This article came to my attention via email, and since it has long been a pet peeve of mine regarding some Christians and their Bible, I thought I would use the Rev. Gushee's column in its entirety. It was in the Oct 4th edition of the Palm Beach Post.


Inflexible belief in bible's words misplaced faith
By Steve Gushee
Special to The Palm Beach Post
Thursday, October 04, 2007

Idolatry is the problem. The faithful are the idolaters and, Mirable Dictu, the bible, is the idol.
That phenomenon triggers much of the chaos in the three great religions of the book. The turmoil often spills over into the world as prejudice, intolerance and violence.
Idolatry is worshiping as god something that is not god. It is the worst of sins. The worst of idolatry is worshiping the bible. Countless millions do it.
Large numbers of the faithful in each religion want to honor their scriptures as the word of God. Many read the books literally, as if God has spoken the exact words, set the type and bound the spine. They refuse to use any cultural, historical and reasonable factors to discern what the authors actually intend.
These biblical purists insist that to question an iota of scripture is to doubt God, blaspheme his holy word and commit the most grievous sin. The words of the bible cannot be changed, modified, interpreted in any way.
The result is that the precise details of a book filled with poetry, drama, history, myth and the social, economic and political mores of a very ancient culture written over hundreds of years and translated many times become the inerrant guide to the 21st century.
As a result, the Episcopal Church is on the brink of breaking apart over issues of human sexuality condemned in ancient Rome. Climate change divides Evangelical Christians beholden to the Book of Genesis written more than 3,000 years ago. Muslims debate the meaning of Jihad used to define seventh-century spirituality. Jews argue over ancient real estate decisions in the Torah, and Catholics debate the authority of the Pope and the precise words of Jesus.
Each dispute is rooted in biblical idolatry, less about the subject under discussion than about how to be faithful to a book.
Idolatry is the worst of all sins because it is the worship of a man-made god made manageable. Many of the faithful have put God in a book, be it Torah, New Testament or Quran. The deity is then under the control of the keeper of the book.
Alan Watts, a renegade theologian of the 1960s, once suggested that every church once a year ritually burn the Bible in the midst of worship.
That would remind the faithful that the Bible is not God, but a mortal means of pointing to the One Who is God.