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Sacred texts, argues Carlin Romano, deserve to be approached politely even by those who see no merit in claims about their divine origins

IN an essay in US magazine The Nation about the wave of successful books vaunting atheism, critic Daniel Lazare wrote: "For a long time, religion had been doing quite nicely as a kind of minor entertainment. Christmas and Easter were quite unthinkable without it, not to mention Hanukkah and Passover. But then certain enthusiasts took things too far by crashing airliners into office towers in the name of Allah, launching a global crusade to rid the world of evil, and declaring the jury still out on Darwinian evolution. As a consequence, religion now looks nearly as bad as royalism did in the late 18th century."

That may sound predictably snide coming from the wontedly secular The Nation, but take a look at a middle-of-the-road piece of journalism, an Associated Press article last May by religion writer Rachel Zoll. In the article, headlined "Angry atheists are hot authors", Zoll describes the success of such books as "a sign of widespread resentment among non-believers over the influence of religion in the world".

She quotes Christopher Hitchens, whose God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything rocketed to No1 on The New York Times' bestseller list in its first week out of the block. "There is something like a change in the zeitgeist," Hitchens told Zoll, positing "a lot of people, in (the US) in particular, who are fed up with endless lectures by bogus clerics and endless bullying". Zoll writes that atheists such as Hitchens are tired of believers "using fairytales posing as divine scripture to justify their lust for power".

Atheism is on a roll, if not a holy roll, in the book world. Last year philosopher Daniel Dennett published Breaking the Spell, British scientist Richard Dawkins followed with The God Delusion and writer Sam Harris has been grabbing middlebrow readers with his The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. The second wave late this year comes at the culture under the banner of secularism, even under the gentler light of irony. Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, in his massive A Secular Age, seeks to understand what that title means for us; he's so ecumenical and thoughtful in his struggle to understand what he dubs secularity that you may not realise he's a believing Catholic. Columbia University's Mark Lilla, in The Stillborn God, offers a rich intellectual etiology of how religion and politics realigned themselves within "political theology" to usher in our putatively secular modernity. From France, Olivier Roy's Secularism Confronts Islam acknowledges the hostility to Islam marked by its title, while arguing against it. Atheism now flourishes even in the form of the gift book, the kind stackable by the register, as in Joan Konner's collection of quotations, The Atheist's Bible.

For almost everyone involved in the believer-atheist debate, atheism consists in denying the existence of God, then philosophically evaluating the consequences in the spirit of a contemporary Nietzsche or grand inquisitor. Yet many of these books tend to ignore a crucial question: What should the atheist's position be on sacred texts?

Think of it as another "death of the author" problem. The first difficulty for atheists is glaringly apparent. They can't deny the existence of sacred texts, at least as texts. They can only deny to such texts the quality of sacredness. That behoves atheists, then, to have a clear definition of the sacred -- "something related to the holy", say, or "something worthy of extreme respect" -- and also a clear definition of text or book. Many atheists who have a relatively clear idea of what they mean by God when they reject his, her or its existence, possess little knowledge of the sacred texts that animate religions. Indeed, Jacques Berlinerblau begins his book The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously by declaring: "In all but exceptional cases, today's secularists are biblically illiterate."

Exploring what these books are as texts, then, is the first step towards pondering the atheist's proper behaviour in regard to them. Happily, one can get help from non-sacred texts, as critical scholarship on sacred texts, which includes what was once widely known as biblical criticism, continues apace.

For instance, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible by Karel van der Toorn, president of the University of Amsterdam, insists on the Bible as the product of a professional scribal elite, specifically the scribal workshop of the Second Temple in the period 500BC-200BC. Another recent study, The Voice, the Word, the Books: The Sacred Scripture of the Jews, Christians and Muslims by F.E. Peters, professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at New York University, looks at what Peters calls the "human fingerprints" all over these texts.

Van der Toorn's analysis of the data leads him to conclude that "the modern concept of books is unsuited to describe the written production from the ancient Near East ... To define the Bible as a collection of books, as implied in the Greek designation biblia, is an anachronism. The Bible is a repository of tradition." It is, he says, "the result of a series of scribal interventions".

Peters, who examines three sacred texts, describes a long process at whose end "are now three books or, rather, more precisely, three collections of books or pieces. An impartial observer ... might call them edited books, which makes believers uneasy since the term 'edited' calls attention ... to the fact that if all these words had a divine author, they also had some very human editors whose errant thumbprints are all over scripture."

