The Good News Bible taught me the power of words, but also stole my youth

[cbayer]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/13/good-news-bible

This Bible really did change my life. It told me that the things I liked – David Soul, chocolate eclairs – were things you couldn’t like all that much if you loved Jesus Christ


Christina Patterson

The Guardian, Wednesday 13 August 2014 19.21 BST


‘When I was a child, the Bible was a very old book, written in old-fashioned language you couldn’t understand.’ Photograph: Philip James Corwin/Corbis

For my 15th birthday, I got a Bible. I have it in front of me now. Underneath the message “To dearest Christina, with much love from Mummy and Daddy” there is a red sticker saying JESUS. Next to it, in rather childish handwriting, I’ve written: “died for ME!!” On the inside jacket there are more stickers: “He was born to die”, “Have a happy new life with Jesus” and, with letters turned into hearts and smiley faces, “GOD LOVES YOU”. Underneath the stickers, I’ve written out a quote from the book of Romans. “If we hope for what we do not see,” it says, “we wait for it with patience.”

My parents would have been surprised to see me talking about patience. Their view of the sulky teenager who spent hours hogging the bathroom was that she was more keen on her family’s patience than on developing any of her own.

They must have been surprised when I asked for a Bible. Two years earlier I’d stopped singing the hymns at the Anglican church we’d always had to go to – the price we paid for Sunday roast chicken and ice-cream. I’d discovered Camus, and you couldn’t really sing “Praise my soul, the King of Heaven” if you now knew there wasn’t a God and wanted to be authentic. You couldn’t be authentic if you even went to church, so I was relieved when my parents said I could stop.

But then I discovered boys. The boys I found were at a youth club attached to a Baptist church, so it wasn’t long before I found God too. This God was quite different to the one I’d grown up with. That God was distant, and busy, and not too bothered with the details of your life. He just wanted you to be nice, and kind, and polite. The new God wasn’t distant at all. He wanted every single thing that happened to you to be all about Him.

more at link

[MADem]

1. I found this bit fun....

I did escape. Thank the God who definitely didn’t write the Good News Bible, I did, eventually, escape. I didn’t get my youth back. No one can give you your youth back. But in the process of finding a faith and losing it, I did learn an awful lot. I learned, for example, that almost anyone can believe almost anything, and that arguing with them probably won’t change their mind. I learned that you can take a great work of literature – packed with stories, poetry and images that have shaped the face of western art – and turn it into something not just dangerous but banal. And I learned that what is beautiful, true, brave and good isn’t something you can ever put in a book and call “truth”.

We should probably post the bolded part over the door of every DU "religion" group!!!

[cbayer]

2. Yep, I agree.

It is such a waste of energy to try to convince people to believe in or not believe in something that has no proof or evidence.

Evangelizers, proselytizers and crusaders of all stripes are spinning their wheels and, in the end, probably driving more people away from their position than attracting them to it. They may come across an individual once in awhile who wants to change, but generally they are pissing into the wind.

If we could just learn to move past that and find out what we have in common, rather than what we have as differences, we would be a lot more effective.

Hope you have been well, MADem. I really enjoyed this article as I am having a wonderful time exploring the world of St. Francis of Assisi right now. You don't have to be a believer to benefit from the stories, the art, the music and the architecture of religion.

[intaglio]

3. Oddly I found the Good News Version terribly anodyne

I much preferred the KJV for the poetry and the sonority of the words.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

4. Even Christopher Hitchens wrote about the beauty of the King James Bible.

How much it has influenced our culture, and its phrases we use all the time.

And he mentioned that at his father's funeral he had read the part about whatsoever things are true and beautiful, think on those things.

Since I took Latin, I like the subject-object-verb sentences which are also common in the Book of Common Prayer used by the Anglicans/Episcopalians, such as "With this ring I thee wed. With my body I thee worship (since changed to "honor&quot ."