Just finished reading "The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible As Literally As Possible" by AJ Jacobs (he also wrote a memoir about reading the entire encyclopedia).
He is genetically Jewish but lacks almost any sense of faith or religious affiliation to start but decides to take a year and try to understand how we choose which laws/advice from the Bible to follow and which to ignore. He doesn't do it haphazardly but reads the entire Bible, makes copious notes and gets regular input from a variety of Jewish and Christian sources.
The lesson: there is always interpretation regardless of how literal you're taking things. He does end up gleaning what he wants from it and leaving the rest.
Worth reading almost just for the snippet about his attempt to fulfill the law in the Old Testament to "pebble" adulterers.
My brilliant plan I envisioned while torturing myself with statistics for 5-8 hours a day has been to do book reviews via Haiku. Get some creativity a'flowin. It was going to be just haikus but I'm thinking, at least to start, they will remain supplementary.
Beard: Symbolical
Open Bible quest for truth
Simply agnostic
Things Haiku can teach me if I keep this up:
--how to make every syllable count (a whole book in 17 syllables??)
--how to choose only the extremely relevant
Appraisal so far: needs work lol
2 comments:
I was looking at the back cover of that book at a bookstore recently. so your conclusion is that it is pretty agnostic? like he realizes that nothing really matters?
i would think that the intention of all the laws help us understand that we can't even do it on our own... i sure know that from personal experience
Silas!
It is an interesting journey. Agnostic yes, but more in the sense that you just can't know not that nothing matters.
But he does take the view of taking the wisdom from the Bible that makes you a better person and trying your best.
Basically he becomes more 'spiritual' but I wouldn't say adopts any hard beliefs.
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