Highlights: How NOT to Read the Bible (Episode 50)

The road to atheism is littered with Bibles that have been read cover to cover.

To most Christians, the Bible is like a software license. Nobody actually reads it. They just scroll to the bottom and click “I agree.”

Never Read a Bible

Verse By lifting verses out of context, they can easily be misunderstood. The story-line of the Bible must be understood so that we can see where the verse/passage/book fits into the larger over-arching story.

We need to enter their world to hear the words as the original audience would have heard them and as the author would've meant them to be understood…If we don’t the possibilities for confusion are endless.

Stranger Things

The surrounding people groups who worship other gods and goddesses practiced all kinds of evil things…God did not want Israel to become like them, so he had Moses write down loving guidelines…to keep them distinct from other nations.

God didn’t create the institution of slavery. Slavery was man-made and was everywhere in the ancient world. The Old Testament rules established unique protections for slaves. Slaves were treated much better in ancient Israel than in surrounding cultures.

Boys’ Club Christianity

When we read what Jesus did with regard to women, it should be recognized as countercultural, highly shocking, and extremely challenging to the religious leaders of his day. We see Jesus striving to change the culture he lived in through the way he treated women – with respect, dignity, and equality.

The Bible verses that at first sound misogynistic and chauvinistic have explanations.

Misunderstandings are due to not looking at the specific situations and unique culture of that time period.

Do We Have to Choose Between Science and the Bible?

The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go. (Galileo)

So many of the debates within Christianity, as well as the mocking criticism of the Bible, end up being irrelevant when we accept that God wasn't providing details to satisfy questions from our modern scientific worldview. God used what the people were aware of at that time to communicate the truth about himself and his work in creating all things.

Does Christianity Claim All Other Religions Are Wrong?

Christianity is the one world faith in which people don't have to earn their way to heaven, but it is through the work of Jesus and us putting faith in him.

The Horror of God’s Old Testament Violence

If you were carefully reading the entire Old Testament, you would not find a reactionary God who needs a class in anger management, someone who strikes out randomly, without cause. Instead, you find a God who is patient – again and again – with his people. Even in the parts where God is actively behind violence and death, it is not done without first pleading for change, giving warnings, waiting for change and showing great patience.

Jesus Loved His Crazy Bible

The Bible Project Podcast (12/06/2021) Interview with Dan Kimball

The Lost World of Genesis One, John Walton 

ReGenerationProject.org 

What’s On My Bookshelf?
 A Review: Plagues Upon the Earth, by Kyle Harper - The Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse | Part 3 - Highlights 

Coronaviruses and influenza viruses are the ones that we are currently worried about. H5N1 (a bird flu)...if it ever gets airborne...it’s got a 60% death rate. (Dr. Larry Brilliant, Harvard Magazine) 

It is the advance of scientific knowledge, actualized by public policy and private behavior, that has given humans the advantage over microbial threats. Science and state-craft are the keys to the Great Escape. 

Science 

As of 1870, only a small Avant-garde of researchers believed that familiar diseases were caused by invisible living agents. But by 1900, for a scientist or medical professional to believe anything else was becoming ignorant. 

The Hygiene Revolution - The principles of germ theory inspired renewed efforts to disinfect the personal and household environments. 

The war against bugs - Insects that had once seemed a mere nuisance were now seen as vehicles with deadly payloads. 

Chemical Control of Pathogens - Dysentery was still a major health problem in the developed world, and typhoid remained – until chlorination. The most important reason we can drink a glass of water today and not feel even a hint of dread is because it has been treated with chlorine. 

Antibiotics - Starting in the 1940’s...Antibiotics delivered us from the long period of human history when the simplest wound was a mortal threat. 

Vaccines - Small pox was a success story. So was the measles vaccine. The vaccine was licensed in the U.S. in 1963, and measles infections fell instantaneously. A disease that once caused 1 million cases a year in the United States was reduced to an annual incidence of fewer than 100. Globally, In the early 1980s, 2.5 million children died annually from the measles. By 2018, mortality has been reduced to 140,000 deaths. 

Public Policy 

Improvements in life expectancy are generated not by ideas alone but by ideas that are put into action, especially by capable governments that care about the heath of their citizens...The control of infectious disease, by its very nature, requires collective and coordinate action. 

Investments in public water systems were among the largest, and might even have been the largest, public investments in American history and they had a larger impact on human mortality than any other public health initiative. The household toilet is a private portal into the sprawling subterranean circuitry quietly gathering our collective muck. Several times a day we sit astride a section of the largest and most expensive environmental infrastructure in the world – the vast underground systems of sewers and waste-water treatment plants that are a defining feature of the developed world. 

The federal government erected an infrastructure for agricultural and veterinary science early on, and precocious American agro-science is an underrated storyline in the global emergence of germ theory and the biochemical control of infectious disease. 

Paradoxically, we are in some ways more fragile than our ancestors, precisely because our societies depend on the level of security against infectious disease that may be unrealistic 

We have much to learn from the experience of those who lived and died before us. It is urgent that we do so. 

What’s On My Bookshelf?
 A Review: Plagues Upon the Earth, by Kyle Harper 
The Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse | Part 2 

Highlights 

We still have much to learn from the experience of those who lived and died before us. It is urgent that we do so. The long history of disease counsels us to expect the unexpected. The worst threat may be the one we cannot see coming. 

Bubonic Plague (Black Death)
Three stages in history - The Justinian Plague (500’s A.D.), The Black Death (1300’s A.D.) and 

Modern Era Plague (1890’s A.D.) 

Almost anywhere the evidence in Europe is rich enough to form a quantitative impression, the Black Death carried off 50-60 percent of the population...the death toll is always staggeringly high. Although many a textbook still claims that the Black Death carried off a third of the continent, in reality, the best estimates are closer to half...In Europe alone, forty million or more might have been claimed by this bacterium. The plague is a killer in a class by itself 

Small Pox 

Endemic throughout the Eastern Hemisphere. Brought to the Americas by the conquistadors. 

Major outbreaks of small pox occurred on Hispaniola and other islands in the Caribbean from the earliest days of discovery but then jumped from the Caribbean to the shores of Mexico in 1520. By the time Cortez approached the capital city of the Aztecs a year later, it had been “hollowed out” by the deadly disease. The small pox devastation continued along the trade routes to the north and to central and south America, having the same impact. Measles came alongside and made its way to the mainland continuing its decimation of those small pox hadn’t claimed. 

In the 1700’s it accounted for 10-15% of all mortality in Europe. 

As the practice of vaccination extended world-wide, small pox was finally eliminated entirely in 1977. It was a global triumph. To date, small pox is the first and only human pathogen that has been driven to extinction. 

The Great Influenza (1918/1919) 

Killed approximately 50,000,000 people. 

One of the single most deadly events in global history. And it infected perhaps one in three persons alive, making it probably the single most coordinated rapid attack by a parasite in the history of the planet. 

And the threat of future novel influenza strains, replaying the events of 1918 to 1919 remains one of the most dangerous lurking threats to human health. 

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, by John Barry.