Should the Bible Continue To Be Used For Swearing-In Ceremonies and In Courtrooms?
Posted: Thursday, December 04, 2008
by John O'Loughlin
Centretruths
They say the Bible is the word of God, but it is a poor type of god whose word is printerly, i.e. in print, and not of an italic writerly character whose ethereal subjectivity would be properly commensurate with a metaphysical disposition and/or dispensation - at least when monochrome, and preferably of a white-on-black rather than black-on-white nature, as though emphasizing psyche at the expense of soma, the Church at the expense, in other words, of the State.
Anyhow, I wouldn't want to swear on the Bible; I'd be more inclined to swear at what, to me, is an obstacle to true godliness which, at the mankind level (beyond cosmos and nature) is most approximated to in transcendental meditation, where the godly ego utilizing lungs and breath to recoil to self from the out-breath more profoundly, bypassing its starting-point to hit the soul spinal-cord deep for a second or two, corresponds to 'God the Father', the end-product of self-aggrandisement to 'Heaven the Holy Soul', the raison d'etre of godliness, and the lungs and the breath to 'the Son of God' and 'the Holy Spirit of Heaven' respectively.
But that would still be godliness in mankind, as a penultimate and not ultimate, or definitive, manifestation of godliness or, more correctly, heavenliness, which will require an altogether different platform of self-realization if it is to succeed in bringing metaphysics to anything like its maximum soulfulness, so to speak - one dependent, in all likelihood, on synthetically artificial substances and coupled to cyborgization of a communal order.
That said (and this is quite another subject), the Bible is a book, and no book is worthy of a metaphysical otherworldly status, being a kind of rectilinear worldly thing corresponding, when monochromatic, to the physical/antichemical southeast point of the intercardinal axial compass in what I normally describe as something corresponding to a phenomenal mode of sensibility. Only scrolls, and these days e-scrolls (if italic writerly on white-on-black monochromatic terms) are worthy to be taken seriously as the 'word of God', and on that, especially in relation to my own more thematically-elevated examples which tend, in their literary collectivization, towards the communal, I would be more than prepared to swear. As for the Bible, forget it! One day it will be consigned to the rubbish heap of history, along with all those other religious and cultural anachronisms from the West or the East which fall well short of global requirement.
This Article has been viewed 38 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)I didn't think there were any other non-believers on this site.I don't accept the Bible, or any other scripture as being anything other than the product of human beings, and I would object to swearing on the Bible.I think the practice may be more of a local decision, however. I work with abused children in the field of Child Welfare and I am in court several times each month. When I lived in Florida they never used a Bible, nor did they include the phrase "so help me God."I just moved to Oklahoma, and here, they include the phrase, "so help me God," but the witness is asked only to raise their Right hand, not to place a hand on the Bible.tex
We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.
