Going To sunday School, Sorta, Part II

(continued from previous article)...MY BIBLE READING did not proceed smoothly. A tome of nearly a million words written in Elizabethan English was for me a prodigious, daunting undertaking, "heavy lifting" as we like to say. Then too, I was easily distracted as a seventeen year old, by rock n roll, phone calls, televised football, thoughts of girls, and many other forms of temptation. I Holed up alone in my bedroom, but my older sister barged in a time or two, expressing amazement that I was attempting to read the entire Bible, and she ridiculed me for it. I thought her attitude strange for someone who attended church regularly. I had hoped she might be favorably impresssed, but she instead chose to display her usual, abrasive personality. Her derisive behavior doubtless derived from her knowing that I was not at all religious, never had been, and most likely never would be. In her shallow mindedness she probably couldn't even conceive of anyone reading the Bible without being a devout Christian. Why would anyone read the Word of God for purely educational, intellectual reasons? Heaaven forbid that anyone should try to self educate. My best guess is that she to this day has never read the Bible in its entirely, like an actual book, but has only "cherry picked" scriptural passages, like most people. Like most people, she has no idea what she's missing. I, however, do. My mother approached me, wondering what I was up to, sequestered for hours. She seemed to assume that I was engrossd in my regular reading material, mainly scinece fiction. I allowed her to dwell in her misconception, but she was properly informed by my sister, from whom I had initally tried to conceal my true activity, without success. The Bible alternately fascinated me, bored me, and repulsed me. I recall that my father, himself a religious cynic, once described it as a "sex novel", what with all the "begats" and such. Though an intelligent well educated man, my father, in his anti-Biblical bias, failed to acknowledge that the Bible is much more a violent novel than a sex novel, by our modern standards. And verily, violent it is. Almost all of its explanations of the creation of the universe and the human species seemed primitive and absurd to me, steeped as I already was in modern science by my high school studies. The religious beliefs expressed in both the Old and the New Testaments likewise seemed primitive and barbaric, and still do. Based upon my I hope unbiased reading of the sixty six books contained in this small "library" of ancient manuscripts, the Biblical God came to seem to me a terribly vicious and irrational entity, murderous, genocidal, unrelentingly, brutally harsh. Over the next fifty years, my opinion did not change, and has not changed. To me the Christian religion is a worldview thousands of years old and outdated in a modern world in which science has immeasurably improved our knowledge of the cosmos and of our place in it. During the past two thousand years humanity has made enormous advances in its knowledge of the universe, but has made scarcely any progess at all, so it seems to me, in the areas of philosophy and religion. New forms of the Christian religion are being invented all the time. During the relatively brief existence of the United States, dozens of them have emerged from within American culture. I keep waiting for one which makes sense to me, and is compatable with, rather than contradictory of, what we now know about the universe. I may have a lot longer to wait.