How can it be that no posts on this site have mentioned her till now?
…I respect the Bible as one of the world’s greatest books, based on a magnificent body of oral poetry. It is a fundamental text that everyone, atheist or believer, should know. It speaks profoundly to everyone at each stage of life. And of course its hero sagas, from Moses to Christ, have been absorbed into the Western fine arts tradition.
But I do not accept the Bible as divinely inspired. Indeed, most scholars would agree that the New Testament was purposefully written as a point-by-point response to the Old Testament to prove that Jesus was indeed the Messiah whose arrival had been forecast for centuries. Therefore the details of Jesus’ life and experiences were tailored and shaped to echo the language and imagery of the Old Testament.
Personally, I do believe there was a historical Jesus….
It’s an old joke among science fiction fans to treat the Bible as two novels — “The War God of Israel” and “The Thing with Three Souls” — written by the same author many years apart, with many ret-cons that reflect changes in the author’s life. The other sequels — “Dune Prophet” and “Illinois Smith and the Golden Plates of Moroni” — are the equivalent of those books that are still published under V.C. Andrew’s name even though she’s been dead 20 years.
Personally, of all the books in the Jehovah Mythos, I think “The Golden Plates of Moroni” is the best — sure, the historical setting is pure bunk, but it’s the only one that stands on its own as an adventure story.
Though of course none of these are half as good as what the Hindus get.
How can it be that no posts on this site have mentioned her till now?
Exactly what I had been wondering. I’m somewhere between a paleo-con and a Paglia-con, and I was hoping to see at least something close to that view expressed on this website. Paglia’s respect and appreciation for religion — especially for Christianity, especially for the Roman Catholic Church — is deeply missed here.
Regarding her comments on the Bible, how can many people on the Secular Right not be saddened by the decline of biblical literacy? Besides all the other reasons we should all, each and every atheist one of us, read and study the Bible, there’s the reason of cultural unity. It’s been said that the Bible used to be about the only topic on which a university professor could converse intelligently with an uneducated farmer. No longer.
“Though of course none of these are half as good as what the Hindus get.”
My thoughts exactly. Even though I was born into a Hindu family, my parents’ agnosticism ensured that I was not exposed to the Upanishads and the Bhagvat Gita during my teens. However, when I did read the books recently, several times, I understood what Emerson and Schopenhauer were talking about.
@Ploni Almoni
“Regarding her comments on the Bible, how can many people on the Secular Right not be saddened by the decline of biblical literacy?”
We’re not that kind of ‘Right’, sir.
“Besides all the other reasons we should all, each and every atheist one of us, read and study the Bible, there’s the reason of cultural unity.”
Wrongheaded and pernicious. There’s precious little in the Bible worth reading even once, much less using to create some kind of shared cultural foundation. And that’s merely dealing with the quality of its concepts – as a literary work, it has the coherence and general artistic merit you’d expect from cramming together several dozen examples of Iron Age religious credos. I would rather reread the Epic of Gilgamesh a thousand times than read the Bible once more.
Besides, we already have bodies of work that constitute our cultural heritage. Some of them even concern the Holy Trinity (Kirk, Spock, and McCoy).