ChapterZero

A friend of the family had a praise celebration party thingie to give thanks for the fact that we survived Rita, with no damage. I sung about 8 hymns, for the first time in months (years!). I also borrowed a book she had: “Who’s Who and Where’s Where in the Bible.” Even though I don’t want to read the Bible, ever— no bigger reason than that I don’t like trying to decipher the King James version, and I have a parentally instilled strong aversion to the more modern versions—, I’d still like to know what’s in it. A little unexpected knowledge goes a long way in quieting holier-than-thou moralists. Also, it is a good source of moderately entertaining, albeit morbidly so, stories.

Who said that challenging God to prove his existence is a bad thing, or a sure ticket to hell? My mother, for one. But consider the story of Gideon, who was visited by an angel that consumed an offering he put before it by fire, yet turned around and asked God for independent confirmation by having him deposit a night’s worth of dew on a fleece without wetting the grass around it, and for futher proof, asked God to switch hit— deposit another night’s worth of dew on the grass around the fleece without wetting the fleece. That’s true cheek! So, excuse me if I need God himself to explain to me that the Bible is indeed his Holy, infallible, literal word. Really, I’d settle for an angel, and just one localized crepuscular precipitation effect.

If I were going to believe any religious text, much more take it literally, it would be the Koran. Unlike ‘the’ Bible, which has been redacted so many times by so many different organizations that the article ‘the’ should in most instances be replaced by ‘a’, the Koran seems to have been passed down in a monolithic, unaltered version. Not that I know much about the Koran, but I do know that even translations of the Koran are not considered as the Koran, because it must be written in the original language. I would guess that there are also stipulations against the modification of the syntax, grammar, and word choices.