Southern Baptists respect and strongly support upholding America’s laws, [Southern Baptist leader Richard Land] said, but they “also recognize a biblical mandate to care for ‘the least of these among us’ (Matthew 25:34-40), to care for the ‘strangers’ who reside in our land (Leviticus 19:34; Hebrews 13:2) and to act justly and mercifully (Micah 6:8),” Land told the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security and International Law.

If I understand him correctly, he’s saying that while Baptists “support” upholding the law, they’re also eager to change the laws so that they more closely concord with the ideas in Bible books like Matthew and Leviticus and Micah.

(This also helps explain why they won’t ever shut up about the “Linen and Woolen Act of 2008.)

Now, apparently Biblical arguments are not uncommon in the HJSICRBSIL, as those opposed to reform also used them:

Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, read a quote from Romans 13:1-7 that crystallized the argument for enhanced border security and strict enforcement of existing federal immigration laws: “Let every person be subject to governing authorities.”

“I suspect we will hear today that it is somehow immoral or unethical to enforce our nation’s laws and that we should ignore our laws,” Smith said. “For those who want to take this approach, there is just one problem: the Bible contains numerous passages that support the rule of law.”

If this is truly Smith’s philosophy, I guess this means that his Bible supports copyright maximalism, the PATRIOT Act, and criminalizing non-violent marijuana users.

In any event, it’s hard not to be proud that a several-thousand-year-old book written by cavepeople plays such a prominent role in our public policy discourse. It appears that Smith’s wife is a faith healer, so perhaps he’ll draw on this additional expertise as the HJSICRBSIL works through the nuts and bolts of health care reform.

He calls attention to the following three teachings:

(1) “Sell the milk and honey”

In other words, no matter how bleak things look, remind everyone that you were promised by a disembodied voice speaking to you from a burning-but-not-being-consumed bush that things will eventually (say, in 40 years) be better.

(I’m pretty sure that Obama is already doing this.)

(2) “Remember the Nile”

If you’ll recall, as part of the first plague Moses told his brother to raise his staff and turn the water in the Nile River into blood. However, the Pharaoh’s sorcerers were also able to turn the river into blood.

I think the river of blood is some sort of reference to Afghanistan. However, this teaching is probably too oblique to be useful.

(3) “The one on Sinai takes the heat”

Basically, Moses also had to deal with accusations of being a secret Muslim, of lacking a birth certificate, of being a protege of Bill Ayers, of attending a racist church, and of having a [holy-]ghostwritten autobiography.

Did he react by getting angry, breaking his stone tablets, forcing people to drink gold-ash water, demanding that people take swords and kill their brothers and friends and neighbors, and calling down a plague on the survivors?

Well, I suppose he did.

(But I’m pretty sure that Obama is already doing this, too.)

I’m not sure why Feiler stopped at three, though. I can think of lots more relevant Moses-lessons:

• if you kill somebody, make sure to bury the body in the sand and hope no one squeals
• before diving into politics, practice turning your rod into a serpent (I think this might be a Bill Clinton reference) and inflicting and curing leprosy. You know, just in case.
• promise everyone a free lunch
• if people ever doubt the wisdom of one of your military adventures, make them wander in the desert for 40 years as punishment
• if anyone questions your authority, get the earth to swallow them and their families and all their possessions
• make a bronze snake on a pole, so that people who get bitten by poisonous snakes can look at it and be cured
• whatever you do, don’t hit a rock with a stick!

Move over, David Axelrod!

I’ll start with the public-domain World English Bible, which frees me from having to pay royalties to Moses, Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. And then I’ll augment this “very special” edition of the Bible by including an introduction explaining Adolf Hitler’s undeniable connection to the Bible, and highlighting the Bible’s racism and its disdain for women.

But that’s not all! I also hope to point out the contradictions in BibleMan’s full armor sequence, the book’s underappreciated admonitions not to make fun of bald people, my suspicion that Jayson Blair completely fabricated most of the events in “Revelation,” and an idea I have about how we can use “quantum tunneling” to produce cars that are fueled by ordinary tap water.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the Bible is about 3,000 pages long, which means that with my new introduction it will be almost 3,010 pages. That’s probably going to make the printing costs prohibitively expensive. But you’d buy it for the Kindle. Right?

Fearful that people might use this as occasion to, you know, disbelieve in the Bible, creative Bible-believers have created the Message-Incident Principle:

That is, instead of confusing or distracting the biblical writers and their readers with modern scientific concepts, God descended to their level and employed the science-of-the-day.

[...]

Therefore, passages in the Bible referring to the physical world feature both a Message of Faith and an incidental ancient science. According to this interpretive principle, biblical inerrancy rests in the Divine Theology, and not in statements referring to nature.

Of course! God didn’t want to confuse people! If everyone believes in a firmament, then God made a firmament. If everyone believes in human parthenogenesis, then that’s how God rolls!

And, being omniscient, god must have foreseen that the science-loving denizens of the 21st century would easily distinguish between the parts of the Bible that count as “Divine Theology” and the parts that count as “Cave-People Folk Science.” It’s just common sense:

In the case of Phil 2, the 3-tier ancient astronomy is “alongside” the “more important” Message of Faith that Jesus is Lord over the entire universe. Amen!

Thanks, god, for not confusing anyone!

Keith Danby, Global President and CEO of Biblica, said the new translation will aim to reach English speakers with a Bible that is “accurate, accessible and that speaks to its readers in a language they can understand.”

“This is why we are recommitting ourselves today to the original NIV charter, complete with its charge to monitor and reflect developments in English usage and Biblical scholarship by regularly updating the NIV Bible text.”

He said the present NIV is becoming “increasingly dated.”

“If we want a Bible that English speakers around the world can understand, we have to listen to, and respect, the vocabulary they are using today,” Danby continued.

Although the full extent of the revisions isn’t known yet, I’ve managed to compile a few examples of the proposed modernizations:

• Wedding at Cana now memorable for Jesus turning water into açaí superjuice
• Burning bush story now mentions Moses’s carbon footprint
• Destruction of Jericho now accomplished by flash mob
• Judas now described by Jesus as Frenemy
• Jesus’s time in Capernaum now described as staycation
• Apostles to be renamed the Netroots
• Moses’s mother’s nurse act will be referred to as pretexting
• “You Foolish Galatians!” to be replaced with “Welcome to the O.C., Bitch!”

1. Observation is not a reliable way of gathering data:

Putting modern scientific ideas into [the Bible] distorts the meaning of the text, which is clearly about God’s faithful and caring relation to the world, not the details of how that world came to be.

See, even though the very first chapter gives a somewhat explicit description of, well, how the world came to be, that’s “clearly” not what the book’s about, and “clearly” you’re supposed to ignore that part. (Many of the other parts are “clearly” 100% true, of course. Which parts? I can’t believe you’d even ask such an impertinent question! Clearly you have no future as a BioLogos Scientist.)

2. Only test some of your hypotheses:

What we learn from science cannot threaten our belief in God as the creator. If God created the universe in a Big Bang 15 billion years ago, guided its development with elegant mathematical laws so that eventually there would be big-brained mammals exploring things such as beauty, morality and truth, then let us celebrate that idea, not reject it.

Can what we learn from science threaten our beliefs in human parthenogenesis, resurrection, non-conservation of bread and fish, and spontaneous heaven-ascension?

The article doesn’t say, but based on my experiences with BioLogos, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that “clearly” it cannot. Praise Jesus science!

2 GB flash drive: $7.99

2 GB flash drive with the Bible on it: $39.95

Getting rich by selling overpriced junk to true believers: Priceless.

I’m in the wrong business.

And yet you probably found yourself wishing that the Berenstain Bears could also teach you some faith-based lessons. Well, wait no more:

At least one book, “The Berenstain Bears Love Their Neighbors,” is a retelling of a biblical story, that of the Good Samaritan. Others use biblical themes or verses.

