Don't believe everything the sacred book says

Some people say that it is necessary to follow a sacred text so that one has a source of moral standards. A dialogue from Tom Perrotta's novel The Abstinence Teacher:

"Say what you want about the Bible, at least it takes a clear position on right and wrong."

"See, Ruth told him. "This is what bugs me. The way you people talk, it's like you're the only ones who know how to distinguish right from wrong. Just because my moral system's different from yours, that doesn't mean I don't have one. And by the way, just because something's written down in a book that's a couple of thousand years old, that doesn't necessarily mean it's right."

"It does if it's the Word of God."

"The last I heard, the Bible wasn't written by God. It was written by human beings. And you gotta admit, some of it's a little nutty."

* * *

"I'm no scholar," he admitted. "I just feel like, you know, with all the moral relativism in the world, it's good to have some absolute standards."

Whose standards – that ought to be the question. Even if we need a single book as the source of our standards, how would we know which book to pick? "It's time to stop caring what desert nomads were spooked by five thousand years ago," Toby Johnson wrote.

Maybe we could choose based on popularity. A billion people or so couldn't be wrong, could they? Well, sure they could. The world has got about 7 billion people, and Christianity and Islam each have about a billion adherents; their holy books cannot both simultaneously be literally true in their propositional truth claims about theology and morality. Besides, the popularity of these religions has changed over time and will continue to change.

Ibn Warraq wrote, "To assess the truth of a doctrine by the number of people who believe it is also totally ridiculous. The number of people who believe in Scientology is increasing yearly. Is its truth also growing year by year?
"

If one happens to identify a book that one likes, one could, of course, also identify what seems to be true and false within that book. Biblical literalists derisively call this "picking and choosing," but it is the same kind of discernment that we use in all other areas of life. We don't assume that people, institutions, and books are correct (or wrong) all the time. We are even capable of recognizing authorities and experts while remembering that they might sometimes be wrong. Frank Schaeffer wrote that

"They [holy books] are also, inevitably, full of mistakes. The question is what to follow and what to ignore, in the same way one ignores a village idiot but knows the value of the village where both the idiot and the rest of us all live.

Every religious and every scientific/secular tradition has a 'village idiot' or two lurking in its scriptures..."

Jennifer Wright Knust said:

"The only way that the Bible can be regarded as straightforward and simple is if no one bothers to read it. As I had already gathered as a child, the Bible is not only contradictory but complex. Biblical books take sides, they disagree with one another, they intentionally change earlier teachings, and they make irreconcilable claims about human life and the nature of God. In some cases, they promote points of view that, from a modern perspective anyway, are patently immoral."

And, when interviewed by the Boston University Alumni magazine, she gave this opinion:

[Bostonia:] Do you think people will ever stop using the Bible for their own arguments?

[Knust:] That's my dream, that people will get the idea that there's the notion of context.

Sources

Tom Perrotta. The Abstinence Teacher. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2007. p. 288.

Toby Johnson, reviewing Men, Homosexuality, and the Gods by Ronald E. Long, White Crane Journal, Issue #64, Spring 2005, p 37.

Ibn Warraq. Why I Am Not a Muslim. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995. p 22.

Frank Schaeffer. Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don't Like Religion (or Atheism). Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2009. p. 215.

Jennifer Wright Knust. Unprotected Texts. Kindle edition. Location 216.

"Biblical Sexuality: Author Jennifer Knust on what the Bible says about Homosexuality." By Kimberly Cornuelle. Bostonia: The Alumni Magazine of Boston University. Winter/Spring 2010. p. 19.

How many Americans believe the Bible is the 'Word of God'?

Over the years, Gallup has asked Americans if they believed the Bible was the "actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word." In 1977, 38 percent of Americans identified themselves as Biblical literalists – rejecting the poll's other options that the Bible is "the inspired word of God" or "an ancient book of fables" – but by 2011 this response had declined to 30 percent. The decline was not perfectly linear. The number of Biblical literalists increased to about 40 percent in the early 1980s and declined to a low of 27 percent in 2001 before rising slightly again.

Gallup found that Biblical literalists were more likely to claim that they were Protestant Christians, attended church weekly, were political conservatives and/or Republicans, had only a high school education or less, and had low incomes. Additionally, Rasmussen found in 2005 that they are slightly more likely to be female and over 40.  (Among atheists and agnostics, by contrast, men clearly outnumber women two-to-one, according to the Pew Religious Landscape Study in 2008.)

When Americans are asked in a general way if they will affirm the truth of the Bible, the majority do so. Rasmussen found in 2005 that 63 percent of Americans agreed that "the Bible" – without having been asked to limit their response to specific stories within the Bible – was "literally true." This figure is twice as high as Gallup's.

Of course, it is possible to believe that some, and not all, statements in the Bible are true. When people are given options to declare belief in specific parts of the Bible, it generates a more nuanced picture of belief. ABC News Primetime poll in 2004 found that over 60 percent of Americans were literalists about certain Biblical events such as the creation of the world, Noah's ark, and Moses parting the Red Sea.  Those who described themselves as "evangelical Protestants" were more likely than other Protestants to have these literalist beliefs. A CBS news poll later that year found similar results, with 55 percent claiming to believe in the creation of the world as described in the Bible. Yet another poll found that 40 percent believed that God created humans "pretty much in their present form" several thousand years ago (Gallup, 2010).

William Saletan argued for Slate that, while Gallup has found in a dozen polls between 1982-2014 that at least 40 percent of Americans claim to believe that God created the Earth less than 10,000 years ago, a new 2014 study by the BioLogos Foundation found that, when people are pressed to be more specific about their beliefs and allowed to express uncertainty, only 15 percent of Americans maintained such a position.

Americans' beliefs differ so widely by geography such that it is hard to generalize about what Americans believe. In the U.S. states of Alabama and Arkansas, 75 percent believe the Bible is literally true, while in Vermont and Massachusetts it is only 22 percent (Rasmussen, 2006).

While 92 percent say they believe in God, only 71 percent say they are "absolutely certain" of God's existence. A quarter of Americans believe God is an "impersonal force." (Pew, 2008)

Polls have returned an assortment of more dramatic, specific beliefs. Over three-quarters of Americans believe in angels. (Scripps Howard / Ohio University, 2001) From 1975 to 1995, 140 children died of curable diseases in the United States after their parents refused medical treatment for religious reasons.  A Pew survey in 2006 found that a third of black Protestants and a third of white evangelicals believe that the "Second Coming" (the return of Jesus to Earth) will occur during their lifetimes.

And although nearly a quarter of Americans don't expect to have a religious funeral (American Religious Identification Survey, 2008), nearly half of Americans said they would disapprove of their child marrying an atheist (University of Minnesota Study, 2008) and 60 percent think the nation benefits when politicians make public expressions of faith (Newsweek, 2002).

Update: In 2020, a third of self-identified evangelicals in the United States agreed with a statement that Jesus was a good teacher, but not God. (The study from Ligonier Ministries was conducted by LifeWay Research.) In addition, two-thirds agreed that Jesus "is the first and greatest being created by God." Both of these positions are inconsistent with "evangelical teaching and most historic Christian doctrine," according to Relevant Magazine.

This article was originally posted to Helium Network on July 30, 2011.