So at the early age of seven, I opened my Bible to the first page and began reading. I was determined to read the whole thing and enjoyed plenty of encouragement along the way from older people who seemed to approve of my youthful dedication to God's word. I finished the Old Testament while recovering from Chicken Pox when I was 12. Sometimes I would petition my father for permission to visit the neighbors so that I could watch NFL games on their TV. He would gravely observe that if I would spend as much time reading the Bible as watching football, I would have a better understanding of God's will than many adults. Dutifully I would follow his advice and read for three hours before kickoff.
The next year I lived with my mother in the Smoky Mountains and would often wander up into the hills after school and sit down and read and pray with the breeze whipping through the grass serving to represent the Holy Spirit. It was as close to God as I could get. I finally finished reading the Bible from cover to cover when I was 14.
The next year my older brother pronounced a disturbing opinion to me. He suggested that the Song of Solomon was not necessarily inspired by God. If you've read this portion of the Bible you know it's basically a romantic poem in which Solomon gets pretty mushy about how delicious he finds every curve and contour of his lover (forgetting I presume the other 2000 women whose responsibility it was to sexually pleasure him and make as many children as possible).But I refused and resented this notion of my brother's.
You can't just arbitrarily point to one part of the Bible and say this part isn't inspired by God. If you do that, I argued, someone else can come along and point to another part that they don't happen to relish, and say the same thing. Hey... you know the verse in Exodus that says thou shalt not commit adultery? Well, I think maybe that was added by some scribe who was worried about the way his wife had been ogling the plumber. See how that could spin out of control?
Yeah... maybe God didn't have anything to do with that passage about turning the other cheek. I think maybe that was just some pansy inserting his own ideology in there because he was tired of people ridiculing him for his lack of gonads.I reminded my brother how it says in II Timothy 3:16 that
All scripture is given by inspiration of God,
and is profitable for doctrine,
for reproof, for correction,
for instruction in righteousness.
And I was thoroughly perplexed when this failed to pesuade him. My stance was that you have to accept the entire word of God as being literal and infallible or you may as well discard the entire volume inasmuch as it would defy credulity to ascribe to any man the wisdom to go through the book and sort out what God agrees with and what is irrelevant. No, I persisted, God would not let anything imperfect into a book upon which rested mankind's best hope of getting to know his maker and his salvation. If God wants us to understand vividly just how hot Solomon was for his concubine of the moment 2995 years ago, then it must be of the utmost spiritual significance. And trust me, somewhere someone is making the most earnest argument to this effect, replete with symbolism about how Solomon represents Christ and the concubine represents the Church and her twin breasts signify the alpha and the omega while the erection is obvious code for the resurrection.
Ah... how black and white the world was then. I reminisce rather often back to that fraternal discussion because you see, it was a different time for me. Since then my older sister became an atheist. And then my little brother. And then I did too. The older brother who was able to hold onto the Biblical baby while simultaneously throwing out the bath water was the last holdout, but four years after our conversation about Solomon's virility, he too acknowledged a lack of faith in God's existence. But beyond a rejection of religion, I've relinquished my proclivity for seeing the world and its issues with such rigid perception.
By which I mean that I rather frequently shrug my shoulders with the realization that there are not so many good guys and bad guys as I used to think. There's just a whole lot of people. And it always comes back to how you look at a thing.
Hitler. What if he'd frozen to death because of his nurse's negligence when he was only an infant? Is there anyone, who having learned of such an incident, would not view it as a pitiable tragedy?
Or consider the plot in the movie Crash where a cop, infused with racist bigotry, is sexually and spitefully molesting a black suspect in front of her husband. At that point you're just sick with the despicability of what you're watching, but then later this same cop is the first on the scene of a car accident and heroically saves the life of the same woman he'd violated earlier. Hmm... what to make of that! My inclination to rip his fucking head off had I been witness to his earlier transgression, wouldn't have done the woman much good, had it deprived her eventual rescuer of his life.
Politically I look at the wars we wage against terrorism. How much propaganda is our support based upon? How much corruption. Does torture save lives? Is it really torture? How much torture do we not know about? Are we really the good guys? Which side has killed the most innocent lives? And how many of those innocent lives were destined to grow up and become the next Hitler?
Yes I sometimes miss my simple childhood when it was all crystal clear black and white.