The full series is not complete yet, which means that we have lots to look forward to. As a long-time Berenstain Bears fan, I most eagerly anticipate the following:

• The Berenstain Bears Talk to Prostitutes
• The Berenstain Bears and Brother Bear’s Circumcision
• The Berenstain Bears and the Twelve-Piece Concubine
• The Berenstain Bears Learn Biblical Genetics
• The Berenstain Bears Maul the Elijah-Mockers

After his best-selling The Language of God came out three years ago, Collins began receiving thousands of e-mails — primarily from other Evangelicals — asking questions about how to reconcile scriptural teachings with scientific evidence. “Many of these Christians have been taught that evolution is wrong,” Collins explains. “They go to college and get exposed to data, and then they’re thrust into personal crises of great intensity. If the church was wrong about the origins of life, was it wrong about everything?

You’d like to think a “scientist” would conclude, “yeah, probably.” I mean, if I were to show up at a scientific conference and present my several-hundred-page “Grand Theory of Everything,” and if the first few chapters were filled with obvious falsehoods, you’d hope that the other scientists would laugh me off the stage, tell me to take a long walk off a short pier, or tar and feather me. And you’d certainly hope that they wouldn’t run off to their little science lairs and try to come up with harebrained justifications as to why the rest of my theory was probably still true.

Which is why, although I have great respect for the Human Genome Project (a scientific achievement on par with the Alan Parsons Project), I find myself wondering just how rigorous it was. And looking at Collins’s BioLogos website isn’t doing much to reassure me.

Here, for instance, is how he sums up his answer to “Question 11: Is there room in BioLogos to believe in miracles?”

This response provides a simple answer to the question of miracles, namely that BioLogos does not in any way remove the logical possibility of miracles. However, for the universe to behave in an apparently ordered fashion, such events must be rare. BioLogos is thus compatible with many faiths that have miraculous events at the center of their doctrine. Finally, although a scientific explanation does in fact take away a phenomenon’s miraculous status, it does not establish that God was not involved in the process.

In other words,

• The fact that the laws of science are regular and predictable seems to leave no room for miracles; however, there could still be miracles as long as they didn’t happen very often.
• Also, even though any given “miracle” may have a perfectly natural scientific explanation, god may have been involved somehow.

I am not sure what the word is for “let’s add an element to our theory that makes it more complicated and doesn’t actually explain anything, but that makes our theory more palatable to the superstitious,” but I’m pretty sure it’s not “science.”

Still, I’ll keep checking the BioLogos site, because I want to see what their answer is to “Question 39: This whole website is just a gigantic prank, isn’t it?”

The page with Deuteronomy 20 features a factoid bubble with a green parrot which informs me that Israelite men could be exempted from having to fight if they had been newly married, had recently built a home, or were just plain scared. That’s sort of interesting. But I know that my daughter will ask not about who didn’t have to fight, but rather why those who did fight killed babies and children. After looking through the slickly produced “Adventure Bible” I’m still waiting for an answer.

If only Randal knew some sort of “professor of theology” he could ask. I’m no theologian, but I can take a shot.

There are in fact several theories designed to explain how a “loving” god could countenance genocide. Here are a handful of the most popular:

• At that point in time was still getting a feel for the job
• Tired of getting shot down as “too benevolent” by women in bars
• Developed insatiable blood-lust after drowning most of humanity
• Insisted that mass-killings be done as “lovingly” as possible
• “Wow, it took you until you were an adult force-feeding this garbage to your child for you to start asking questions like this?”
• Influenced by popularity of movie All Genocidees Go To Heaven
• Bible mistranslated; actually tried to stop genocide
• Genocide was actually OK until Jesus came and changed the rules
• Original version of commandment “Thou Shalt Not Kill” contained “just kidding!”
• “Don’t ask so many questions, or we’ll genocide you too!”
• Bible fiction; god imaginary; religion false