Edwin Kagin

“This is a wake up call. Don’t press the snooze alarm. The barbarians are at the gates, and, because they encourage breeding beyond the ability of the breeders to house, feed, and educate the breedees, violence and social disorganization continue. As the most Christian nation on earth watches its civilization dissolve like a Dove bar fallen off of that ark, attempts to enforce irrational superstitious solutions will accelerate. That Branch Davidian thing was a sample. Lots of other messiahs are waiting. Maybe we can have court-ordered Branch Davidian Social Services counseling for people who won’t share their wives with their god’s anointed. Maybe courts can acquit murderers if they believe a god’s finger was on their trigger. Maybe the barbarians will actually succeed in assuring that books, pictures, ideas, doctors, judges and military commanders share their vision. Then we will have a lot of interesting tribal warfare. One useful defense will be humanistic hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is a fancy word for biblical interpretation. When religious types want to make something simple sound holy and mysterious, they often give it an important sounding high falutin’ name. This practice contrasts sharply with the usage of secular humanists, who, in explaining their views, employ simple words, that fall trippingly from the tongue, like ‘eupraxophy.’ Hermeneutics can be an important weapon to use against religious fanatics in the coming ARCW. The hard core nut cases—those who would control every aspect of our lives by forcing us to accept their understanding of the will of their god—tend to share certain operational assumptions. These include the belief that: (1) Every word of the Bible is true. (2) The English translation of the Bible authorized by King James the First of England, completed in 1611, Common Era, is the only fully acceptable, authoritative, and inspired-by-god translation of holy scripture. This translation is accurate in every respect, including punctuation marks. (3) The Bible is the basis of all morality. Without it there can be no morality. (4) The United States of America was established, and should be governed, according to biblical principles. (5) The Bible is without error. (6) No part of the Bible is in conflict with, or contradictory to, any other part. (7) Hermeneutics can be used to clarify and explain those truths of god in the Bible that might appear, to finite minds, to be in conflict. The goal of hermeneutics is to reconcile all portions of the ‘Word of God’ (the Bible) into a seamless, complete, infallible, and final statement of all past and future history (the latter is called prophecy), of divine law, and of how humans should behave and understand morality. The Bible, properly interpreted, is the final word on everything.”
― Edwin Kagin, Baubles of Blasphemy