Billy, Ya Let Me Down

So Billy Graham. Has he always been a conservative tool and I just wasn't paying enough attention? All these people that I thought about positively during my Christian upbringing. I even put one of his delightful book titles in a GUH song. Geesh. James Dobson, whose book we read as a family to help my transition into puberty. Turns out? Right wing tool. I couldn't listen to him on the radio for two minutes without becoming furious.

These people who take the extremely powerful name of God and use it to promote their pet political agendas really piss me off, especially when I find those agendas un-American, restrictive, and hateful. What makes me maddest is that if someone was to ask me if I was a Christian I would say definitively yes, but I would feel the need to add "...but I'm not a misogynist, homophobic, idiot asshole."

I believe the bible is the inspired word of God; a beautiful, wonderful, endlessly engaging, guiding, and challenging holy scripture that I elevate above all other books. I'm also able to admit that a lot of it is really specific to the time and place it was written and a lot of it is just fucking weird and you can't possibly live by it all.

Perhaps unfortunately, what you CAN do, if you want to, is take any position you want to and support it with cherry-picked quotes from the bible. Whatever else you can say about it, the bible is versatile.

Plus, this country was not founded strictly on biblical values. And despite my own personal love for the bible, I think that's a good thing. Countries that try to mix holy scripture with governance never look like good places to live from where I'm sitting. America was founded to promote life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Some people think that means running as far away from the bible as they can get and I respect their right to do that.

My favorite moment from any of the debates, Presidential or Vice-Presidential, was Joe Biden admitting that his Catholicism told him that abortion was wrong but that he didn't think he had the right to force that belief on someone else. I agree on both points. This is the line that we people of faith must walk as we vote and help to create public policy in this wonderful, amazing, miracle of a country we live in. (I also have a fervent love of America but again there feel the need to add "...but I'm not a etc.")

So how can we solve the original problem, that is that the very words "Christian" and "American", which are both so precious to me, have come to suggest a hateful, misogynist homophobe who would have us living in an Iranian style theocracy? How about if someone says something like this:

I'm a Christian who believes in the bible and I think it's time for America to acknowledge marriages regardless of the gender of the two people involved.

I'm a Christian who believes in the bible and I don't think states or the nation should be making decisions about women's bodies for them.

Whew! I feel better! I think that's what I needed to do. Okay, now you.

The Bible

Hey readers! I am lazy! Help me! Do my research!

I read a lot of books. In the last week or two I read Hotel De Dream, One For The Money, and Star Trek: Destiny: Books One and Two. I was about to read Inside Out by Larry Crabb for a book study an old friend is leading online. This is a book about Christianity. Then I was thinking how I would like to read the whole bible. (Not as a New Years Resolution either. I don't do those because they don't work any better than, say, July Resolutions - time of year is just a coincidence.)

Here's the thing though. The Bible is handicapped as a work of actual readable literature. It's always broken up into tiny columns. It's got numbers all over it that break up what narrative and/or poetic flow there is. I love the Bible but it's hard for me to really read it and get into it like I do with other books. So how can you help me?

I seem to remember something about a Bible that came out a few years ago that attempted to dispel these chronic handicaps to the Bible's readability. It may have been endorsed by Bono. I would love to read a Bible with normal typesetting and no numbers (okay, maybe just chapter numbers, but no verse numbers). It doesn't have to be in modern language, in fact I would rather it were not. I've read the Bible enough that I like the syntax, grammar, and language the way it is. It's just the way it's printed on the page that always makes me feel I'm trudging through mud. So is there such a thing? A Bible with old school syntax and language but modern, readable typesetting?