BookTV introduces some great books and I end up buying a book every time I turn it on. This weekend there were several good authors represented. The best was a debate/dialogue between Sam Harris, "Letter to a Christian Nation," and Reza Aslan, "No god but God". You can watch it online here.

I have to admit that I'm really beginning to like Sam Harris. I appreciate his ability to blatantly point out how absurd certain aspects of religion look to the outside observer. He doesn't understand the bible and he reads it just like a fundamentalist Christian but I still appreciate his opinions and willingness to open dialogue. He says things that I often want to say myself. However, I have seen how horribly people react when you try to shoot down their belief system so forcefully. I've made that mistake also, but now I try to take a softer approach. Sam Harris is a valuable asset to the progression of religion. To use metaphorical language, I believe that he is being used by God to heal Christianity and all modern religions. In that light I consider him to be a man of God and an important modern day prophet.

Reza Aslan did a great job of expressing a progressive understanding of scripture and faith. It was really a pleasure to know that people of all faiths can and do look at their own tradition through a modern critical lens. It was one of the best examples of interfaith dialogues that I've seen on TV. I've just ordered his latest book about the history of Islam and I can't wait to start it.

One comment that Sam Harris always makes that hurts his argument is that he always points to the horrible things that Israel blames on God in the Old Testament and assumes they must be believed as literal events and that the authors of the Bible were correct to credit them to God. I like those stories but I don't for a second think that God actually did any of them. Those stories tell us what Israel thought about God and how they used him as an excuse for doing evil things (like killing women and children and stealing land) as well as the reason for prosperity and hardship. These texts do NOT tell us what God told Israel to do or write about. I don't understand why people accept this idea. Just because a story is in the Bible it doesn't mean that we should endorse it or expect it to be factual. King David had a man killed and then took his wife but that doesn't mean we should follow that example just because it is "in the bible". All sorts of horrible things are done in Bible stories but they are there to show what happens when people do dumb things. This type of logic would be similar to hearing radical Islamic claims that they were told by God to fly planes into buildings and then assuming that God did actually tell them to do it. That would be silly.

The mythical OT stories and even the fictional (and exaggerated) elements in the NT are still valuable, not because they are historical facts, but because they tell us something about how certain ancient groups interpreted the world and expressed their faith through that interpretation. As modern Christians we should not always try to imitate the acts of these real and fictional people, but we should look at the lessons in these stories and apply those lessons to our lives.