The very short article "The Bible tops 'most influential' book survey" reports that a recent poll to assess public opinion in the UK found that the Bible, and Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species took the first two places (2014).
The Bible! "No way!" was my first reaction, but I was wrong. The Bible has truly had a massive influence on Western society for over a thousand years. But most of that influence has been bad. Western society, especially its politics, has been greatly harmed by the Bible, as has scientific and technological progress. The article quotes the poll as reporting that while men favoured Darwin, it was women who voted for the Bible, "which they argued contains the 'guidelines to be a good person'."
They are completely wrong. The Bible is not a reliable guide to being a good person. On the contrary, as the long dark age that ensued in Western history shows, the influence of the Bible was to bring ignorance, political despotism, and moral disaster to the Western world. So, why do so many people honestly and sincerely believe that the Bible is a book full of moral insights and ethically sound teaching? I think the main, perhaps only, reason is that that is what they were taught and no dissenting opinion was ever allowed to disturb the myth being pushed into the minds of innocent children such as myself. This seems to me also to explain why the most Christian nations also loved to make it illegal to say the Bible was wrong, or that the Christian church in power was wrong, or that its leaders were wrong: the ugly history of laws against heresy and laws against blasphemy were needed to censor and suppress free speech because once thinking and respect for truth were permitted, many people would stop believing in the Bible and start seeing it for what it really is.
And what it really is does have much that is of great value. I don't think the Bible is all vile filth and nonsense. It contains some great literature, from the powerfully written story of creation in Genesis, through the exciting use of terrorism in Exodus as a tool to force the Egyptian Pharaoh to release the Israelites from slavery to the delivery on Mount Sinai of the famous Ten Commandments: all of this is great story telling, combined with likely historical memory of a people. And there is the poetry, the often thought provoking proverbs in Proverbs, and the beautiful psalms. Finally, the Christian Bible adds to the Jewish Bible a set of gospels relating the remarkable life of the political rebel who upset the traditionally ruling Jewish elites of Jerusalem so much that they cooperated with the hated Roman occupiers to have Jesus executed by law. This is all great reading for many good reasons. But what it is not is a reliable guide to moral right, although many valuable moral insight are to be had in its pages.
The real problem with the Bible is, I think, in the very thing that so many Christians pick out as most clearly telling its followers how to live a "good" life: the Ten Commandments.
The name says it all: they are commandments. This reflects perfectly the despotic, anti-democratic nature of the primitive, Middle Eastern desert societies that the Bible came from. It is the morality of the Pharonic Egypt, of the Hittites, of Assyria, and of the great Persian Empire.
In contrast stands the Western world which was already establishing a very different set of core values: things like reason, liberty and democracy. I think these can be seen already in the book that I would have voted as most influential, even though it didn't even make the top ten list, and is perhaps read by very few people today: Homer's Iliad. This first great work of Western literature led the way to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, led the way to Athenian democracy, to the Roman Republic, and led the way to Thales and scientific inquiry.
Almost three thousand years ago, the deep divide between the East and the West was already set in it's foundational literature, and when the Christian cancer invaded the West from the 4th century AD on, it spread its deadly anti-democratic, anti-reason and anti-moral poison every where using censorship to silence critics, to stop thinking, to prevent truth being discovered and spoken. This lasted for over a thousand years, but the for about 500 years now the West has been recovering, and the rest of the world plainly wants more of the values that are enshrined in embryonic form in Homer's great work, as we see in the worldwide aspirations of citizens everywhere for more democratic societies where all have a voice, where truths may be sought and spoken freely and where people are respected as being of equal moral worth as persons.
The Iliad is the ultimate source for all of this. No other book can compete in influence on the world as it is today being forged.
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