The journalist A.J. Jacobs, an agnostic New Yorker, sets out to ‘live the ultimate biblical life’ by following the Bible as literally as possible.
Soon to become a film, this comic and gently cynical approach may lead to far more misunderstandings about how God works than Dawkins ever could. A recent article in The Guardian’s Saturday magazine summarises its message.
72 pages of commands
Last Saturday I was settling down happily to a huge cappuccino in the lovely café at Mudchute Farm on the Isle of Dogs. Amazingly, the kids were playing quietly and there was an enormous pile of unread papers set out on the next-door table for customers to read. This café isn’t stupid, I thought. Needing inspiration for this month’s column, I was excited to see a picture of Charlton Heston as Moses on the front of The Guardian magazine. The leading article was by a man who claimed to have read the whole Bible and tried to do what it said. It put me to shame. I haven’t read the whole Bible despite many attempts. This man had spent five hours a day for four weeks reading solidly from Genesis to Revelation, typing ‘every rule, every guideline, every suggestion, every nugget of advice’ into his PowerBook as he went along. His resolve was to do what so many religious people claim to do. ‘Millions of people say they take the Bible literally’, he says, ‘but my suspicion was that almost everyone’s literalism consisted of picking and choosing the parts that fitted their agenda. That would not be my approach’.
