Dateline: March 21, 1999
Most people's understanding of both the bible and of many aspects of history are woefully inadequate. This is due in part to not spending the time necessary to learn what is necessary, but also in part to faulty and erroneous texts.
Two books I've read recently would be a big help in that regard - one on the bible, and one on history. Both are of great use to freethinkers who wish to understand either Christianity or world history.
The first book is Don't Know Much About the Bible: Everything you need to know about the Good Book but never learned by Kenneth C. Davis. It's a sad fact of life that the vast majority of people who profess to believe in the Bible and attempt to follow it in their daily lives know precious little about it. Not only are they ignorant about what is actually in the bible, but they are incredibly ignorant about what has developed out of the past couple of hundred years of scholarly work on the Bible. Indeed, there is a tremendous amount of prejudice against "German rationalism," the term often applied to any form of higher, scholarly criticism. This is perhaps because such critiques of the bible started in Germany and there may be a hope to associate it with Marxism, Nazism, etc.
The second book is Richard Shenkman's book Legends, Lies & Cherished Myths of World History. Christians like to tell others about how their religion is a "historical religion," which is to say that they claim that their religion is historically factual, unlike other faiths. If Christianity has a reliable, verifiable historical basis, then that would weigh heavily in its favor. This is supposed to distinguish Christianity from other religions which are supposedly "only" based upon myths, like Hinduism.
But one question which we can reasonably raise is just how reliable our general historical knowledge actually is. After all, if what we commonly regard as "common knowledge" of history isn't true after all, then perhaps the same can be said of the purported history of Christianity. Shenkman's book addresses just that point, and brings home the fact that we definitely do not know as much as we think we do.
| Quote of the week:
It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand. Mark Twain |
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