Are even fundamentalists waking up to the inanity of the Old Testament?  As much as I want it to be true, I doubt that’s the case.  The begats and books like Leviticus have been causing wrinkled foreheads for a couple thousand years, and Christian apologetics has long been called upon to smooth those wrinkles out.

In addition to validating the Old Testament by quoting the New Testament (2 Timothy 3:15, “All Scripture is inspired of God and beneficial…”), Awake! likens the Old Testament to an apple tree.  “Once you have the apple, is the tree that produced it irrelevant?” (March 2010, p. 28).

Of course, if the Old Testament just contained useless stuff, it wouldn’t be a problem.  Not only does it contain long passages full of hate, but worse still, it promotes a bronze-age morality that even moderate Christians point to as being enlightened and “still relevant.”

When the Awake! article points to the Psalms as being an especially tasty apple off the tree, moderate Christians would tend to agree, and that is indeed cause for alarm, given the militaristic tone of the Psalms (127:4-5), their obsession with enemies (59:10-14), support for slavery (2:8-9), worship of a God who plays favorites (33:12-20), embrace of the “prosperity Gospel” (21:1-7), and promotion of mindless obedience to those in authority (23:1).

The righteous rejoice when they see other people suffering; they love to wash their feet in the blood of the wicked.  (58:10-11)

How happy is he who gets to dash the heads of his enemy’s children against the stones.  (137:9)

Christians point to The Psalms to justify their continued use of the Old Testament.  Not just fundamentalist Christians, but even the seemingly more-enlightened modern Christians.  Let me go out on a limb (from an apple tree), and say that such behavior is morally irresponsible. 

The Old Testament isn’t irrelevant.  The hatefulness, greed, and violence that it promotes are still present in our world, and there’s no excuse for continuing to eulogize, distribute, and disseminate this stuff.  Doing so is the equivalent of handing out poisoned apples and telling people, “Here.  Try this.  It’s wonderful.  Really!”

There it is again:  The Bible isn’t harmless!  Even bible-based ideas that are so archaic as to seem silly, still get used by present-day Christians.

Okay, okay.  Yes, these people are a minority, operating at or beyond the borders of fanaticism.  If I mentioned the “Warning on Witches” article to the average Christian, they would roll their eyes, sigh, perhaps even become vexed at belonging to the same religion as those who treat rationalism like a disease.  “Doesn’t have anything to do with us.”

But it does have something to do with you, if only because we all have to live together on the same planet.  So, rather than dismiss the fundamentalists as superstitious fools, we’d better figure out how to communicate with them.

Now, one of the best ways to communicate is by setting an example, and one example modern Christians could set would be to stop using the Old Testament.  This would be the equivalent of reformed witches no longer keeping voodoo dolls in their homes.

Unfortunately, modern Christians refuse to take this step.  “The true use and meaning of our voodoo dolls has just been misunderstood all these years.  We’re the good voodoo experts.  We know how to use the dolls to do good things.”

What really gets communicated by this attitude is the importance of voodoo dolls.  Or to bring the analogy back home:  the importance of The Bible.

Removing the Old Testament from The Bible won’t bring about an era of world peace.  It won’t change basic human nature.  But abandoning the Old Testament would be a psychologically important act, demonstrating not just in words but by actions, that modern Christians really are different.  Not different just in trivial details, but at the very foundation of their religion.

Abandoning the Old Testament is the Christian equivalent of throwing out the voodoo dolls.

By analogy, imagine that you’ve decided to be a psychology major.  Your first day at the university, they hand you a book and say, “This is the core curriculum.  If you want to understand psychology, this is the place to start, and this is where you go if you have any questions.”  You open the book, only to discover that Freud fills the first 3/4ths of it.  Remember, this isn’t the text for a single course, but the framework underpinning the entire curriculum.

The problem here seems obvious.  Whatever Freud’s influence on psychology, that influence is now primarily of historical interest.  Given how much we’ve learned just in the last twenty years from the study of genetics and brain physiology, there’s simply no excuse to place so much emphasis on a single individual, particularly an individual like Freud who was arguably more of a philosopher than a scientist.

Is Freud an appropriate topic for a single course?  Sure.  Does it make sense to mention him in an introductory text?  Sure.  And the same can be said of the Old Testament.  But to keep the Old Testament in The Bible places way too much emphasis on a violent, hateful, legalistic, and bigoted approach to life.

If anything, the article went off in the opposite direction from what I had hoped, talking about controversy over The C.S. Lewis Bible, which puts Lewis’s religious musings together with the traditional contents of The Bible, all under a single cover (available in leather and hardback).  Apparently, nobody complained about the pairing itself.  Instead, the furor has arisen because Lewis was squished side-by-side with the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV).

The NRSV, you see, is a gender-neutral translation.  While there appears to be some academic disagreement, the general consensus among Lewis scholars is that he would have found the gender-neutral stuff offensive.  As a product of an earlier generation, Lewis would have taken The Bible seriously when it says that women are to be subservient to men, that they are to keep quiet in public, and that their salvation comes through bearing children.  As a result, it seems likely he wouldn’t have supported changing the language of The Bible to treat women as full partners.

So here we are again.  Is The Bible the cause of bigotry and prejudice?  Of course not.  But nobody ever said it was.  What we do say, though, is that The Bible justifies and even encourages (among other things) certain types of bigotry, such as the subjugation of women.

For those moderate and liberal (“enlightened”) Christians who claim that their eulogizing and support of The Bible is morally blameless, here is a counter example.  A small little thing, sure.  But the matter does warrant some soul-searching.  Would prejudice of this sort be getting aired in public, without apology, by college professors and magazines like Christianity Today, in the year 2011 (half a century after the civil rights movement of the 1960s), if such attitudes weren’t actively supported by Christian tradition and, more specifically, by The Bible?