Quote:
Originally Posted by Textcritic
If anything, this little incident only serves to show how badly the Western world needs to be re-educated about the Bible.
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As both a Christian and a teacher of the Bible, this needs to be much better understood by anyone living in a nation which grew out of the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment. Whether you like it or not, you are beholden to the influence that the Bible has had upon the shaping of your culture and your worldview: Studying the Bible can only help us to better understand ourselves and our world, because it is virtually and irrevocably ingrained in our world. You don't have to like it. You don't have to embrace the Bible, but you should at least gain a clear idea of what it is, why it matters, and how and why it has maintained currency for over 2000 years.
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Hey my first off-topic post. I like this quoted post and particularly like the decent tone of it.
I think what is more important than the west being "reducated" about the Bible, is education of how the west came to care so much about the individual. It is this empowerment of the individual that, to me, is what makes the west the "west".
So where does the Bible fit with regard to western commitment to the individual? I would argue that the dark ages were the result of a weak civil society and a very strong church. The renaisance, the enlightenment, and the subsequent victories for individual liberty all came at the expense of and despite the opposition of the Church. People who fought for democracy and other individual liberties did not have wonderful passages from the Bible to quote from. They went back to the Greeks to find the arguments for democracy. There were no Jesuits or religious writings from which to draw succor. People like Locke, Bentham, Smith, and others had to find their own words and arguments to support the growing idea that a decentralized society that allows each individual room to make their own life and define each own's happiness, was the best and most fair way to organize society. The Bible provided no help to these thinkers.
On this, the most important aspect of western society - liberalism, liberty, the rise of the individual from serf to citizen - the Church had very little to say except, "don't do that!" And this was not a Church that was purposefully misreading the Bible. In truth, there is nothing in the Bible which supports this huge shift from theocracy/monarchy to democracy. Again, the Greeks and the enlightenment philosophers, not the Bible, provide the philosphical foundation for this change.
By my understanding of history, an honest "reeducation" of the role of the Bible in western history will only serve to show people that the Bible has consistantly been used as authority for the most reactionary and least progessive ideas in the west. The great rise of the individual - the west's greatest accomplishment and secret recipe - was accomplished in spite of, not because of, the Bible.
Edit add - There is no doubt that the ideas of individual salvation and other Biblical moral teachings provided a foundation from which the political thinkers jumped in order to restrict political power from the Church and monarchs. The underlying "goodness" in the west that allowed for such respect for individuals to exist, is probably a byproduct of the general morality of Europe, which most definately was informed by the Bible.