People who know me well know that I am an out-of-the-box thinker. I do not follow people, and I simply do not worry about whether my friends and detractors share my opinions or whether they don't. It's my make up. It is how I am.
People who know me are also shocked, disappointed, displeased or simply dismayed at my views and feelings about religion.
I live in a notoriously fundamentalist, protestant and Pentecostal-evangelical-influenced segment of the world, and I have written quite some about it since I hardly know how to keep such opinions to myself, nor do I wish to, because I feel that the teachings are plainly dangerous and mentally, economically and psychologically debilitating. I believe that fundamentalist religious teachings, in particular, keep people ignorant and poor. I have argued elsewhere that the missionaries who brought the teachings we hold to in the Caribbean up to this day were neither successful nor mentally or financially rich, and that their descendants have long since abandoned the teachings that our children are still being frightened and badgered into retaining. This does not mean I am unable to appreciate the Bible that they came carrying, and I particularly love the King James version of it. The language is to die for. I have downloaded it to my smart phone, and plan to download it on my other devices.
I think I'll be an idiot to have a problem with a book of any sort, but I love the Bible because it is a book of the impossible and I love impossible thinking. There is no "can't" in the Bible; everything and anything is possible there. Faith is magical; a simple command is able to move mountains or make the sun stand still. The dead can rise; love can make a man willingly surrender his life to the cruelty of crucifixion, and sailing to the skies is not impossible inside that book. What's to dislike? Giants can be brought down by little boys, a little child can lead "them" and women can turn strong men into molten wax.Humans can live inside the belly of a fish, and Matthew1:12 tells me that life can continue in a Babylon.
The Bible, in my opinions, is one of the greats, if not the greatest book ever to come out of the imaginings of humanity, and nothing I believe or don't believe is going to make me think otherwise. I will continue to contend to the annoyance and puzzlement of my Pentecostal and fundamentalist detractors and friends, that the Bible is simply a marvelous book that has fallen into the hands of the wrong people; people who do not know what else to do with it other than use it to frighten the poor and the vulnerable.
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