Peters brings this disenchantment of the sacred even to the Koran, which Muslims believe is "totally and simultaneously true". Among the human fingerprints are the traces of "anonymous editors who, we are told by Muslim tradition, collected the scattered records of Mohammed's revelations, added the headings now prefaced to each sura, and then arranged the suras in the order they now appear ... As all concede, it is certainly not the order in which the revelations were made public in Mecca or Medina."

Peters adds that "once the suras are reordered even in the most approximate chronological terms, immediately a new problem arises. On the face of it, many, if not most, of the suras appear to be composites ... that is, periscopes from different times and settings have been stitched together to form a single and quite artificial sura unit."

Such lack of credence in the God-authored notion of sacred texts is widespread not only among scholars but even in casual book-reviewing culture. Here, turning to the New Testament, consider the beginning of a review on Powells.com of another recent book, titled Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why by Bart D. Ehrman. "Those who call the King James Version of the Bible the unerring word of God have a slight problem," reviewer Doug Brown writes. "The New Testament of the KJV was translated into English from a version of the Greek New Testament that had been collected from 12th-century copies by Erasmus. Where Erasmus couldn't find Greek manuscripts, he translated to Greek from the Latin Vulgate (which itself had been translated from Greek back in the fourth century). Here the problem splits into two problems. First, Jesus spoke Aramaic; his actual words, never recorded, were only rendered in Greek in the original gospels. Thus, the KJV consists of Jesus's words twice refracted through the prism of translation. Second, Erasmus's Greek New Testament was based on handwritten copies of copies of copies ... going back over a millennium, and today is considered one of the poorer Greek New Testaments."

Consider this just one example of a sacred text treated almost as a farcical text in regard to its having a single, coherent, intentional, shaping, authorial, divine mind behind it.

Is the Bible, in one counting, the 66 books of the Protestant Bible, the 73 books of the Catholic Bible or the 77 books of the Eastern Orthodox Bible?

After a litany of examples of intercopy disagreements, scribal clarifications, arbitrary decisions on what is canonical and what is apocryphal, and putative scribal addenda such as the controversial last 12 verses of Mark (16:9-20), with their references to snake handling and speaking in tongues, it is difficult to think of such texts as sacred, as opposed to much-handled compilations put together over time by committee. Writes Brown: "In many respects, the Bible was the world's first Wikipedia article."

Religious true believers naturally possess arguments against some of these considerations and against the overarching conclusion that so-called sacred texts are not sacred. They may want to argue that sacred texts are the handiwork of God; directly dictated, as in the Koran; communicated more indirectly, as in the Old and New Testaments; or, as one modern hermeneutic strategy holds, inelegantly played out through generations of editors and copyists in a messy process, like Darwinian evolution, but with God the entity whose flick of a finger started the ball rolling. None of these, however, is the conclusion of an atheist. If it is the proper behaviour of atheists in the face of sacred texts that interests us, we must work from the conclusion that such texts are not sacred in the sense of being authorised and fact-checked by God.

The next question is thus whether sacred texts are sacred in any other sense than that they're God's handiwork. I say they are. Sacred means not only related to God but also set apart in a particular way, worthy of uncommon respect, not open to easy violation. How atheists react to sacred texts, I submit, properly belongs as much to the history of etiquette as to that of philosophy or theology.

Let me explain. Much of the believer-atheist debate about God or sacred texts takes place on printed pages, not at marriage receptions or in doctors' offices or during water-cooler conversations. We tend to be friction-averse in these settings. When we think, as intellectuals, of how atheists and believers should behave, or do behave, we often invoke the printed-page model of no-holds-barred assertion of truth and belief, of argument and counter-argument, regardless of the consequences. But there's no obvious reason the punch-counterpunch paradigm of the page should dominate our discussion of sacred texts.

Not all secularly inclined intellectuals agree. Berlinerblau, for instance, says the goal of his book is "to outline a coherent non-theological, non-apologetic paradigm for the study of ancient scriptures", while making plain that "the peculiar way in which the Bible was composed in antiquity makes it far too contradictory and incoherent a source for public-policy decisions in modernity". He seems to feel that such a goal requires an enormously aggressive critical spirit and focus on truth in sacred texts. He writes: "We are bound by honour to cast aspersions on the integrity and historical reliability of holy documents. A scholarly exegete reads such work in heckle mode. He or she cannot accept that the Bible is the infallible word of God as mediated by mortals (as the secularly religious and most biblical scholars often contend), nor the distortion of the word of God (as some radical theologians have charged). The objective existence of God -- as opposed to the subjective perception of him -- is not a legitimate variable in scholarly analysis. The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament is a human product tout court."

