As I was growing up I remember reading Bible stories from the Bible and discussing them in Sunday School or Bible School, but I don’t ever remember reading of gore in there at a young age.

Yes, I read about the parting of the Red Sea and the Pharaoh and his army all being drowned, along with their horses. Yes I read about the walls of Jericho tumbling down but I never thought of it at the time as having a big death toll.

I read of Noah’s Ark and knew all but 8 people and pairs of animals perished. I read about Isaac taking his only son Jacob up to the mountains, gathering wood and getting ready to slay him on God’s command until the angel of God stopped him.

I read all those stories and more. I read of the Crucifixion of Jesus, the Only Begotten Son of the Only God. It did not make me happy, but no one went into deep detail as to what happened and it was only until I saw Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” that I fully realized the suffering our Lord did for me and for you.

I was never traumatized by it and I’ll wager I was just as normal a kid as any other and my teaching was just as normal as the teachings of today are.

That’s why this story is so disturbing to me.

The Good Book isn’t clean enough for Hong Kong.

At least 838 complaints had been registered Wednesday with the city’s Television and Entertainment Licensing authority after an anonymous Web site, truthbible.net, said the Bible “made one tremble” with its sexual and violent content, including rape and incest, the news agency reports.

[...]
If the Bible is labeled indecent in Hong Kong, people over the age of 18 will be the only ones able to purchase the book, and it would have to be sold with a warning label wrapped around the book.

The Web site truthbible.net already includes an English-language warning: “Legal Disclaimer Warning: This Web site contains Bible material which may offend and may not be distributed, circulated, sold, hired, given, lent, shown, played or projected to a person under the age of 18 years.”

[...]
“If there is rape mentioned in the Bible, it doesn’t mean it encourages those activities,” Reuters quoted Reverend Wu Chi-wai, Protestant minister, as saying. “It’s just common sense … I don’t think that criticism will have strong support from the public.”

Those things are in the Bible for a purpose, and that purpose is to show us how not to live in some instances and how to live in others.

Written by ~J~

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