You didn’t even know that you were blind.
Some of our knowledge of our beliefs has been documented. We have been
watching ourselves act, reflecting on that watching, and telling stories
distilled through that reflection, for tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands
of years. That is all part of our attempts, individual and collective, to discover
and articulate what it is that we believe. Part of the knowledge so generated is
what is encapsulated in the fundamental teachings of our cultures, in ancient
writings such as the Tao te Ching, or the aforementioned Vedic scriptures, or
the Biblical stories. The Bible is, for better or worse, the foundational
document of Western civilization (of Western values, Western morality, and
Western conceptions of good and evil). It’s the product of processes that
remain fundamentally beyond our comprehension. The Bible is a library
composed of many books, each written and edited by many people. It’s a
truly emergent document—a selected, sequenced and finally coherent story
written by no one and everyone over many thousands of years. The Bible has
been thrown up, out of the deep, by the collective human imagination, which
is itself a product of unimaginable forces operating over unfathomable spans
of time. Its careful, respectful study can reveal things to us about what we
believe and how we do and should act that can be discovered in almost no
other manner.
Old Testament God and New Testament God
The God of the Old Testament can appear harsh, judgmental, unpredictable
and dangerous, particularly on cursory reading. The degree to which this is
true has arguably been exaggerated by Christian commentators, intent on
magnifying the distinction between the older and newer divisions of the
Bible. There has been a price paid, however, for such plotting (and I mean
that in both senses of the word): the tendency for modern people to think,
when confronted with Jehovah, “I would never believe in a God like that.”
But Old Testament God doesn’t much care what modern people think. He
often didn’t care what Old Testament people thought, either (although He
could be bargained with, to a surprising degree, as is particularly evident in
the Abrahamic stories). Nonetheless, when His people strayed from the path
—when they disobeyed His injunctions, violated His covenants, and broke
His commandments—trouble was certain to follow. If you did not do what