An Introduction to The Humanist Bible Project

Let us assume that there is no God: that this is a given of existence. A crumb-collecting theologian may want an inquest to decide if its death was murder, old age, suicide or most likely, an antediluvian stillborn.

A question for the humanist is: what we can make of the great works of art and wisdom inspired by this God? They were certainly created by people in commune with a sense of the beyond, a mysterious compulsion that they named God. This God was perhaps a convenient explanation of their super-human powers, as if they were embarrassed to admit themselves capable of the staggering fertility of their imaginations, the towering intellect and insight whose flashes they could transcribe into music and art. So God is perhaps best described as an alibi; a colossal self-denial. We had the divine in us, were ashamed, and assigned it elsewhere. We excised perfection from humanity and called that perfection the divine. The divine is the fearful perceived impossibility of authentic perfection: the non-human, the meta-human, the über-human. Yet there is only human.

God is a human concept. Everything we assign to it signifies some human depth. The inspiration from God comes only from within. The messages and morals come from inside humans. Like the Greek Myths, all religious stories are necessarily and in every way about us. Every tale that resonates with us is one in which we see ourselves reflected, as in a glass, darkly (1 Corinthians 13). Freud found in the Oedipus myth a cipher of human desires. Camus saw in the myth of Sisyphus a manifestation of our own sense of endless futility. Whether or not done consciously, these ancient stories strive towards self-understanding. The same can be said of Shakespeare: we needn't attempt to unravel Hamlet's actions to know that somehow he is the everyman; his struggle his not explicable, but is utterly and terrifyingly knowable. Something, in the words of Beethoven, "which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend."

Is it not time to decipher ourselves through the prism the greatest story ever told: The Bible? To reinvent parable as myth?

The Bible stumbles on weighed down by a dead God hanging like an albatross from its neck. It should be saved and put in its place not as a devotional text, but as a psychological work of art. The Bible must be rescued, not thrown out with the bathwater of organised religion. Remove God, and we are presented with a solely human work, a work comprised of tales of greed, love, avarice, calumny, sacrifice, wisdom and art probably unparalleled in any other single text. God must be recognised as a placeholder, and re-signified as a mortal intention of the human psyche.

As an example, the story of Abraham and Isaac. In it we learn that God is a manically jealous deity, perhaps a practical-joker. Without God, these parables can become riddles of human psychology, instead of endless ruminations on the vagaries of a fantastical beardied lunatic. Perhaps we see Freud here: the father is jealous of the son and seeks to kill him. It could reflect the inexplicable instinct to destory that which we love , or perhaps our endless intoxification with danger and violence. Is this a challenge which we all face everyday - the effort not to kill those around us? Man is both a proud and yet a wretched thing.

Humans wrote every word in the Bible: unearthed every psychological truth, had every mystic revelation, created every heart-stopping metaphor, grappled with the terrifying and uncompromising truths of existence and constructed a place for mankind in a seemingly chaotic world: it’s time to take sole credit for this achievement: to acknowledge the human divine. I would like to see a Bible stripped completely of its devotional elements, with God on the cutting room floor, and left as a book of human wisdom and human art.

Time to make an atheist’s Bible of pure literature, untainted by the stain of religious association. The aim is not to explain or understand what the writers of the Bible were implying, but just to render them accessible, to allow their words to emerge from under the veil of faith.

Anyone who is interested in joining in, do so: the aspiration is to become open-source.

Art obscures truth; art illuminates truth: the case of the Bible

The Bible, like all works of art, is a manifestation of one of the dichotomies of mankind. We are both literal beings: animals, machines for turning good food into shit, beings of mere phenomenon; and yet also metaphysical: we are artists, sensitives, creators of the transcendental. The Bible is literally just a devotional text, a practical guide for life, and yet also a rarely-paralleled work of literary art. This duality, of practical devotion and non-aligned expressive spirituality, is a dilemma for translators, a dilemma for cultured atheists, and a dilemma for fanatics and the devout.

The Bible is to all mankind a work of art, and to some Christians a work of truth. Is this truth illuminated by its artistry, or obscured by it? Should the Bible be read as a purely devotional text, or as a text in which language is as divine as content?

Modern Christian translations of the Bible assign primacy to intelligibility, in order to facilitate pure devotion without the distraction of obscure complexity. In so doing, they must refashion florid language into the common mundane, clarify opaque and mysterious fables into lucent morality tales. In the process they must strip art from the scriptures, untangle the literary from the liturgical, and leave a text of merely devotional value. The translator is contending that the Bible should not be acclaimed for anything other than its religious significance.

But is it not through encountering art that we can encounter, as humans, uniquely, our experience of the divine? What divinity can be encountered without transcending the merely human, the instructional mundane?

There are many translations which appeal solely to the devout. The devout can have them. I would like to see an atheist’s Bible of pure literature, untainted by the stain of religious association. The Bible stumbles on weighed down by a dead God hanging like an albatross from its neck. It should be saved before it is pulled under. We should not throw out the Bible with the bathwater of organised religion. I would like to see a Bible stripped completely of its devotional elements, with God on the cutting room floor, and left as a book of human wisdom and human art. Humans wrote every word in the Bible: unearthed every psychological truth, had every mystic revelation, created every heart-stopping metaphor, grappled with the terrifying and uncompromising truths of existence and constructed a place for mankind in a seemingly chaotic world: it’s time to take sole credit for this achievement: to acknowledge the human divine.