This strikes me as machoism pretending to be scholarly integrity. Why can't atheists see sacred texts as sacred to believers and behave respectfully when not provoked? It is simply not true, in a normal, etiquette-infused vision of life, that we think truth must be stated at every time and in every context. We lie to people in small ways every day to make interactions gentler and less tense, and to be kind to others. Why shouldn't a similar gentleness and desire to avoid hurtful comments inform atheists when they write about books that many hold sacred?

The most familiar rebuke to this rears its head regularly in the most scathing, sarcastic and popular of the atheist wave, Hitchens's God is Not Great. It is that believers in the God-given authority of sacred texts are "ultimately incapable" of leaving non-believers alone. Religion, writes Hitchens, "does not, and in the long run cannot, be content with its own marvellous claims and sublime assurances. It must seek to interfere with the lives of non-believers, or heretics, or adherents of other faiths. It may speak about the bliss of the next world, but it wants power in this one. This is only to be expected. It is, after all, wholly man-made."

The cosmopolitan atheist of today -- the well-educated secularist steeped in the histories of various faiths, as well as the carnage they've produced back then and now -- can't easily toss off Hitchens's point. Polite respect ends when believers insist on sacred texts as God's authorisation of those believers to regulate, suppress or punish the behaviour of non-believers. In such situations, the atheist's politeness goes out of the window because the believer has thrown his politeness out of the window first. Is there anything as impolite as forcing one's moral rules on another because they supposedly come from a divine being whose existence the other doesn't accept?

As a result, we get the predominant tones in which atheists have assessed sacred texts over the centuries: anger, disrespect, contempt, sarcasm, insult, dismissal, even pity. Consider three examples.

"The Bible," sighed Voltaire. "That is what fools have written, what imbeciles command, what rogues teach, and young children are made to learn by heart."

"As to the book called the Bible," thundered Thomas Paine, "it is blasphemy to call it the word of God. It is a book of lies and contradictions, and a history of bad times and bad men."

And, as nasty wrapper, there is A.A. Milne's point. "The Old Testament," he claimed, "is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief, call it what you will, than any book ever written: it has emptied more churches than all the counter-attractions of cinema, motor bicycle, and golf course."

Harsh stuff. Yet the very sophisticated understanding of history and society that often justifies the atheist's snappishness in such remarks should also lead them not to stir conflicts of believer and unbeliever unnecessarily. Because sophistication implies an equal grasp of etiquette and tolerance as a bulwark of civilised, non-violent life together on the part of believers and non-believers.

In that respect, Taylor, Lilla and Roy's second wave of books wisely pay little direct attention to sacred texts, focusing more on how believers have behaved than on their authorising documents.

That's all to the good. In advanced, progressive, tolerant societies, we also don't go up to strangers and tell them that they're ugly, that their children are repulsive, that their clothes don't match, that they need a bath, that the leisure activity they're engaged in is stupid and a waste of time. In the same way, atheists should not, unprovoked, go on and on about how sacred texts lack God's imprimatur. And believers should not blithely go after atheists. If this sounds like the credo of an American -- an odd creature of history who may be an atheist or believer -- the plea is guilty. One can, of course, line up the bolstering high-culture quotations on this side too, against the belligerent atheists.

Schopenhauer's proviso that politeness is "a tacit agreement that people's miserable defects, whether moral or intellectual, shall on either side be ignored and not made the subject of reproach". Even Eric Hoffer's lovely line that "rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength".

The simple answer, then, to how atheists should respond to sacred texts is: politely, if possible, employing all the wry ambiguity book critics use when awkwardly trapped with the author or admirer of a book about which they have reservations.

"It's really quite amazing," one may say, or: "You know, I was just reading it the other day; it's as good as ever."

But when believers start to use sacred texts to oppress, the atheist must attack and reject the divine aspect of their books, out of self-defence and because it interferes with the individual's freedom of conscience and behaviour. Some things, after all, are sacred.

The Chronicle of Higher Education

Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania.