Donald Andrew Henson II

Posts Tagged ‘American Society’

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Make That 12 Ways to Fix America

In American Economy, American Society on August 25, 2012 at 2:34 am
Wall Street

Wall Street (Photo credit: b00nj)

Last week, I started talking about a few things that would fix our broken country. Sure, the world’s not perfect, and there are a lot of messed up countries out there. But if America wants to maintain its ‘special’ status or avoid becoming the next Greece, we need to make some big changes. I started with a list of eight things that would make us better, but as I continued to think about it, I came up with a few more.

Make everyone go to public school. I’m thinking in two different directions here, one being that nothing is dumbing down future generations more than homeschooling. When did we decide that it was a good idea that people who barely finished high school should teach their children? Now, you might think that what you teach your child is your business – but it’s not. Because that child will eventually grow up and vote, it’s vital to the survival of our nation that they know how to think critically, to know when someone is trying to baffle them with bullshit, or to be able to see when the numbers just don’t add up. If some poor child’s mom is their only teacher – and she barely got through high school, couldn’t locate France on a world map, and doesn’t have the mathematical skills required to balance a checkbook, how might we expect that individual to grow up and make informed choices?

The other side of the ax I’m grinding has to do with mutual understanding in our multi-faceted society. When kids go to private schools,  divided by religion, race, class, economic level, etc., and are never exposed to people and ideas from outside their own group, our pluralistic society ceases to be the melting pot that it has always been. I don’t like to talk about ‘Christian children’ or ‘Muslim children’ because the children in question have not made any decisions for themselves – they have been indoctrinated, not persuaded of the moral validity of their parents’ arguments. But children of all faiths need to understand that there are good people from other faiths, that those people want the same wholesome lives that they themselves want for the most part, and that the other groups aren’t really so different from their own group. A Christian kid who plays soccer with kids from Jewish and Muslim backgrounds will probably be more tolerant of different religious beliefs when he gets older.

And if all kids go to public school, all parents will have a stake in making them better. Rich folks don’t care if teachers are fired due to tax cuts – their kids won’t be affected. Public education has been one of the foundation stones of our society; it’s time everyone is faced with improving it, not just the poor.

Bring back the draft. Why is it that WWII lasted six years, yet we can’t get out of Afghanistan after ten? How is it that American presidents are able to mobilize troops first, then get Congressional approval later? One of the main reasons is that the wars are almost always fought by those Americans with few economic opportunities, and the burden of responsibility is not spread out evenly among the different socio-economic groups. If every war – or military excursion, or whatever presidents call our wars in order to skirt the constitutional stipulation that Congress alone can declare war – if every war required that a draft be formed within 90 days of the beginning of the conflict, we’d never be in another long, drawn-out, pointless military excursion again. Those millionaire congressmen and TV pundits wouldn’t be so fast to release the warhounds if their own sons might end up on the front lines. This is the only way to keep us honest when it comes to military interventions around the world; we need to be forced to decide if whatever it is we’re fighting for is worth the death of our own family members. I’m betting that we’d decide ‘not important enough’ more often if those soldiers were not nameless faces but instead our own flesh and blood.

Break up the huge media conglomerates. The fourth estate plays an important role in our democracy – we need to have real journalists doing real news reporting so that we can make informed decisions. Every report has some bias, to be sure, but it’s just plain wrong that four or five huge corporations decide what gets reported and how it is represented. The major channels today are filled with commentary – both MSNBC and Fox News fill up 90 percent of their programming with politically-driven opinion. A democratic society needs information – not partisan sniping.

Break up the big banks. Nothing to me is more dangerous than financial institutions and other companies that are larger than small countries and carry much more political clout. We don’t get to vote for the chairman of the board or the CEO, so we need to make sure that they don’t have an inordinate amount of power. And we need to make sure that if any business is too big to fail, it shouldn’t be allowed to exist. Free markets depend on the fact that inefficient companies will go belly up; if something has become so big that the world can’t afford for it to collapse, then that entity needs to be dismantled, end of story.

Put the government in charge of health care and retirement. It used to be that your job provided for your health care and retirement – but most corporations aren’t interested in doing so anymore. And why should they be? American businesses are competing against Asian companies that pay a pittance and offer no health benefits at all – paying for pricey benefits for American employees simply hinders their ability to compete. And we are up against European companies as well, many of whose employees receive generous health care and retirement benefits from their governments. In short, not only do I think that everyone deserves access to decent health care, I also don’t want to see our American business bogged down by providing it. The clear answer is to let the government take over these areas, so that businesses can be more competitive.

Think a moment about how we do this now. Our health – or lack of it – is a for-profit business. Why should some investor somewhere make a profit when I’m sick? I understand that the people who take care of me ought to be paid a reasonable salary, and that any insurance company who takes me on as a client needs to charge me enough to cover possible costs. But notice the share prices of insurance companies in the back pages of the Wall Street Journal, check out the dividends they are paying; go downtown if you live in a mid-sized city, and have a look at the tallest buildings there -if one or more of them don’t belong to an insurance company, I’ll eat my ball-cap. There are fortunes being made daily off of the misfortunes of others – it shouldn’t work this way.

Notice I’m in favor of government-sponsored, single-payer health insurance for two reasons; 1) everyone has the right to be healthy  - I’m not saying that we should all have access to the most expensive kind of experimental medicine, nor do I think taxpayers should be financing six-figure medical procedures for octogenarians. But I also don’t believe that people should be dying in their 60s because they didn’t have the money to pay for routine check-ups in their 40s and 50s. 2) Relieving business of the burden of health care and retirement would allow them to be more competitive internationally.  How would you pay for this? Well -

Have a national discussion about taxation, then radically alter the tax code. It’s ridiculous that a multi-millionaire would try to reassure as by letting us know that he’s paid at least 13 percent per year over the past decade. Mitt Romney isn’t rich because he’s smarter than you – he’s rich because he was lucky enough to be born into a multitude of advantages that most are beyond most people. Why does a janitor have to give away a quarter for every dollar he makes breaking his back, when the ultra-rich pay half that percentage on ‘invested’ money? Or they pay zero by sending the money to the Caribbean or Switzerland.

This country has never been about inherited wealth and privilege, and in fact, most of our ancestors fled Europe and other locations across the globe to escape the tyranny of aristocrats. When we allow people to accumulate millions, tax-free, then bequeath fortunes to their heirs, again tax-free, we are creating an aristocracy.

And while we’re at it, let’s eliminate ALL tax deductions and then vote on which ones we want to put back in. Why are we subsidizing home owners with tax breaks? What advantage does it provide for society that we are willing to lose billions of revenue every year? Our tax code should be encouraging only those behaviors which have been proven to be beneficial to society as a whole.

End rhetoric in favor of research. These days just about anyone can get on television and spout off their own personal facts to support pretty much any political viewpoint, It’s time we started holding people accountable. We had that clown Todd Akin making up his own medical and biological facts last week in order to justify his opinions about limiting access to abortions. He’s a computer engineer. This is how it works in America now. We have people who’ve never worn a uniform a day in their lives convincing us of the necessity of military engagement. Dentists get on TV and tell us that global warming isn’t real. Former used car salesmen try to convince us that tax cuts create jobs.

When a guy called Joe the Plumber gets to lecture about the intricacies of our tax code – and people listen – you know the country is really screwed up.

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8 Ways to Fix America

In American Economy, American Society on August 19, 2012 at 2:50 am

I just ran across an article from a year ago entitled Eight Ways to Fix Our Politics, which was posted in Newsweek and the Daily Beast. There are some excellent ideas that would get rid of the gridlock we currently have, namely -

  1. Stop letting the political parties determine how congressional districts are divided.
  2. Change the way elections are funded.
  3. Eliminate party primaries in favor of open primaries.
  4. Let the popular vote determine the outcome of elections.
  5. Change the way congressional committees are put together.
  6. Eliminate secret holds on appointees.
  7. Change or eliminate the filibuster.
  8. Eliminate the debt ceiling.

