I haven't read David Plotz' new book "Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible" (yet) but I did find his series "Blogging the Bible" in Slate to be entertaining and remarkable. For me it was truly uplifting, but it is disheartening to hear Plotz write that although the experience of reading the bible was intellectually and culturally fulfilling, it didn't connect him to God.
After reading about the genocides, the plagues, the murders, the mass enslavements, the ruthless vengeance for minor sins (or none at all), and all that smiting—every bit of it directly performed, authorized, or approved by God—I can only conclude that the God of the Hebrew Bible, if He existed, was awful, cruel, and capricious. He gives us moments of beauty—such sublime beauty and grace!—but taken as a whole, He is no God I want to obey and no God I can love. >moreI don't know Plotz, apart from being a loyal reader of Slate and of listener to the Slate Political Gabfest, but I believe his experience with religion is so anchored in scripture that he has difficulty reconciling human beings' interpretation of God with the unknowable reality of God.
As a species we so need to have faith in worldly things, whether they are histories, artwork, rituals or holy wars, that we only consider the validity of relgion and mythology and we are inhibited from considering the validity of a singular creator whose reality is both represented and distorted by human experience.
I'm looking forward to reading Plotz's book, and hope you will to.
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