1. They believe it wholeheartedly and seek to demonstrate through the best possible verses why.
2. They don’t believe it and seek to demonstrate through the worst possible verses why.
3. They’re well read anyway and recognize a quote as being from the bible, whether they believe the book is truth in print or not.
4. They’re familiar with the phrase from other sources and may not know or care if it’s from the bible because the phrase passed from elitist knowledge to common knowledge years ago and the origin doesn’t matter as much as the meaning does.
Are there more reasons? Could I break those down better? Maybe, but you see what I was intending, at least.
I’ll give you an example from some other cultural reference point.
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
You don’t have to Kobayashi Maru your way out of that one (necessarily), but you do have to have a big enough knowledge of Star Trek to clue in, and specifically have a recollection of the episode in TNG where the phrase was uttered and why.
If you watch the video, it won’t help you a bit, but it’s just a little slice of Sims 2 awesome I had to share, which I was reminded of because of Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. Oh, you just gotta go where the brain wants to go, you know?
Anyway, in this particular episode, Picard and company wind up dealing with a planet where the culture speaks in metaphor. Sure, the universal translator can tell them what the folks are saying, but not what they’re talking about, so there’s a lot of confusion for the first while. It’s meme to the extreme, where everyone speaks of new events by acknowledging an event known to the whole group from sometime in past. So how do you establish communication when you can’t speak the same experiences?
I haven’t seen the episode since it first aired but according to the Wikipedia article, Picard winds up telling his captor the story of Gilgamesh as best he can with limited vocabulary and sign language, particularly the part where Enkidu dies and Gilgamesh mourns him. The Tamarian is at risk of death at the time, so the story resonates with him and he understands Picard’s intention completely. We discover later that “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” refers to two enemies reaching common ground. Picard is able to use what he learned, and what he shared with the Tamarian, to sooth ruffled diplomatic feathers at the end.
Why use Gilgamesh instead of finding some relevant bible story to throw in as a reference point? My guess is that since Star Trek was not a show that pushed religion on people, writers were not going to add any, no matter how easy it would have been to use a religious story there. Too many people still believe the bible is touched by god and has his fingerprints all over it. The Epic of Gilgamesh is even older than the bible (and available in Klingon). It’s considered mythical but Gilgamesh was a king of his land at one time and the poems that were scratched into clay and preserved and later translated probably have some truth in them. Plus, the similarities between that epic and what got put into the first few books of the bible is also interesting but off topic.
The Washington Times has an article about an author promoting bible literacy. I get why this keeps coming up. People want the text to be relevant, want people to still think it’s relevant, want people to quote it and know precisely what it is they’re quoting so they don’t twist the meaning around to suit some nefarious purpose (unlike when religious folk do it for their own purposes…). The author is Timothy Beal,
who has written a book connecting popular references to biblical stories. “Biblical Literacy: the Essential Bible Stories Everyone Needs to Know” was published in October.
“I think you can’t be culturally literate without being biblically literate,” Mr. Beal said in an interview in his snug, book-lined office at Case Western Reserve University.
“These biblical stories and even images are pervasive in our language; they are all over our culture, from high culture to low culture, from Michelangelo to the Simpsons.”
Mr. Beal thinks people who are unfamiliar with these or other biblical references in everyday life are missing a lot.
“When we don’t know these stories, when we don’t hear these resonances, and we’re not familiar, we’re really missing half the conversation,” said Mr. Beal, who has written 10 books and teaches Bible literature and the method and theory of the study of religion.
And I’m going to reiterate something I’m sure I’ve mentioned in this blog at other times about this same topic – maybe it’s time to put the bible down. Our societies and communities and neighbourhoods aren’t designed with WASPs in mind anymore – at least, they shouldn’t be. Nobody ever suggests having a good handle on the Koran or Rig Veda in order to be well-read public speakers. It’s always the bible getting pointed at as evidence of cultured dialogue. Why? There are lists of books all over the place that we could be quoting to sound sophisticated and spiritual. Why the bible? Why continue to treat that book with so much reverence and cultural significance?
It’s a habit. We could just as easily quote Mark Twain:
“Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.”
Or Charles Dickens:
“I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.”
or the current Dalai Lama:
“If you have a particular faith or religion, that is good. But you can survive without it.”
and sound just as insightful and on topic. It’s just that bible stuff seems so pervasive and recognizable, which is probably another reason why people like to quote it – not because they buy it, but because they know their audience will.
