This is part of an ongoing series that will be posted each Monday. You can read the introduction to this series by clicking here.

Look! Up in the sky – and all around us! It’s MONDAY. Time once again for Monday School! STILL “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday!” Remember? If not, keep reading – maybe it’ll all suddenly come back to you like a revelation from on high.

Today’s Lesson: Does Reading Silly Bible Passages In Context Remove Any Of Their Silliness?

If you’ve attended Monday School before, you probably know that I often cite the Bible chapter and verse in an attempt to point out exactly why it’s an absurd collection of writings we really ought to condemn and reject instead of worship, praise, or live our lives by.

If you’ve attended more than a few Monday School sessions, you probably also know that Christians often respond to these chapter and verse criticisms of mine with rather harsh hoots of “Ha! You’re just taking things out of context! You need to read these passages in light of what the Bible says as a whole! Once you do, all these passages you criticize perfect sense!”

There are several problems with this claim of theirs.

First, Christians themselves disagree about what many passages mean despite their best attempts to read them in light of what the Bible as a whole says, so it’s pretty odd for them to recommend that procedure as the means to enlightenment.

Second, they fail to make clear why we should read specific passages within the context of the Bible as a whole but not then go on and read the Bible itself within the context of the ancient times and mindsets which created it. Even if a given silly passage might somehow make sense within the context of the Bible as a whole, the fact remains that the Bible itself loses much of its credibility when seen within the broader context of human history, human psychology, and all the other cultures which have created and assembled similar “We have a hotline to God!” collections of myths.

Third – and perhaps most importantly as far as the average Monday School student is concerned – I have thought at length about how individual passages of the Bible fit into its overall message. Far from explaining away the silliness and immorality of individual passages, this procedure serves to underscore the fact that the Bible as a whole is fundamentally flawed and not merely in error here and there.

Consider Biblical morality in the context of the Bible as a whole rather than as reflected in isolated passages….

Throughout the Hebrew scriptures (commonly called the Old Testament by Christians), a dry, unbending, intellectually dead legalism is repeatedly emphasized at the expense of a genuine morality which takes into account specific circumstances and the greater good.

We perhaps get our first whiff of this legalism when the Bible’s God expels Adam and Eve from the Garden before they can eat of the Tree of Life and obtain for themselves an immortality which God Himself seems unable to reverse after it’s acquired no matter how undeserved or immoral that acquisition may be (Gen. 3:22-24).

Later, God honors Jacob’s acquisition of the birthright and blessing which properly belong to his brother, Esau, despite the underhanded way Jacob acquired them (Gen. 25, 27). Possession may be nine-tenths of the law, but is it really the essence of Absolute Goodness? The Bible here (as elsewhere) would have us believe that it is.

When God threatens to kill all the Hebrews and start over, Moses talks Him out of it not by proving that the Hebrews deserve to live or have an absolute Right to Life but by citing God’s promise to Abraham (Ex. 32:11-14). Apparently God (and, by extension, everybody else) is bound by promises even when the greater good or a deeper morality requires a promise to be broken. Both here and later (Num. 14:11-20), Moses also points out to God that killing the Hebrews will make Him look bad in the eyes of the Egyptians – a winning argument that reveals the Bible’s God to be even more morally shallow than an appeal to the absolute sanctity of promises does.

Joshua 9:3-26 tells us that the Hivites escaped Joshua’s wrath by making a deal with him while misrepresenting themselves as other people. Even though God ordered their destruction (Deut. 7:1-2), Joshua nonetheless honors the promise he made to them in his ignorance – and God does nothing to indicate Joshua was wrong to do so. (In shining contrast, our legal system – imperfect as it is – does not require that contracts be honored when they are arrived at through fraud or misrepresentation.)

Judges 11:30-40 tells the incredible story of Jephthah’s rash vow to God to sacrifice the first person who comes out of his door when he returns home if he is granted victory in battle. When his victory is granted and the first person out that door is Jephthah’s beloved daughter, Jephthah does indeed sacrifice her – and God does nothing to dissuade or punish him. Clearly the Bible would have us believe that breaking a promise to murder an innocent person is more immoral than murder itself.

When the sons of Aaron attempted to worship God, the Bible tells us they were utterly consumed by divine fire for failing to worship Him in precisely the way God had ordered (Lev. 10:1-2). Clearly the God of the Bible is more concerned about the arbitrary form worship takes than about its substance (otherwise God would kill those who don’t worship at all before He would kill those who merely worship wrongly).

Legalism (which I define as blind adherence to the letter of the law even when doing so violates higher principles of justice and morality) is very unfortunate and much bemoaned when it occurs in our own justice system. It is absurd (and many non-Biblical theists would say blasphemous) to attribute such an unthinking, legalistic mindset to a truly perfect deity – yet that’s exactly what the Bible does, again and again and again.

Indeed, the Bible’s primitive, legalistic morality often degenerates into a childish sort of magic, as when it tells us that the Hebrews escaped God’s killing of the first-born in Egypt by smearing lamb’s blood on their doors (Ex. 12), that the Hebrews prevailed in battle only so long as Moses held up his hand (Ex. 17:11-13), that Aaron was able to stop a God-sent plague simply by waving a censer (Num. 16:44-48), and that Samson’s power was derived from his long hair (Judges 16:19-20).

This absurd legalistic/magical approach extends to the Gospels. Mark 4:11-12 quotes Jesus himself as saying that he speaks in parables so as to confuse his enemies lest they learn the secret of salvation, convert, and gain forgiveness for their sins. Apparently conversion is a kind of irreversible hocus-pocus which can circumvent justice, morality, and/or the will of God Himself and thus must be kept from certain people the way guns must be kept from children by their non-omnipotent parents.

These and other passages (as well as the bizarre Christian concept of substitution atonement) prove that the God of the Bible is often motivated less by any rational system of justice or ethics than by primitive rituals and arbitrary acts which make no sense given His allegedly perfect, omniscient, and omnipotent nature. Indeed, the God of the Bible often seems more like a pre-programmed robot or thoughtless simpleton than the wisest being imaginable. He has more in common with the cruel and capricious gods of oft-deplored non-Hebrew/non-Christian theists than with the best human judges of today, and as such is hardly a better guide for our behavior than the alleged dictates of the volcano deities of primitive island tribes.

That’s the conclusion I come to when I read the silly passages of the Bible in the context of the Bible as a whole, anyway.

If you come to a different conclusion, please tell the class exactly how and why.