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By Lee Duigon
March 28, 2013
NewsWithViews.com

“The trouble with the Bible is that it hasn’t been modernized. We need a Bible that’s been brought up to speed with the 21st century. And now we’ve got one.”

So says Rev. Dr. Geoffrey Jidrool, Professor of What’s Happening, Nudnick Theological Seminary. Dr. Jidrool chairs a committee of scholars that has just released for publication The User-Friendly Really Modern Bible.

“We have ironed out the conflicts between modern thinking and the Bible,” he says. “Now you can go with the flow and still be a perfectly good Christian.”

“What we’ve done is to add clarification to the Bible, to bring it into line with contemporary thought,” explains the project’s executive editor, Rev. Wanda Byaduck, Priestess of Goddess Sophia at the seminary’s chapel. “This results in some of the passages being rather longer than in the original, so we just deleted the Old Testament. I mean, who’s interested in anything that old? Besides, the OT is so sexist!”

As a preview, we are given the committee’s treatment of Chapter 15 in the Book of Acts. This passage deals with the apostles and Church fathers in Jerusalem deciding what to tell the Gentiles (non-Jews) converted to Christianity by the missionaries, Paul and Barnabas. The text from the King James Version is in brackets.

[… Wherefore my sentence is, that we trouble not them, which from among the Gentiles are turned to God: But that we write unto them, that they abstain from pollutions of idols, and from fornication, and from things strangled, and from blood… verses 19-20.]

And here is the clarification.

“Why should we abstain from worshiping idols, or eating meat sacrificed to idols?

“We now understand that St. James was only joking when he suggested this. All Christians now realize that any worship, of anyone or anything, is acceptable to God—a long as it’s sincere. Remember, all roads lead to Heaven! And everybody gets there in the end, except for those who refuse to believe in Global Warming and the innate goodness of the collective.

“What if I have a family member who engages in fornication of some kind?

“Well, the good news is that, in that case, he’s excused! And so are you. You and your family member can simply ignore everything the Bible says about sexual morality. It doesn’t apply to you. Very soon, you will evolve to the point where you will understand that sexual sin is only possible for homophobes.

“Why are we not allowed to eat anything that has been strangled?

“Once you become a vegan, of course, this problem will not crop up. In the meantime, you really ought to recognize a silly statement when you see one. The apostles did not enjoy the blessings of modern theological scholarship, so naturally their understanding of Christianity was very primitive. They could not possible know then the things that we know now. Ignore this.

“Why are we not allowed to eat or drink blood?

“This comes from an ancient Jewish superstition that ‘the blood is the life.’ To consume blood, they thought, was to consume life itself. Can you imagine anything more quaint? These poor, primitive people actually believed that all life was created by God, and belonged to Him, and that therefore we had no right to consume the ‘life’ of any living thing. Now, of course, we know that life is the product of Evolution—not God’s personal handiwork. We are free of superstition. And this whole business about the blood is another thing you can simply dismiss from your mind as soon as you become a vegan. You’ll then be helping to save the planet, and Mother Gaia will be pleased, and maybe help you win the Powerball.”

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And so on, and so on. “This Bible is guaranteed to make Christians feel good about themselves,” says Dr. Jidrool. “More importantly, it’s sure to make everybody else feel better about Christians!”

“If Christ had only preached what we preach,” adds Rev. Byaduck, “he wouldn’t have been crucified. But we’re going to see to it that Christians don’t make that kind of mistake today.”

According to Dr. Jidrool, “at least 30,000 mainline churches in the United States and Canada” have already ordered their copies of the User-Friendly Really Modern Bible. (The first 1,000 orders came with free lilac-colored vestments for the pastors.) “It will do for Christianity,” he says, “what Buddy Holly did for rock-and-roll.”