Most of these have something to do with weakening the present two-party political system, something that I am very much in favor of. Did you know that political parties are not even mentioned in our constitution? Why do they play such a big role today in our politics? It seems that the GOP and Demos are locked into an endless cycle of fighting and one-upmanship, where the goal is for the party to win – the country itself be damned. The others have to do with money arguments – and that got me thinking about some of the larger problems in politics and in the country in general.

Our capitalist economic system – when working well – is the best system the world has ever seen.  However, it does have its flaws, which have been on display the last 2-3 years. Democracy is the best political system in the world. When these two systems are working as they should, operating in a check-and-balance sort of competition, America is hard to beat. The problem is that over the last decade or more, the two systems have been involved in a destructive, incestuous make-out session, a Wall Street / Washington love-fest, in which the interests of anyone who doesn’t have power or money haven’t mattered very much.

Because of this neglect, there are a lot of things that are broken in this country, not just our politics. This got me thinking about how to fix some of the other ills we are facing as a country as well. I agree with the fixes in the Newsweek article, but I think we can do even better.

Get the money out of our political system – all of it. CNN’s Jack Cafferty reports that Congress’s wealth has increased by more than 25% during the height of our current recession. Peter Schweizer’s recent book Throw Them All Out  details how almost everyone in the legislative branch is using insider trading, cronyism, and land deals to enrich themselves at our expense. We can’t really have a democracy – and we can’t really accomplish any of the other things we need to accomplish – as long as our government servants are not looking our for our interests. Federal elections should all be federally funded – all donations or use of personal wealth should be illegal. PACs should be transparently funded. We all need to realize that a dollar and a vote are not the same thing – everyone, no matter how rich they are – has only one voice in our political forums; no one should be allowed to have thousands.

Congressional Elections are Fixed in America

(Photo credit: davemakkar)

Require that everyone vote. Australia, Belgium, Singapore, and at least two dozen other countries around the world make voting mandatory. It’s ridiculous that a country with as much international power as ours often elects its leaders without even a majority in this country participating. Both political parties are constantly trying to disqualify certain voters, or qualify certain others to their political advantage. If everyone voted, these kinds of shenanigans would come to an end, and the politicians would have to promote ideas that appeal to everyone, not just partisan wingnuts.

Do everything possible to weaken the two-party system. The Newsweek article sort of beats around the bush on this point – it’s time someone came out and said it. George Washington was very unhappy that the nation began to develop two very strong parties right from the beginning. We either need more viable political parties – or none at all. Our country is locked into a perpetual Yankees-vs-Red Sox rivalry that is destroying us. The future of our country is too important to leave it up to political gamesmanship. We’ve got to end the polarization that the parties are encouraging and figure out how to work together again to solve some of our biggest problems.

Fix our ailing infrastructure. Living in Beijing for 3 years before coming back to the US, I got used to roads with no potholes, modern bridges and superhighways, state-of-the-art trains and airports, clean, bright, modern buses that run on natural gas – and a host of other conveniences that make life in an American city downright medieval by comparison. Our business can’t compete in the coming century when our grandparents were the last ones who bothered to pay to build a new runway or port. I think it’s Thomas Friedman who said that if a person who knew nothing of history were asked to look at the infrastructures of Germany, Japan, and the US, and, based only on those observations, ascertain which country won WWII – he’d come up with the wrong answer every time.

Stop empire building / financing expansion of big oil. Many Americans may be unaware of how India became part of the British Empire. There was a joint stock company called the British East India Company that began investing in spices, tea, and other commodities in India and in other places in the Far East. The success of this company made its investors – including many members of Parliament – fabulously wealthy, and provided cheap raw materials to England’s factories. Every time there was a skirmish of some kind between the Company and the locals, the British Army would arrive to pacify the area, and turn it into a ‘protectorate’. The British government ended up colonizing all of India this way – not because there was a public discussion and decisions were made that empire would be best for the country – but because big business decided that’s the way it should be.

