The Bible

I want to approach this subject eloquently, so I’m going to bare my soul a little in order to explain my views. One of the first books my mother bought for me was “My First Bible”, the watered down gist with cartoon pictures to illustrate. I loved it as a child. I thought it was incredibly fascinating and I requested to visit church. I enjoyed the sense of community, and the beautiful building which we worshiped in. My granddad was a Baptist minister and my grandma was catholic but they didn’t force religion upon me. My mother is a pagan, my stepfather also, but they didn’t force their beliefs on me.
I grew up in Yorkshire, and we were never too far from an expanse of woodland. My many memories of being young were tramping through them with my mother who took care to point out the names of trees and the shapes of their leaves, the many animals and birds, and I happily explored the treasures each season brought. My mom is the kind of mom who let me be a wild spirit. She never cared if I got muddy, or ambled from the path, or jumped into the sea, or took a special fancy to a stick, or returned home with a bag full of seashells, leaves, acorns and brambles. I took less of an interest in church as I got older. I was much more fascinated by what I could touch, smell and hear in the outdoors.
As I reached my teens, my family fell apart. In the whirl of chaos, abuse and panic I grew very sceptical of any deity, let alone this angelic idealisation of the human kind I was presented with. High school only served to make this worse for me in a torment of bullies. I in no way hated the Christian religion it just became increasingly apparent that it wasn’t for me.
The age old query with the bible is whether to take it literally, or symbolically. I never saw it as literal; I see it purely as symbolic. The bible like in all great pieces of literature it is a matter of interpretation. To me it is a central text to a core religion that discusses the morality and state of human nature written by humans, and a representation of the power of story and words. The human nature I find to be incredible, as we are capable of love, compassion, courage, sacrifice and creation which are all held in high regard and depicted in Jesus the son of God.
However we’re also easily consumed by lust, greed, gluttony, anger, envy, laziness, and pride are Christian concepts of the vices of the world, the 7 deadly sins. Admittedly, these aspects are the shitty bits of being a human being and have been evident in people’s cock-ups throughout history. But they are also part of being human. The need to mate is in our biology, and our pride and jealousy can drive us to be better people too. Anger can be born from true passion. Gluttony, well, I don’t mind a damn good feast. In moderation. Greed is when we don’t have respect for how much hard work goes into the things we need to live such as clothing, and food, and housing, which personally I think is a huge product of the modern day period and its mass production and corporations. The old pagan gods mirror these qualities to the extreme! Nobody liked to fuck, and kill and screw people over as much as they do in their mythological tales, yet they were worshipped and are still worshipped. And I don’t take them literally either. The pagan gods for me are purely symbolic personifications of nature, life and death, and the human nature itself. Like the bible, they are beautiful stories, but with rather different tales and teachings from the Christian book.
A lot of the bibles teachings makes sense naturally e.g not to murder, not to be adulterous, not to steal, to love your fellow humankind ect... and it repeats in a lot of religions. Remarkably though, a lot of humans have and continue to fail to follow these very teachings in pursuit of defending the other smaller bits. You all know what those are.
I was watching the last Harry Potter yesterday, and one of the lines in it is (I’m not saying by whom in case anyone hasn’t seen it) “words are a most inexhaustible source of magic, capable of both inflicting injury and remedying it” I agree entirely, and in that case, the bible is an incredible force of magic itself like any great book. It has wielded magic and power for centuries and continues to. And I always abide by that, whenever someone debates the subject with me, I always say it is a great story. (I was really nervous about writing this blog. I'd like to hear what people think too)
Cerridwen