Nearly a year. That’s how long it took me to get through the Berean Study Bible version of The Old Testament, reading one or more passages a day, aloud, any time I went to take a dump.
I was given a pocket version of The New Testament when I was eight years old. I went aboard my father’s Fisheries Patrol Vessel for one of its then three-week runs up and down the coast of British Columbia. I don’t remember the rank or name of the sailor who gifted me the little blue-covered, rice-papered tome, but I know now, more than forty years later, that he was, by a wide margin, the least aggressive proselytic Christian I’ve yet to meet. I read that Bible, and it accompanied me on my two harrowing hitchhiking trips back and forth between Victoria and Banff, Alberta when I was eighteen. I would later refer to this as having “studied religion” whenever anyone brought the subject up.
I can now confidently make that claim, at least for the books of The Old Testament. I probably should have reviewed each in their turn, but scholars with much higher degrees of education and investment have already filled libraries with much more qualified thoughts than mine.
I can say that I’m not 100% sold on Christianity. Not yet, at least. The ancient text of The Old Testament does make for some rip-roaring reading, though. There are sections of those books that contain some of the most metal descriptions of wrath that I’ve ever read.
There are also many stories that smack of the supernatural and alien. If you were to approach a reading with the idea of substituting “angel” with “alien”, the tales of visitation laid out by the prophets might make more sense. Seeing how long it took me to fully digest the text, I also have to question how many people who claim to be active practitioners of a religion derived from The Old Testament have actually read—and understood, at least for themselves—all the words therein. My feeling is that it’s few.
I’m trying to maintain an academic approach that results in religious syncretism. Once I finish reading the Jesus part of the Bible—which should be significantly faster, as it’s a rather slim collection of volumes compared to the preceding behemoth—I plan to move on to The Quran, and from there the Vedas, Upanishads, and Bhagavad Gita. All aloud, all while enthroned on the Tinkle Temple.
It sure beats doomscrolling social media.
2023.09.23 – 2024.09.19
Next: Mpt 1, 2024
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