Our situation is the same – big oil and other industries make investments abroad that bring enormous wealth to a select few investors – and to countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, and Venezuela, countries that do not share our democratic vision – and then tax dollars are spent to protect our ‘national interest’ in these areas. Why do we stick our military noses into Iraq and Afghanistan, yet ignore similarly belligerent regimes elsewhere? Oil, money, the interests of big business. It’s time we do a bit of nation building here in our own country, if you ask me.

I’ve got a few more ideas that are much more controversial, including making everyone go to public school. But it’s 3am and I have to work tomorrow, so I’ll save those for my next post later this week.

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God Is Not Speaking To You

In Religion and Government, Religion and Society on June 9, 2012 at 1:17 am
English: Book of Job in Illuminated Manuscript...

God Speaking to Job – Byzantine

If you’ve stuck with me through the last couple of posts, thank you. Talking about prophecy and how God speaks in general is some pretty obtuse stuff, and it’s bound to draw some discontent from different corners.

I’ve said all that I’ve said in the last couple of posts to say this – God is not speaking to you. Whether you want to call it prophecy, God revealing his Word to you, God speaking to your heart through ‘impressions’ – what have you – there’s simply no independently verifiable method to prove what you say is true. If you say that you can verify that God has spoken to you because you can compare it to the scriptures, I have to ask how you know the scriptures are valid, or at least that your interpretation of them is the correct one. If you can only answer that you know this because God has revealed it to you in some way – then your logic is completely circular.

I know you want to think God talks to us, because we talk to him all the time. But we have to face the fact that most if not all of the ‘impressions’ that drop into our minds are simply our own thoughts. We imperil our democracy if we refuse to do so.

Deciding that your opinions are ‘God-breathed’ in some way, and that mine are just the machinations of a fallen nature undermines the idea of democracy. Our laws are to be based on what’s best for the common good, what the majority of the populace decides – not on what one group’s God wants. Saying that God is the author of your convictions is just a way of elevating your opinions – and discrediting mine.

It also makes it impossible to compromise to get anything done. Anyone who grew up in a large family knows that no one can have what they want all of the time. Everyone has to compromise from time to time for the good of the family as a whole. Democracy works the same way. If Christians get what they want all of the time, America would be a very unhappy place for people of other faiths or no faith at all.

If you feel, for example, that God told you that tax cuts for wealthy people are good for the economy, then if would be impossible for you to compromise with someone who felt differently, or to vote for someone who proposed such an idea. No amount of data or academic proof would be able to dissuade you of your opinion. Any everyone knows that when God tells you something, you dare not compromise. Who would ask you to compromise what God told you? Well, only Satan of course. So the other party must be driven by the spirit of the Antichrist.

You can see why we’re not getting much done in America these days. I lived in China and other Asian countries for just over a decade. They’re eating our lunch when it comes to building roads, airports, and other infrastructure, and they’re investing in education at ten times our rate per capita. The reasons why China is pulling ahead of us are complex, to be sure. But one reason why is that everyone believes that the only solution to their problems is themselves. Also, no one ever accuses the other political parties of being motivated by demons.

If it comforts you to think that God speaks to you about the intimate details of your life – who am I to deny you that comfort? But if I think that the problems we are facing in this country can be solved if we just all figure out how to work together – who are you to deny me and my descendants a happy and prosperous future?

Talk to God if you like – but don’t pretend that every idea that falls into your head comes from him.

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1 Thessalonians 5

In Blogging the Bible, Blogging the New Testament on May 29, 2012 at 12:30 am
Thessaloniki Film Festival

Thessaloniki (Photo credit: Recovering Vagabond)

Read 1 Thessalonians 5 here.

