Unspiritual Reason to Read the Bible #2: Everything Other Than Books

We have seen how reading the Bible, which is one of the foundational documents of western culture, helps you understand books here. It’s helpful for pretty much everything else as well, you know.

Films: The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, The Robe, Prince of Egypt, The Passion of the Christ, The Mission, Godspell, Into Great Silence, and others I can’t think of because I’m not a big enough film buff.  There are doubtless lots of movies that play on biblical ideas, stories, and morals.

Art: Michelangelo, Raphael, Byzantine & Russian Icons, Mediaeval manuscripts, Bernini, Jerome Bosch, El Greco, Rembrandt, et al.

Music: Haydn’s Creation, Handel’s Messiah, Bach’s St. John Passion, Christian rock, some stuff by Creed, some Scandinavian Power Metal from the ’80s, some stuff by Lifehouse, Strauss’ Salome, hymns, Christmas carols.

Morals & Ethics: Most of these, at least the traditional ones (not counting individuality) are based in the values upheld by the biblical narrative.  If you want to get to the heart of how our society operates, you must get to the heart of the Bible.  And once you’ve got the heart of the Bible, you see how short our society falls and has fallen from the ideals that helped guide it to where it is.

I believe that the Bible helps with the understanding of all of these things.  It will also help make sense of a lot of specifically Christian things, like the liturgy and why your neighbour may engage in certain practices.  Missing out on the Bible misses out on these things, though.  So it’s worth a read.

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