Quoting Trent W. Buck (trentbuck@gmail.com):

> The response I was actually expecting is that USA is a Christian
> millet, so non-Christian USians need to read their holy book to
> understand their legislation.

Heh.

My experience was not that, in part because I was raised (part of my
boyhood) in California, not in the Bible Belt or Oklahoma.  In part
because my parents were non-militantly non-religious.  We did observe
Christmas and Easter, but I as a boy would have been utterly astonished
by the notion of these being Christian.

Christmas was a tree and presents, and a dinner with family.  Easter was
decorating and finding eggs in the outside lot of one of my aunts and
uncle's house, and then a dinner with family.

And, the larger point is, in California, nobody pushed religion at you.
That would have been deemed terribly impolite and Not Done.  I was
distantly aware that religion existed, but it had no centrality in
public life, because that was (and still is) deemed inappropriate.


In 1980, I mentioned during my time as a kibbutz volunteer that my
family had observed Christmas in this fashion until 1968 when Dad was
killed by the negligence of Boeing Company and his employer Pan American
World Airways.  One of my fellow kibbutzniks, an Israeli, made a comment
about 'you Christians', and I boggled and said 'Excuse me?  _Whom_ are
you calling a Christian?  I don't hate Christians, and some of my best
friends are such, but I never said I _was_ one, and haven't been one for
a day in my life, thankyouverymuch.'  I was obliged to explain that,
among other things, we Scandinavians had been celebrating that seasonal
occasion since long before Christianity showed up, under the name, Jul,
that it is still known by in the Germanic-language Nordic countries such
as my father's native Norway.  So, Christmas doesn't necessarily imply
Christian, dammit.  Get it right, my Israeli friend.  And never accuse
me of membership in a Middle-Eastern death cult again.

Because of a historical oddity, I am technically an arguable Christian
on account of baptism, even though absolutely not in any real sense:
When my parents found they could not conceive children, and arranged
adoption of first me and then my sister in infancy from private parties,
they found to their great annoyance that a fossil statute of the state
of California still required adoptive parents to give their children
some bare minimum amount of religious instruction and education.
(Christianity was not required.)  Mom and Dad therefore sought locally
for the least-bothersome option.  They found a new
social-activism-oriented congregation, that didn't yet even have its own
building.  (It met at, I believe, a high school's building on weekends.)
The main attraction was the minister, a great and good man named
Reverand Stephen Peabody.  Rev. Peabody met the highest ideals of
Christianity by my standards, in that he didn't care what if anything
you believed.  He just wanted to help make the world a better place,
and he and his congregants would be found helping and feeding the poor,
doing civil rights actions, and other deeds of good character.  My
family thus became in theory congregants from 1958 to 1962, and I
attended Sunday School there at which I remember colouring books and
instructive toys but no religion whatsoever.

Many years later, when the elderly Rev. Peabody and his wife retired,
they sold everything they owned and moved to rural Bolivia to spend the
rest of their lives trying to teach and feed poor rural children and
their families.  And that was their story.


> Personally, I tried to read an English translation, but didn't get
> past about page ten.  That seems to be about par for holy books for
> me.

The key to reading the Tanakh (the Old Testament) is to prepare to skip
great gobs that are just peculiar wastes of time, such as all the
begats, and read it in the framing of ancient politics, as if you were
reading about the Wars of the Roses.  And of course there is obvious and
less-obvious mythology lying and pretending to be history, but you can
read all that tall-tale gibberish and just think 'This is mythology,
less accessible than Edith Hamilton, but also less grim and terse than
the Eddas and less alien than Hesiod.'  There is some fine writing, such
as the tales of King Saul and King David.  The history is suspect and
sometimes outright fraudulent, e.g., the invasion of Canaan and the 40
years in Sinai and escape from Egypt, none of which happened and are
pure literary fantasy.  Even the _Iliad_ is better founded in fact.

But you don't read it as history.  You read it as politics and
commentary on the human condition.

It helps to adopt the (imperfect) framing used for the Tanakh by Jewish
tradition, which divides it (the 'Old Testament') into three parts.
(1) Torah (law), the first five books.  Of course it's not just the 613
commandments to the Jews from God, but that's the concept applied.  (2)
Navi'im (prophets).  These are the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, etc.,
social critics of several stages of the (claimed) history, and a meaty
source of insight into character and society.  (3) Ketuvim (holy
writings).  This is the grab-bag of Everything Else, stuff like the Book
of Esther, a bloody-minded fairy tale set in Persia.

For the New Testmament, the main attraction is the four Gospels, which
comprise the three 'synoptic' ones, the ones that are in close agreement
about the life and teachings of Jesus, and then the outlier, the Gospel
of John, from an author who spent way too much time warping his mind on
Greek mystery cults and tried to overlay that on a biography of Jesus.

Following that, you have many books largely concerned with the annoying
and somewhat retrograde street-politician figure Saul of Tarsus (yclept
'Saint Paul'), the guy who inherited leadership of early Christianity
when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and Christianity's incumbent
(Judiasm-oriented) leadership along with it.  Saul transformed
Christianty away from Judiasm, intuiting that he needed to broaden its
appeal, which paved the way for Emperor Constantine later to use it as a
unifying principle for his east-leaning Roman Empire.  Saul is also
where much of Christianity's misogyny came from (or started and was
perpetuated).  An Israeli friend called him 'a one-eyed Jew who couldn't
get laid', which is about the size of it.  ISTR that if the book has
'Epistle' (letter) in its title, it's in almost every case Saul writing
to somewhere to speak in either a selling-his-religion role or writing
to other church functionaries to tell them what to do.  (I'm perhaps a
bit vague on Saul/Paul's epistles because he struck me as repulsive in
his ways of thinking.)

And, as with the Tanakh (Old Testament) there is the grab-bag of stuff,
some of which will cause you much WTFery, such as the Book of the
Revelation of Saint John [of Patmos], which is like a terrible B-movie
horror film directed by someone on magic mushrooms.  (One theory is that
it's mostly political allegory, avoiding using contemporary real names
of powerful people so the author would not be killed.)



> Shakespeare I had no problem with because it's mostly cross-dressing
> and fart jokes.  The comedies, anyway.  The tragedies and histories
> never interested me much.

They are worthwhile.  And all of Shakespeare matters because a huge
amount of the vocabulary and expressions of modern English come directly
from his words.  Seriously.

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