My Lent Book

As is the custom I have nicked from the Christians, every year I choose a book to be my Lent book. Despite not keeping Lent in any way at all, obviously.

This year it has rather chosen itself because in January I already started re-reading Robert Wang's Qabalistic Tarot, for something like the third time. I felt a pull towards it and a desire to read it again very slowly and let it sink in.

It's not an easy subject, or book, obviously, and I also felt strongly that to do so I should clear some dead wood out of my psychic space to enable the change to happen. In this case it meant getting together a number of individually very minor annoyances with the company that manages this building and putting them together into one complaint. Not to put too fine a point on it, it felt so clearing to do this that I now understand why cats zoom around the house after using the litter tray! I am delighted to say that they ignored this complaint so it's now with the ombudsman and out of my head.

Last year, after Lent, I also performed the exercise of reading all the way through the bible again. I used the New English Translation that has translators' notes online and read the Oxford Bible Commentary as a companion. I think this is the third time I have done this in my life, although the first while I haven't been one of the faithful.

The main thing this experience did for me was to reinforce what I already knew, that Christian topics of obsession are almost never based on what the bible actually says. For example I have commented here before on the biblical approach to 'the unborn', which is to treat them purely and simply as property and afford them none of the value given to people. The other major thing it reinforced was my conviction that the majority of Christians read the bible selectively at best, and probably repeat reading the same bits. Of course there are some who put in the necessary work to get to the bottom of the multivocal, repetitive, contradictory and disjointed text, but the road to atheism is littered with well-read bibles. Because if you read it and don't conclude that a lot of it is about land grabs and that God just loooves genocide, you're not paying attention.

I would have loved to have this book, actually by Richard Littler, the creator of Scarfolk, but sadly it doesn't exist.