Biblical distortions and sex

Zoe Williams, Guardian News Service, London

The firecracker Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, sparked a new controversy at the weekend when he claimed on BBC TV that the Bible condemns not same-sex relationships as such, merely casual sex. His rationale was as follows: "If the Bible is very clear -- as I think it is -- that a heterosexual indulging in homosexual activity for the sake of variety and gratification is not following the will of God, does that automatically follow that is the only sort of homosexual activity there can be?"

This statement has everything you'd expect from a modernizing bishop -- a clear awareness of how times have changed, and a measure of the interpretative fine-tuning a religion has to perform in order to keep up with them. If the development of Christianity tells us anything, it's that you can find whatever you like in the Bible, so long as you know where to look, where not to look and which funny words you're allowed to ignore in the interests of modernity.

Of course, Rowan Williams' remarks might be offensive to more concrete-minded Bible studiers, but they have bigger fish to fry than the fate of homosexuals in a Christian context -- if you read the Bible literally, via its code-breaker Michael Drosnin, we are only four years away from an atomic holocaust. Drosnin claims as his proof the fact that this same Bible code predicted Sept. 11. Since its prediction came some days after the event itself, this document does seem rather less useful than the more traditional predictive method of steering clear of things that have already happened, but it's a chilling prospectus nevertheless.

The point is this -- the Bible is of very little sincere use to anyone these days. Genuine modernizing Christians waste a lot of time trying to justify their tolerant and loving message in biblical terms, when they'd be better off saying: "Never mind about that, it was a long, long time ago."

Hocus-pocus merchants looking to see almost into the future should stick to Nostradamus who, let's bear in mind, already has strong brand recognition among teenage girls and the kind of people who ask your star sign before they'll let you stroke their cat.

Hardliners and fundamentalists may get a lot of their pro- life, anti-fun juice from the good book, but they tend to find its milky, peace-loving commandments really get in the way when they want to blow up an abortionist.

The same, clearly, could be said about the Torah and the Koran. Neither of these works is possible to live by literally, which leaves you with one of two choices -- either select bits to take literally and ignore the rest, which is a pretty illogical way to proceed. Or, stress the figurative, symbolic nature of the texts, and define the practical nuts and bolts of your creed as "what everybody else seems to be doing", which is how most mainstream religions go about things.

Rather than passing gracefully out of the collective consciousness, however, these ancient texts are gaining more and more currency as a way of making sense of international conflict. Clearly, I'm not talking about Tony Blair and his Koran bedtime reading, since that was just vulgar showing-off. No, I'm talking about little tidbits that seep out following any clash or act of violence. The most effective little religious fact, in so far as it went round western media faster than an annoying catchphrase derived from Friends, was the one about suicide bombers getting 72 virgins once they reached paradise. Muslim scholars immediately refuted this on the basis that suicide is banned under Islamic law, but what they should have been saying was: "You can talk. In your paradise, all there are is lots of rooms!"

Anti-semites make much of the boiling excrement. According to the Talmud, anyone who mocks the sages -- which could be something as innocuous as not believing in them -- will be sentenced to boil in excrement. Even this is open to interpretation, since in some translations, the mockers will judged in boiling excrement, leaving open the possibility that they jumped into the excrement themselves, maybe in the spirit of mockery. Never mind that, though -- this is usually cited, pretty obliquely, as a sign that Jews can't live alongside anyone without being mean to them. It's an absurd leap of logic -- bad things happen to unbelievers in all monotheistic texts, while good things are heaped upon believers. Otherwise there'd be no point believing.

But now, just at the time when these texts should have evolved into rum old stories, their commandments are being trotted out as proof that some religions are reasonable, where others are freakish and alien. When in fact, they're all as freakish and alien as each other.