Outside of copyrighted books, the Holy Bible is the biggest selling book in the world. Through its four hundred year history it has been praised, burned, debated and spurned by millions of people.
The King James Bible, first published in 1611, has arguably done more for the English language than any other book, with the possible exception of Shakespeare's First Folio, obviously. But as Victor Hugo said, "England has two books, the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare, but the Bible made England".
Surprisingly, there were very few neologisms in the Bible. David Crystal (my personal hero) has written a majestic study on the Bible and the English language and he estimates that there are around 70 'new' words in the Bible (Begat, Crystal 2011). Compared to Shakespeare's 1,700, then that is not too many. But Shakespeare was a playwright, he was paid to use language as a form of entertainment; the Bible, on the other hand, was an instructional manual - literally! The Bible does have the proud claim to be the point of genesis of a number of sayings, proverbs and phrases that we still use today. "The powers that be" went through a "labour of love" to develop the Good Book, and "God forbid" if there is "a fly in the ointment" to cause trouble. Crystal has counted at least 257 phrases that we still use that were first seen in the Bible. Pretty impressive for an instructional manual.
And this is where I have my beef. As an instructional manual, the Bible just doesn't work.
Once, when I was young and naive, I gave organised religion a go. I read a lot of the Bible. I still do as I read a lot of religiously inspired literature (Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, et al). I came to the conclusion that the power of prayer is not very powerful at all. In fact, I found that the more praying I did, the less likely I was to get a response. Here are a few things the Good Book says about prayer:
"Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and it will be opened to you." - Matthew 7:7
"Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it." - John 14:13-14
"Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it and it will be yours." - Mark 11:24
So I was led to believe that praying to God would help me in my life. After all, He is a generous, caring and loving God and not at all jealous, selfish and fickle. So I prayed. And I prayed hard - 4 or 5 times a day. It was a simple request: I needed a new car to get to work. "Lord," I said, "in your infinite wisdom and mercy, please can you help me find an affordable yet comfortable car that I can use to help me keep my job so that I can continue paying my rent and buying food. Thanks for listening and hope to hear from you soon.Amen."
I did this for around a month with no result. Maybe, I thought, I was aiming too high. I should start off small and work my way up to a car. So I prayed for some toast. Nothing fancy, just some toasted bread with a bit of margarine spread on it. No marmalade, cheese, HP Sauce. Just toast. I prayed, I sat and I waited. Prayed. Sat. Waited.... nothing.
After 45 minutes I began to feel hungry (praying for toast makes a person want toast). So I got up, put some bread under the grill and toasted the shit out of it. I began to think of the reason why God had not given me toast. At first I thought that God was motivating me to make my own toast. But I could have done that without all the praying, which wasted my time more than anything else. The go-to argument is, of course, "The Lord works in mysterious ways". But the Lord did not do any of the work - I did. So maybe if we change the word "mysterious" to "lazy" then we can be a bit more accurate.
God had become nothing more than an inconvenient middle man who does none of the work and takes all the glory. Further research was needed. I began to ask people that were praying for serious things: the health of a dying loved one; a long wished for pregnancy; an end to suffering in the world. And the result showed that God did not intervene with these either. How was this motivation? A grandfather dies in agony. An aging couple lose all hope of having their own child. Last time I checked, there is still a lot of suffering in the world. God wasn't motivating. God wasn't listening. God was not there.
Maybe toast is evil. Maybe crisping some bread and smothering it in jam is the Devil's work and I was never meant to eat it. But I doubt it. Toast is the shit!
So there it is.... toast destroyed my faith.
God could not bring me toast, but science could through the simple addition of fire to bread.
And then science proved how it worked too.
With evidence.