In my previous post, I maintained that Paul’s views on the Kingdom of God may have evolved over time – originally, Christ’s followers appeared to have believed that his return was imminent – meaning measured in months, not years. There wasn’t much need to develop an opinion on what might become of someone who converted to Christianity and then died of old age before Jesus’ return. As the years rolled by and people began to die off, the need arose. I suspect that Paul meditated / prayed /thought it over, and decided that Jesus’ resurrection was a precursor to that of believers – the ‘first fruits’ doctrine that he develops later in his letter to the Corinthians.

Conservative Bible commentaries seem to abhor the idea that Paul may have developed this doctrine later, as the situation arose. Most seem to explain 1 Thessalonians 4.13-17 by saying that Paul was simply telling the Thessalonians something he had neglected to mention to them before. I find this implausible. To teach a resurrected Christ without mentioning the promise of resurrection to deceased believers just doesn’t seem likely.

It seems much more likely to me that his central message for two decades had been Christ’s immediate return to set up a kingdom. I think the part about the dead in Christ rising first was something he came up with as the situation changed. This is not to say he made it up necessarily; if you’re a believer, you might think that he simply received further enlightenment from the Holy Spirit. I’m not sure why many commentary writers feel the need to insist that he had simply neglected to inform his flock of so critical a piece of information.

In chapter 5, Paul again returns to the topic of the return of Christ, and the sparing of believers from the coming wrath. It seems to me that it is a topic never far from his mind as the wrote this letter. He tells them to forget about trying to predict the exact time or day when Jesus would be coming back; it wasn’t something that was possible to do. This hasn’t deterred many of his followers from trying to do so over the centuries. Seems the last guy to do so was sometime within the last year or so.

Basically, Jesus is going to sneak up on everyone – just when they think things are going pretty well, he’ll return. However, Christians are not to be caught unaware, for they are to live their lives in a constant state of preparedness for his return. He may not come back tomorrow, but believers should live as if he will.

Again, I would take issue with those who might neglect their civic duty in a democratic government due to their belief that Jesus is going to come back and fix everything. I believe the problems that we face as Americans are quite fixable, so long as everyone is truly interested in fixing them. If a large proportion of the population feel that the purpose of government is to prepare for Jesus’ return – not to try and create a better society – then America suffers due to their belief. Even if you think Jesus is coming back, you shouldn’t stand in the way of progress. What if he waits another 2000 years?

I’ve found several things in this letter that I think do potential harm to American democracy, but finally, here at the end, is some advice that, if taken, would actually improve it.

Live in peace with each other. And we urge you, brothers and sisters, warn those who are idle and disruptive, encourage the disheartened, help the weak, be patient with everyone.  Make sure that nobody pays back wrong for wrong, but always strive to do what is good for each other and for everyone else.

Imagine if we always strove to do what is good for each other and everyone else – what a brilliant democracy we would have. Why is it that we seem to be only looking at what’s best for us personally, or what fits into our particular worldview, instead of what would be good for America? Paul’s admonition to be positive is also not bad advice, as long as we don’t insist that problems don’t exist.

He ends the letter with instructions that prophecy not be treated with contempt; that is, allow people to say ‘thus sayeth the Lord’, but to ‘test’ what they say, and to hold on to the good prophecies and forget the others. However, he doesn’t really spell out what kind of test would be appropriate, and this is troubling. How am I supposed to know when someone is really speaking for God, or when they are just a little stirred up about something themselves? For the average believer, it usually boils down to accepting the prophecies they agree with, and neglecting the ones that might actually require them to change their views.

I actually had one believer tell me, just today, that when she was unsure whether the ‘voice’ she heard in her mind was God or just her own, she might ask God to give her a sign – through her dog, if I understood her correctly. Pardon me if I sound dismissive, but in a democracy, I’d rather folks use the mind God gave them to make important decisions, and not seek out canine oracles. But I guess if  in the Old Testament, God spoke to Balaam through an ass, he must speak through dumb-asses today.

And finally, I don’t know what a holy kiss is – but I’m glad that’s one custom of the early church that didn’t make it to the 21st century.

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1 Thessalonians 2

In Blogging the Bible, Blogging the New Testament on May 18, 2012 at 12:02 am

Read 1 Thessalonians 2 here.

