? I just might go down to my local megabookstore, buy this book and sit down to read some probverbs with a cup of cappuccino.
-- Michelle Rudd
While I would agree that fundamentalists have done more damage to the Christian message than legions of avowed anti-Christians could ever hope to do, I submit that Jonathon Keats has missed the point. He suggests that the Bible is good literature (it is) and is at the center of Judeo-Christian morality, but he seems to have failed to grasp that the main point of nearly every story in the Bible is that there is a source from which this morality comes, and that this source (which Christians and Jews, among others, call God) has an enduring love for humanity in general and each individual in particular.
That is the message that the fundamentalists have obscured by their insistance that there is only one way to understand or interpret Biblical writings, and that failure to interpret the writings THEIR way merits divine condemnation. One of the reasons that the Bible is so integral to our culture is that it really identifies a point of moral commonality between a large number of belief systems. As he points out, these writings ring true to most people. The Judeo-Christian belief maintains that this is due to the fact that all morality comes from the same source.
-- James F. George
Keats' silly railery against fundamentalists and his talk of "rescuing the Bible" from them, makes him sound far more like a nutcase zealot than any of the fundies I know. Apart from everything else, his article left me puzzling over his arrogant assumption of personal superiority over those vulgar people who actually read their Gideons and try to live by the words contained therein. Keats is patting himself on the back for having rediscovered the wonder of the Bible, while mocking those who figured out the same thing long ago, and didn't need an intro written by Bono to enlighten them.
-- Hiawatha Bray
Jonathon Keats reveals a lot about the dynamics of modern Christianity and secular culture in this piece. The utter contempt he displays for "fundamentalists" totally betrays the "liberalism" of modern thought. I wonder at those who consider the belief that God knows more than man to be a manifestation of lamentable ignorance. The skepticism expressed by Keats is something with which evangelical Christians do struggle. But our faith in the wisdom of God leads us to painstakingly reconcile what we observe in the world with the eternal, though at times elusive, truths we believe have been given to us in the Bible. I rejoice that more of the unchurched are reading the Bible. A context of honest inquiry is never threatening to the truth.
-- Lenise Baxter
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