Literal Truths

I read the following comments a little while back from a Church of Scotland Minister - the Rev David MacLachlan, of Langside Parish Church in Glasgow - who seems to have a pretty relaxed view about gay marriage.

Now the Reverend's approach ancient tales from The Bible seems pretty sensible to me - if things written down centuries ago were never interpreted in a modern context - we'd all still be driving around in horse and carts.

Here's some of what Rev MacLachlan had to say in a recent newspaper interview:

“The same chapter of Leviticus that says ‘a man may not lie with a man’ also says you shouldn’t wear clothes made of two types of cloth, so there goes your polyester and wool suit.”

“It’s astonishing what the Bible says about sex. The conservatives will say ‘the Bible teaches clearly, marriage is one man and one woman and that’s it’. But if you look at the Bible there’s all sorts of stuff goes on. You’ve got gang rapes, women being taken prisoner and becoming the spoils of war, harems, levirate marriage, where if your wife dies you’ve got to marry her sister, [and] polygamy — and we look at them and we say, ‘No, we don’t agree with any of that’. It’s nonsense, just nonsense.”

“Sometimes, in these arguments, the Bible gets used. The Bible was used to justify slavery, the Bible was used to suggest that ‘people of colour’ were inferior and even to look down on women. You look at the Bible you can find stuff to justify all sorts of opinions.”

Quite so - because anyone who says that every single word in The Bible is literally, the word of God - true is conveniently ignoring .