The Bible: Literal Word of God Or Not?

So this morning I was driving my husband to work and he was talking to me about one of his religious co-workers who says she will not have sex until she is married. He told me he is going to ask her today where in the Bible it says that you are supposed to wait until marriage to have sex. He then said what many liberal Christians say: the Bible is only to be taken as a guideline and shouldn’t be taken as the literal truth.

I used to believe as my husband still does: the Bible is a guideline and there are parts of it that should be ignored as outdated. But the Bible is supposed to be the inspired word of God, and as such, free from error and human bias. If the bible is not to be read in the literal sense and portions of it are outmoded or outright wrong, then why read it as anything other than a work of fiction?

The entire basis of Christianity is laid right in Genesis with the Fall of Man. It is because Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil that God had to sacrifice himself on the cross for “our sins.” If that didn’t happen, then what was Jesus’ sacrifice for? 

We know that the Genesis creation story absolutely did not happen. Science has proven it wrong…yes, I know some Christians don’t “believe” in evolution and think that dinosaurs and humans walked on Earth at the same time, but really, most reasonable people can see that the creation story is just a myth.  What I can’t understand is why these normally reasonable people would continue to believe in a book that has been proven to be factually wrong…not only on the origins of Man but on basic historical facts as well.

So much misery and suffering in the world has resulted and still results from belief in the Abrahamic faiths. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a case in point. The Israelis are so unyielding on holding on to every piece of land in the Gaza Strip because they believe this land was given to them by their god…based on the  words written in an ancient book.

Conservative Christians, mostly Evangelical Protestants, in the United States have been on a crusade for the last thirty years to roll back the clock on civil liberties for minorities and women. They actively work to continue to deny homosexuals of their basic rights and the right to get married. They kill abortion doctors and fight to keep the death penalty legal. They dream of a day when the United States will be a theocracy: when Biblical law, as interpreted by them, of course, will be the law of the land.

Of course, the Bible has been used through-out history to oppress and enslave others. It has been used to justify torture, murder, and all manner of privations. Why continue to perpetuate this cycle by believing any portion of this book? Does it really make any sense? I don’t think so.