Ben Edward Akerley
Författare till The X-Rated Bible: An Irreverent Survey of Sex in the Scriptures
Verk av Ben Edward Akerley
Taggad
Allmänna fakta
- Födelsedag
- 1920
- Kön
- male
- Nationalitet
- USA
- Yrken
- professor (retired)
- Organisationer
- Freedom From Religion Foundation
PFLAG
Gay and Lesbian Atheists/Humanists (GALAH)
Medlemmar
Recensioner
Statistik
- Verk
- 1
- Medlemmar
- 128
- Popularitet
- #157,245
- Betyg
- 3.6
- Recensioner
- 2
- ISBN
- 4
This second edition of The X-Rated Bible provides sixty chapters of Bible badness, divided into seventeen broad topics. Akerley's usual style is to provide glosses on the Bible text, and follow it up with the direct quotation from scripture. With very few exceptions, he quotes the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. Other than discussing the likelihood that James I of England was gay (xxii), he provides no background on the context of the KJV translation, the motives in its production, its difference from other versions, or the locus that it occupies in English literature.
I was especially eager to read Part VIII ("Prostitution and Phallic Worship"), but was fairly nonplussed by it. Akerley addresses no texts that were not already familiar to me in this context. He also accepts the typical Christian assumption that the Jahwist cult was only and always in opposition to phallic worship, instead of having its own phallicist root. He doesn't even mention the indigenous Hebrew goddess Asherah.
This tendency to take the most conventional Christian reading as a strawman for the meaning of a Bible passage is evident throughout The X-Rated Bible. Going even further, Akerley repeatedly gloats over the contradiction between the alleged omnipotence and omnibenevolence of God, a conundrum that is actually extrinsic to the Bible, having developed in the medieval philosophies of monotheism. (There are certainly foreshadowings of it in the book of Job, but Akerley doesn't go there, because a full discussion of theodicy would distract from his central topic!) The result of this capitulation to Christian premises is a book that does a somewhat better job of lambasting Christianity than it does of exploring the Bible. Still, as a "survey" it's not bad, and it does provide a convenient digest of Bible passages that will repay study far beyond the discussion that Akerley affords them.… (mer)