Incest, bestiality, genital mutilation and infanticide? Ban the Bible now!

At last. And God Bless America. I’ve been saying it for years. The Bible is unfit for human consumption. The most widely read book in the world, it must also be among the most pornographic. Now available at any church and most hotel rooms near you. (Thank you, Mr Gideon.)

Yes. The Catholic Church had it right when it banned laity from reading the Bible. It was on its Index of forbidden books. All versions of the Bible, other than in Latin, were banned, as was Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Galileo’s Dialogue on the Great World Systems. Such distinguished company.

Then, in 1966, Pope Paul VI got rid of the Index. And look what has happened to the Catholic Church since. So, three cheers for Utah’s Republican legislature, which in 2022 passed a law to weed out pornography from all school libraries.

And congratulations to the Davis School District in Utah, north of Salt Lake City, which this time last year used that law to remove the Bible from its schools, as it was full of “vulgarity and violence” while also being “one of the most sex-ridden books around”, as one appalled parent put it.

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It was argued that the Bible included incest, bestiality, genital mutilation, and infanticide, making it pornographic under the definition set out in that 2022 Utah law.

There is hardly need to go into details here?

Okay so, and as the Miami Herald helpfully explained, the Bible implies a debauched sexual scene with Noah in a drunken state with his youngest son, and that Lot, nephew of Abraham, was incestuously seduced by his daughters. Abraham and Jacob had children with mistresses, while the word “onanism” arose from God striking down Onan for “spilling his seed”, which might, it was felt, inadvertently “inspire” teenage boys.

Judah, ancestor of Jesus, had sex with a prostitute who also happened to be his daughter-in-law, and there was sexual assault and murder involving King David and Bathsheba, and probable nonconsensual premarital sex. Then there was David’s passionate claim that his love for Jonathan far exceeded his love of women.

All of which means that, like King David, his ancestor according to Scripture, Jesus was descended from incest and rape, adultery and prostitution.

Ban it, I say. Now!

Bible from Greek biblion, for “scroll”.

inaword@irishtimes.com