The Bible - Peeling Back the Layers

Why, why, why, do some supposedly normal, educated people still take the words of the Bible, or any religious text for that matter, so literally? I’m not going to name names but I’m looking your way Biblelands, USA. Allow me to usher you out of the, I want to say stone-age, but from what I know of the Neandertal* culture and belief system, they were far less gullible...THE EARTH WAS NOT CREATED IN 7 DAYS!

As any school child knows, stories, fables, nursery rhymes and the like are a great way to educate. Within the context of a simple story you weave a lesson about life that the child can take with them. That’s essentially what the Bible is, a collection of writings structured in such a way as to educate the masses about our origins, morals, life’s lessons and all sorts of information, in a simplified manner that all walks of life can take something from. I mean c’mon, as long a book as the Bible is, it’s actually quite short considering the magnitude of the topics it covers. That’s what makes it so ingenious. It’s a book about everything…the ultimate anti-Seinfeld if you will. Just compare it to modern-day educational literature where everything is fragmented, requiring a different set of rules and theories for each different topic. In order to explain anything, we need to break it up into manageable chunks of information, and even after doing that, the works are lengthy. That is what makes the Bible such a great book, and it’s unfortunate that people have misused it for so long, everything from justifying ridiculous wars to propagating ignorance. Let me do my little part to help.

I see the Bible as a book with multiple layers of information and interpretation, 3 layers by my count, those being:

1. The “silly fool, we didn’t mean that literally” layer, LITERAL for short
2. SYMBOLIC, and
3. ENCODED

Some take everything in the bible literally, which centuries ago when we knew very little about the world is somewhat understandable, but today, less excusable. Firstly, the 7-days of creation are symbolic. It doesn’t mean seven 24 hour periods as we know them today, but rather 7 somewhat distinct periods, of various lengths, when significant events (from a human-centric perspective of course) of the earth’s history took place, covering everything from the creation of our solar system to the birth of mankind. Yes, greatly generalized and presented in a way to make it understandable to the uneducated masses, but based on facts none the less. Other examples of literal interpretations converted to symbolic include:

“Days” means anything from billions, millions or even fewer number of years depending on what was created that particular day. This is similar to using the term “eras” when delineating geologic, social and other time periods of unequal length, but exhibiting a particular set of common characteristics that set them apart from other “eras”.

Let there be light...and God separated the darkness from the light, means our Sun’s hydrogen furnace ignites and begins to burn and shine light upon the not-quite-complete spheres orbiting around it, one of which is our planet Earth. As the Earth forms into a solid sphere it rotates on its axis, creating night and day (appx 4.6 billion years ago).

On the second day, God created a dome and separated the waters, meaning, the planet wide ocean begins to evaporate, creating clouds that will rain down, and a rudimentary atmosphere is created.

On the third day God called for dry land to appear, followed by vegetation. Well, geologic evidence clearly shows that vulcanic eruptions on the ocean floors formed bulges in the earth's crust, pushing it up, until dry land finally appeared out of the oceans. Once dry land appeared vegetation followed, sustained by the carbon rich atmosphere at the time. The carbon-dioxide was released by the vulcanic eruptions, while the plants exhailed oxygen, a necessity for the animal life that is to follow.

In the days to follow, God first made aquatic creatures, then land animals, and finally humans. This totally fits in with fossil evidence, except what the Bible calls days, you must simply understand are millions of years. Animal life did begin in the oceans, and humans are one of the newest species on this planet today, thus the 7th day is symbolic of our late arrival to this planet relative to other species. Despite this, it's amazing how many people still take the term "day" to mean a 24 hour period. One such nutcase claimed to be a real scientist who's theory I came across at http://www.answersingenesis.org. Even now in 2005, he claimed that scientific evidence shows that everything on earth was created in one week, as we know it today. I had a good laugh reading it, but it's sad when you really think about it. On top of all this is the whole Adam and Eve thing. Taken literally, that would make us all quite inbred, so I could see why this notion is so popular in the south, where they still teach creationism in schools, instead of evolution. The actual number of Adams and Eves is several thousand...the number of modern-human individuals from whom we all descended.

If you needed any more proof that the Bible should not be taken literally, just look at Jesus. It's common knowledge that He always used parables to spread his message. Yes, his stories were amusing to the people, but they were not the real message, but rather symbolic vessels of the true message.

Deeper still, beyond the symbolic layer, exists a substantially more puzzling third that I’ll call the encoded layer. I believe Leonardo Da Vinci suspected it, and Isaac Newton was secretly obsessed by it...the idea that the Bible contained deeply encoded information about events of not only the past and present, but even the future. With the invention of the computer, putting this to the test became possible. According to Michael Drosnin’s book, the Bible Code, such experiments have yielded clear evidence of encoded information within the Bible. The technique used involved writing out the contents of the Bible in the original language (Aramaic), and eliminating spaces and punctuation. At certain skip sequences (e.g. taking every 567th letter) one begins to find startlingly detailed information. For example, Rabin’s assassination is well documented, including the date and the assassin’s name, all encoded together, as were numerous other events that were tested for. Critics initially argued that virtually any work, provided it was long enough would, statistically speaking, likely yield similar information. In response to this argument, tests were conducted on other popular literature and revealed no evidence of encoded information, yet the Bible continued to hit the mark.

So, how deep should we be looking into the Bible? Well, maybe the third layer is something to leave to the experts for the time being, but certainly we should help our slower brothers and sisters overcome the first layer, and all its problems. Now, I’m not coming at you from some extreme leftist, atheist, seed-of-Satan viewpoint. I’m what you might call a seasonal religious practitioner, also known as Roman Catholic, whose lifetime mass attendance record stands at a slightly above average 4.35 visits per year...Christmas and Easter being the mandatory 2, with some mix of wedding, communion, confirmation, baptism, funeral, and if need be, the occasional Saints Day substitution for the other 2.35 times. That being said, I believe in God and the need for spirituality in ones life. I believe that Jesus, be he an immaculately conceived son of God or just another human being conceived out of wedlock, through his teachings, actions, and influence was one of the best things to ever happen to humanity. I also doubt that he intended for me to be a mindless, passage-reciting zombie, who was never to touch himself or a woman (other than a wife solely for procreation purposes), and I’m pretty sure he didn’t intend that for all of you either, because how would that really make us any different than those Taliban freaks!?!

* Yes, that’s the correct spelling of Neandertal, there is no “h”. It was named after the original place of discovery Neander Valley in Germany. “Tal” means valley in German, thus Neandertal.

By the way, you can listen to great discussions on this issue at http://podcasts.yahoo.com/series?c=e&s=56200effeaaf322de1f933f85cc00c9e&es=1&rs=1. Look through the archived shows for Catholics on evolution, intelligent design, etc.