People quoting Bible verses at each other really bugs me. I posted up this video which is part of Believe Out Loud's campaign calling on people of faith to "break the silence" and stand up for "full LGBT equality in the church." It's a beautiful video and a message worth spreading. Of course, when I posted it, I immediately got Biblical "literalists" telling me how clear the Bible is on homosexuality and, my favourite, simply leaving Bible verses. Let me reiterate: people quoting Bible verses at each other really bugs me.
I realised, however, it's not just Bible quoting that bugs me. It's the outsourcing of morality and the ideology which says, "This person/book said it, so it must be true." I get why people don't like Christians; there's this stereotype that Christians don't think for themselves based completely on this incessant outsourcing of morality. It's not "I think murder is wrong because my own conscious tells me so," but "I think murder is wrong because a book (the Bible) tells me so." What, then, if the Bible told you murder is okay? Or what if the translation you're reading is wrong?
After defending my right to be a Christian without agreeing with all Christians and calling out the incessant quoting of Bible verses as if that might settle the matter ("I can quote Bible verses too, but doing so is almost always just a fear-based tactic which preys on others and belittles their beliefs while asserting one's own Biblical-knowledge-dominance."), I was told, "I quote so that it's not my words, but what is written." And that is exactly what bugs me.
The Bible, as I reminded my homophobic Facebook friends, was not written in modern-day English, but in Ancient Greek. We only read what someone else says someone else said happened. Try reading some Shakespeare and then tell me how clear everything is. It's not, and that's the same language and much more recent. It is an old, changed language with plenty of slang we're not so sure about. I love my Bible, and I am fully in favour of more people reading and studying it, but just because one guy decided to translate one Greek word as "homosexual" (despite there not being any word in Ancient Greek which expresses homosexuality as understood today) while most other versions have something else doesn't mean that God really meant "homosexual" there. We don't know for sure, and so we have to check our own conscious to figure out what matches up.
And remember, as Abraham Lincoln once said, "People often misattribute quotes on the Internet."
1 comment:
It seems that the real issue is the question you asked above: "What if the Bible said to murder people?" Meaning that the translation issues are somewhat besides the point, because progressives would not suddenly turn into literalists if we understood the Greek perfectly. The largest divide between literalists and proressives is how to interpret the Bible, regardless of how it the Greek translated. (*conscience, not "conscious" :P)
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