1611 King James (1611) vs New International Version (1978)

1 Corinthians 13:

For now we see through a glass darkly

Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror

Ecclesiastes 1:1

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

"Meaningless! Meaningless!"
says the Teacher.
"Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless."

Mathew 6:28

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:

See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin.

Nude vs Prude in the Vatican Museums

On the left, a 2nd century BC bronze Hercules in the Capitoline Museum in Rome, dressing to the left. On the right, a similar Hercules in the Vatican Museums, chastened. Around half of the Roman and Hellenic nude statues in the Musei Vaticani have had their genitals crudely covered by fig leaves. These peculiar blotches are visually incoherent. They interrupt the continuity of nude musculature and rather undermine the effect of the nude as a representation of human beauty. They are also conceptually weird, floating, glued or perhaps stapled on. They lack the symbolism imbued by the artist to each other object in the production of allegorical art. As with all censorship, in the end it is the censor who exposes himself. There’s nothing funnier than an enraged prude, and above all these sheaths show to comic effect the self-defeating nature of censorship, in this case intended to sustain the decency of the Papacy. They have surrounded themselves with cocks and fannies, eye-catchingly prominent by their conspicuous absence. In fairness, many have been uncovered, but only in the sculptures which are deemed to have particular artistic value. 

The Victorians are just as guilty or this inverted perversity. Unfortunately for the majority world, while Victorian values cling on only in a few outposts (by-passed rural islands, public schools) the Vatican continues to dictate half the planet’s policy on sexual health and gender issues. From a theological perspective, this prudishness serves to place men firmly outside the garden, into a place of sin and shame. The Ancients, the creators of these works of art, had lived in paradise, before Adam was cast out, before God hated men. These Ancients were not ashamed of themselves, living with philosophy, culture, debate, democracy, tragedy, games, as well as nudity and occasional sexual freedom. The Papacy, graphically and literally, imposed shame upon them, defrocked them of innocence and beauty, and dragged them into God’s new fig-fringed repression. The natural state of man, they claim, is not a Greek ideal: the hero, the youth, the philosopher or athlete, but the sinner and the guilty. Having enforced on men self-embarrassment, this doctrine can then monopolise self-worth through confession, indulgence and absolution. Thus the same cause spreads the illness and then sells the cure, like an itinerant quack with the lurgy.

The Pantheon

The Pantheon in Rome is shockingly old. The marbled floor is on a noticable camber from centre to rim, no doubt the great walls, which conceal the buttresses and arches required to hold up the dome, are sinking into the ground of the Piazza della Rotunda like a biscuit mould cutting through pastry. In typically solid Roman proportional architecture, the dome is as high as it is wide, given the peculiar sensation of being inside a circular cube. Above is a great occulus, a skylight through which a pole of light traces a parabola around the floor. This occulus is the manifested absence of the Roman keystone. In a normal two dimensional arch, the keystone is the key stone, supporting through pressure on itself the weight of the building. The key stone is the physical and conceptual focus of the arch, the confluence of the building's weight. But when translated into three dimensions, the point can be transormed from thing to nothing. The defining presence of the keystone becomes its own absence. In the place where all the pressure of the mighty dome concentrates there is a hole, a void. A ring of keystones all press inwards on each other, focusing all the energy and weight of the mighty dome invisibly into nothing but air. It is a triumph of lack, an existential vertice, the imperceptible point of total connection, before the weight is conducted, spreading and dropping down through the solid walls.

The occulus eyeing idlers in 1911.

This momentary suspension and expansion of matter is like the gap between the fingertips of Adam and God on the Sistene Chapel, the spark of life is channeled into an unseen stream, compressed for a heartstopping moment, and then bursts out again made flesh, a living thing.

The entrance is wide, high and free. The stanchions and capitals, the freezes and cornices have become the trunk of the world's architectural tree of life, so that the family resemblances to all other buildings are so strong as to blend ancestor with infant and make their profiles habitually indistinguishable. Tourists sleepwalk, staring upwards at the columns and portico they have already just passed. The interior is full of people, energy and chatter, like the foyer of a concert hall in an interval, or an airport arrivals hall, or a grand Victorian bank that has been converted into a pub. There is no sense whatsoever of a temple, even pagan. The building was consecrated by the Catholic sect to their own worship over a thousand years ago, yet the proportions are so ancient and unlike the vaulted barns of churches as to compromise its monotheist rebaptism as a tomb for artists and tyrants. The tourists too lack the feigned reverence for God they may show in St Peter's, itself not so much a church as a supertanker performing some endless turning circle.

Instead we gape and chat, photograph, step around, bump into each other, watch. This must be more like the forum, some ancient marketplace of exchange, debate, meeting. It is called a church but there is no sense of religion. People come who do not call themselves pilgrims. But they are pilgrims to their own experience in this miraculous primeval space. Instead of being reverential to some other being, a divine presence extant in holy places, the pilgrims are reverential to their own presence in the building. This is a secular existential pilgrimage. The presence of being there, inside these walls, in a space made possible by that the sublime building which encloses it. These walls make us flesh. We are not reverential of a divine presence, but of our own presence.