People are Opening Their Bibles Less


A survey of Christians finds they regard the Bible as less important than they used to. This makes sense. What does not make sense is that a large swath of the world's population ever thought it was anything but the writing of ancient and wealthy goat herders.

It is odd that so many people in the world believe that if the wealthy tell them the wealthy are more important than they are, people believe it. That is what happened when the wealthy 1% in ancient times wrote the Bible. 

It's foolish for the gazillion churches to call themselves "Church of the Open Bible" or other names like that. Equally foolish is the denomination of my youth, the Covenant Church. It has minimal tenets and says it rules can be found by reading the Bible. More clever is the Catholic Church which says the Bible needs to be filtered through wiser minds, the clergy, and should not be followed directly by reading it. By doing this the Catholic clergy can manipulate those in the pews to believe the clergy are more important than they are actually. 

All of this business about basing the faith on the Bible has an underlying assumption. The assumption is those in the pews respect the Bible. If they lose interest in it and respect for it there goes the whole kit and kabuto. The march away from the Bible has started. My prediction is it will be impossible to turn it around.  

For centuries, the faith has done what those in the media industry call "cross promotion." When a company owns a newspaper and TV station it has its writers for the newspaper talk about the TV station. The TV people do the same for the newspaper. In the Bible it talks about the importance of attending church. In church the preacher urges people to read the Bible. The only problem is that when one of the two goes out of business it takes down the other. Just now, there are fewer going to church. Without the constant reminder to read the Bible fewer are reading it.

So much smarter would be a propaganda that talked up a mysterious unknown. No one knows what the unknown is so it's foolish to pretend, as the Bible does, someone knows it. 

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