The Blible

I've been slowly re-reading a major religious book that I read several times as a young guy.  Hard to believe from the invective that I regularly spew but I was a pretty religious kid.  I wouldn't say that I'm opposed to religion even today, rather that my flawless ability to spot the flaws in anything at the drop of a hat sort of makes my outlook . . . ahem . . . cynical.

Because I'm trying not to offend anyone I won't use the actual name of the book but instead have decided to use a bookish pseudonym.  Let's call it The Blible.  That way no one will be able to figure out which major religious book I'm talking about.

As with most traumatic things that I revisit in my life, things that were so objectionable to me for so long, I'm finding the whole exercise pretty tame.  It's a pretty good book, actually.  I don't even find it all that objectionable.  In fact, I can't imagine what I found objectionable about it at all.  A lot of it is kind of boring to be honest about it: Jeebus did this, Jeebus went there, Jeebus talked for a while blah blah blah.   I'm not running into anything very controversial, that's for sure.  An awful lot of verbiage is devoted to trying to convince the reader that Jeebus is the main dude so if you believe that already it gets to be a bit repetitive.  I feel like saying: "OK, I'm on board - how about something profound already?"

As with a lot of things in my life as a professional cynic my big problem is with what the so-called experts in the field tend to emphasize.  Frankly, I'm reading along and I haven't found any of the stuff that seems to be talked about ad nauseum.  And I'm finding tons of stuff that seems really pretty nice and positive that never seems to get mentioned at all.  Maybe I'm hearing selectively.  Maybe 

My dad was a microbiologist who spent a lot of time parsing scientific studies.  He always told me to be very suspicious of numbers because a good promoter could usually set up a study to show the kinds of results that he wanted to show.  I guess it's that way about everything.  I could write a few volumes about The Blible that would stress concepts that I don't hear that much about.  I would have An Agenda.