The Bible for secularists

"Argument", "excellent", "puberty" and "novel" are amongst these Biblical bequests.

And so many of the phrases that we use come straight from the King James version of the Bible. Without understanding the context in which these phrases arise, we can't properly understand what they mean.

If it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, does it mean that when it comes to eternal life, the rich need not apply?

And in language context is everything. While words have a meaning of their own, this is always modified and modulated by the words and ideas in which they are wrapped and surrounded.

So, when the University of Queensland English Department insisted that their honours students study the bible, it was an acknowledgement, even 36 years ago when church attendance was much higher, that a whole box of tools for understanding the language was lacking.

And while language might be the first step of biblical influence, it extends far beyond that into our world view.

Clarke examines some key philosophical concepts, such as human equality, and shows that they are grounded in the Bible, starting with the Garden of Eden, contrasting this with societies without a Christian pedigree, where equality is not seen as a moral given at all.

He also explores its role in fostering the rise of universities, the development of science, and lists some of the great modern intellects who welcome it as a foundational document.

He also corrects some naïve views of what the Bible is. While fundamentalist Christians and atheists alike want to view it as the inerrant word of God – one group as a means of supporting it, and the other as a means of tearing it down under its own internal contradictions – Clarke describes it as "God's Dewey Decimal System".

By this he means that the Bible is a library of other books, and just as you wouldn't expect books in a real library to cohere with each other, neither should you expect those in the Bible.

What the Bible is, is a collection of books worth reading.

This would appear to be something that has escaped militant atheists like Richard Dawkins who use quotes from some of the books in the bible to confound modern audiences because they conflict with the values those audiences have been brought up on, which are drawn from other (generally later) books in the Bible.