OK, I’ll admit that it didn’t take me too long to get worked up about something while reading the Bible; a scant ten verses in, and I’ve already found a popular Christian belief that I feel damages American society. Living your life as if Jesus were coming back in your lifetime leaves very little incentive for improving things for the next generation.

I think this kind of thinking really took off in the 1960s. With all the social change, students fighting policemen in the streets, the Vietnam War, the drug culture – many felt the ‘end of days’ had arrived. Folks like my parents got into a church and dug in hard, preparing for what would surely be the ‘coming calamity’ they had heard about when they were children. You can’t really blame people who live in difficult times of change to believe the worst might happen; it’s just that, contrary to what my parents thought back then, contrary to what Paul believed nearly two thousand years earlier – Jesus just didn’t come back. My take is that we need to operate our civic institutions under the assumption that he never will.

Paul begins the second chapter of his letter to the Thessalonians by talking about his prior ministry there – his good results, how he was mistreated by the authorities there, how he preached to please God and not men. Then he seems to insinuate that – even though neither he nor Silas nor Timothy availed themselves of financial support from the Thessalonians – as apostles, they had every right to do so. I admire the fact that they worked to support themselves; I’m a little concerned that they seem to be saying it would be acceptable for ministers to live off of the good will of the people they are nurturing.

Now I know this is the way of things, and always has been – that preachers, prophets, and priests make a living from preaching, prophesying, and – what is it priests do? (Insert punchline here.) But I can’t help but think of all the fat-cat church leaders out there, making their fortunes off of the donations of grandmas on fixed incomes, and desperate, jobless folks trying to send in ‘seed money’ or hoping they can ‘cast their bread upon the water’. (Those of you attending an American church know what these phrases mean – I’ll explain in a later post to the rest of you – apologies for now.)

If you follow the American Secularist Facebook page (and you should if you want to know about my posts the minute they are posted, plus enjoy links to other articles I’m reading on a daily basis), you’ll already know about the latest of a long line of stories of financial abuse within the church, the TBN scandal. It seems to me that Paul didn’t really know what he was starting here by justifying the idea of ministers making a living from their flocks. The enormous wealth these shysters take in is completely tax-free; is it time for a change? Comments on a previous blog of mine seem to indicate that at least some people think so.

TBN World Headquarters, offers a variety of ac...

TBN World Headquarters

But this isn’t the only problematic teaching I find in this chapter; verses 14-16 give a glimpse into what would become full-blown anti-Semitism by the 4th century, and would last for centuries more. Notice it isn’t the Roman government that killed Jesus, nor is it the Devil, or, in this verse at least, part of God’s great plan. It was the Jews. And their actions are deserving of God’s wrath – pretty strong words.

A final disconcerting idea in this chapter isn’t nearly as troubling as anti-Semitism, but it is troubling, nonetheless. In verses 17-18, Paul writes “out of our intense longing we made every effort to see you. For we wanted to come to you—certainly I, Paul, did, again and again—but Satan blocked our way.” Ok, what bothers me here might be hard to see; it’s subtle, but bear with me. Paul says that he wanted to do something – not God wanted him to do something or the Holy Spirit prompted him to do something – but Satan blocked it. This is an interesting way of talking, if you think about it. Why not say, “I wanted to come, but I wasn’t able to,” or “circumstances prevented me,” or my favorite, “I was detained by a subsequent engagement.”

No, Satan opposed MY will – a very developed sense of ego on the part of Paul, don’t you think? This strain of thinking so permeates the day-to-day talk of Christian folk, that it’s easy to dismiss the audacious pride contained therein. Satan made me lose my house. The Devil tried to take away my job. Or, even more mundane, Satan created a traffic jam to make me late; the Devil made it rain during my beach vacation. It’s nonsense – but a very ‘me’ generation sort of nonsense, that seems to say whatever I want must be the will of God, and if you want something different, you are obviously in league with Beelzebub.

