Noah’s Ark — the more you think about it, the more you realize how impossible it is.
Do religious scriptures have any meaning at all? More and more, I come to see the answer as negative.
Let’s start with the Bible, which is chock full of contradictions. Perhaps the most important one is also perhaps the most important moment in the whole Christian narrative: the empty tomb on Easter Sunday. The Gospels have very different versions of which woman or women were at the tomb, what they saw or didn’t see, and what they did or didn’t do afterwards. This is supposed to be the ‘word of God.’ Would God lie, or contradict Himself?
To most Christians, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter whether the Old Testament says ‘an eye for an eye’, while the New Testament says to ‘turn the other cheek.’ Did Jesus come as a peacemaker, or ‘with a sword’? Who cares?
I find it comical that 200 years ago the Bible was used to justify, according to Americans, slavery, racism, and denying women’s rights, but now, 200 years later, slavery, racism, and denying women’s rights, have now miraculously become bad, according to the very same Bible. You don’t hear much about the ‘curse of Ham’ anymore. I remember, from my youth, Ephesians 5:24: “wives should submit in everything to their husbands.” I’m not hearing that much these days.
The Bible is just a symbol; what it actually says is of little importance. You can justify anything you want with the various contradictory passages in the Bible.
I’m not singling out Christianity for its hypocrisy. Take Islam, where the Quran is written in Arabic. In most countries, the Arabic language is sacred and may not be translated, so most Muslims memorize verses and prayers in Arabic without the slightest idea what they are mouthing. In Africa, I saw young boys learning to recite the entire Quran, without knowing the meaning of one word they were chanting. The Quran is sacred, but most Muslims don’t know what’s in it and can’t even read it.
In fact, much of Islamic doctrine comes not from the Quran, but from the Hadith — sayings attributed by a wide variety of sources to have come from the Prophet Mohammed or his entourage. Just as in Christianity, the Hadith contains many contradictions, and Islam has various schools of thought and interpretations about which verses are more authentic or more important than others.
Here in Buddhist Cambodia, where I live, most people can’t even name the holy scriptures (the Tripitaka — bet you didn’t know that), much less quote from them. People follow the teachings of the monks, and of their family upbringing, oblivious to what the scriptures say.
Just as in other religions, Buddhism has various versions, interpretations, and contradictions among the Tripitaka. Cambodian Theravada Buddhism recognizes the Pali Canon, which differs from other branches of Buddhism.
So why do we have holy scriptures, anyway? Well, for one thing, they symbolize the ancient continuity of the religion. Simply the very existence of the Bible — whatever it says — shows that Christianity has been around for a long time. It gives Christians a sense of rootedness. Same goes for the Quran and the Tripitaka. They give the religious community a pivotal point of unity, even though the (some 45,000) Christian sects interpret the Bible in different ways, or emphasize different points of it.
Those 45,000 Christian sects, which all agree to accept the Bible as holy scripture, but which have 45,000 different interpretations of it, are to me the most convincing evidence that the Bible is an important focal point for Christianity, but that it doesn’t really matter what the Bible actually says.