Originally Posted by loquitur

actually, if you read David Plotz's "Blogging the Bible" series, he made the observation that much of the Bible is pretty damn brutal and sanguinary - to get the sort of stuff out of it that a lot of people want to get out you have to emphasize some parts and downplay others severely. He was speaking as someone reading the book for the first time, front to back. If you want to read him - he's a good writer and pretty incisive as an observer - put his name into the search function at Slate and you'll see the entries. He did it over the course of a year, from mid-06 to mid-07.

So reading the Bible in the right spirit is quite the misstatement - people tend to take away from the exercise what they bring to it. But that's true of most things.

Oh, and MM, I wasn't saying there is no such thing as truth and no such thing as reason -- only that our ability to use them is limited by our humanness (is that a word?).