My problem with this kind of thinking – whether I’m criticizing it from a Christian point of view or a secular one – is that it makes a demi-god out of the individual believer. Ross Douthat, author of Bad Religion, spoke of this on Dylan Ratigan’s show a day or two ago. He said that a popular but polarizing concept in American churches today is that “whatever is coming out of my own soul must be the voice of God.” I don’t have to tell you how this is playing out in American politics. The GOP (God’s Own Party, apparently) want to run the country a certain way and, by golly, Satan (the Democrats) are blocking the way.

So, 1 Thessalonians 2 is a troubling little chapter – justification for fleecing the flock, good old-fashioned anti-Semitism, and a little bit of self-aggrandizement thrown in for good measure. God bless help us.

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Blogging the Bible

In Blogging the Bible on May 13, 2012 at 11:34 pm

By Rembrandt.

This week I’m happy to get started on what I hope will be a central feature of American Secularist – a blog of the New Testament. Back when I taught Sunday School on a regular basis, I was a real student of the NT, reading it through a number of times. I believed, and still do, that anything happening in a person’s life that is part of his Christian experience should be measured against the words written in these twenty-seven books.

But why, you might ask, would a secularist blog be interested in looking so closely at the New Testament writings? Well, if I wanted to understand Russian culture, I might spend a bit of time reading Dostoyevsky or listening to Tchaikovsky. If I wanted to delve into the French mind, a bit of existentialism might be in order. Just as it would be impossible to understand Thai society without an appreciation for Buddhism, I think it’s impossible to understand how Americans think without some knowledge of the second half of the Bible, and the teachings that stem from it. To be sure, there are other influences on American thought, but in the mainstream, the Bible is still the most influential book.

I hope to take a fresh approach to the early Christian writings, looking at them without any pre-conceived ideas, as either a believer or a skeptic. A ‘scholarly’ approach would be a little heavier than what I have in mind as well – there are plenty of books available along those lines, if you can stay awake long enough to read them. As I read the scriptures, I simply want to answer a few questions about the relationships between mainstream American ideas and the Bible.  Some of the questions rolling around in my head are:

  • what exactly do Jesus and the Apostles have to say?
  • can we be reasonably sure that the Bible as we have it today accurately represents their ideas?
  • are there any recent discoveries that help us understand the context of the New Testament?
  • what doctrines / beliefs have Americans constructed from these writing?
  • is American Christianity an accurate representation of the teachings of Jesus and the Apostles?
  • what relationship, if any, does the New Testament have with democratic government?

To give credit where credit is due, I also hope to continue the task one of my favorite on-line writers started, but never finished. A few years back, Slate writer David Plotz started blogging the Bible, but seemed to lose interest after the Old Testament. As he comes from a Jewish background, I can understand why he wouldn’t have much interest in the New Testament – and I guess after blogging on the Bible for two years, he may have just wanted to write about something else. Nonetheless, I always enjoyed reading his comments, so I was disappointed that he didn’t keep going. Here’s what he had to say about reading the Bible through:

Should you read the Bible? You probably haven’t. A century ago, most well-educated Americans knew the Bible deeply. Today, biblical illiteracy is practically universal among nonreligious people. My mother and my brother, professors of literature and the best-read people I’ve ever met, have not done much more than skim Genesis and Exodus. Even among the faithful, Bible reading is erratic. The Catholic Church, for example, includes only a teeny fraction of the Old Testament in its official readings. Jews study the first five books of the Bible pretty well but shortchange the rest of it. Orthodox Jews generally spend more time on the Talmud and other commentary than on the Bible itself. Of the major Jewish and Christian groups, only evangelical Protestants read the whole Bible obsessively.

That last line is one I may have to disagree with – I’m not sure that evangelicals read the whole Bible obsessively; popular Christian books and television programs seem to focus only on those scriptures that reinforce particular ideas, like the prosperity gospel. But I’m committed to keeping an open mind – please call me out whenever I fail to do so.

Will you join me in reading every single verse of the New Testament?

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