For a considerable part of my life I used to hold Bible in high regard. I used to think about it as a wise book that offers deep insights about human nature and the hidden forces behind world’s events.

I’d like to reflect on what enabled this fable to exist and be convincing enough for me to believe in it.

If you ask a group of believers for things in the Bible that stand out as wise they will most likely quote Peter or Jesus. It’s remarkable that even the messiah has been pushed out of the limelight by one of his apostles. It never occurred to me to ask myself why Son of God is um, simplistic, at best, compared to a mere mortal man. A man who even within Bible’s narrative is clearly using his secular education to make his writings look impressive. It looks like divine wisdom, unparalleled in elegance until you actually read the supposedly existing Paul’s reading list from school. Divinity seems to use a lot of wisdom of this wretched world and Logos gets progressively smarter as the world around it gets more educated and rich. What a coincidence!

Pepe Silva, the promised messiah of lost mail!

Both Jesus and Peter speak in riddles. Jesus openly says that his examples are meant to confuse general public and their secret meaning would only be revealed to those close to him. Sermon on the mount is one of the few cases where someone who was not an apostle could get actionable insight from what was spoken. Rest is mostly a linguistic symbolism test that really serves no purpose.

Both would often contradict themselves. And this, I’ve recently figured out – was the thing that has me hooked. You see, moralistic reasoning that is confused to the point of direct contradiction is like abstract art. You can stare at something for months only to discover that the painting is upside down. Don’t get me wrong, I love abstract art. But nobody in their right mind would call Kandinsky instruction manual for life.

I’ve spent thousands of hours reading and interpreting the Bible. This is what sunk cost is about. Spend enough time doing something – and you will very likely value the activity you are engaged in as more valuable. More time – more value. Spend 100 hours thinking about Pokemon – you will start seeing deep messages in there. I recall some distant friends of the family speaking about couple of world literature classics in the same way many christians speak of the Bible. They would re-read the book yearly and claim that it “is like reading it the first time”, that it’s characters are so complex they represent general human tendencies and that the wisdom in the book is timeless. Funny that this was not followed by the usual mockery of “those worldly people”. Any mention of psychology would be. Apparently my family’s respect for being culturally developed was strong enough to compensate cult indoctrination for a bit. But I digress. The point is – non-religious people refer to books as “eternal” and “wisdom for generations”. All you have to do is have enough data for a person not to be able to keep in all in memory and repeated reading – voila, you’ve got yourself a “Scripture”.

Bible adds to that. There are tons of mutually contradicting verses that, surprisingly not weaken but embolden the zealots. See, it means you have to read it all as meta text! Those are facets of God’s wisdom! Holy spirit makes you see what you need in your particular circumstances!

Or maybe it’s not meta text because meta text was not a term or a concept until late 20th century. No sheepherder would know how to read something like that. Lots of the people featured in the Bible did not know how to read at all.

There are tons of things that could’ve been simple statement. How DO you get saved – by grace or by works? Simply removing parts of the Bible would make it a far better, coherent book. That would also mean you can read it all, once, remember and move on with your life. But that is not the goal of a fundamentalist group. They need you to depend on their God-given wisdom of interpreting the confusing, contradictory, and never-reliable word of all-wise creator.

Highly religious people are among the most represented groups in mental institutions and I would argue this is why. Majority of them literally attempt to induce one of the symptoms of schizophrenia on a regular basis. There is no difference between doing John-Nash-Beautiful-Mind-style-newspaper-word-counting and trying to prove Biblical God respects women. He does not.

Apophenia is something all humans have a potential for – and we should resist it, not nurture it.