A Quote by George Carlin
I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older; then it dawned on me - they're cramming for their final exam.
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I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older; then it dawned on me . . they’re cramming for their final exam.
I've got a lot of great memories. The journey was great. It just probably makes you more hungry the second time. I'm a lot older and I think I appreciate it more being older now and how hard it is to get to the Final and win it.
After I quit being a lawyer in '95, I was having a lot of trouble writing. Then I read somewhere that Willa Cather read a chapter of the Bible every day before she started work. I thought, 'Okay, I'll try it.' Before each writing session, I started to read the Bible like a writer, thinking about language, character, and themes.
I found that life for me gets a lot more serious as you get older. You start off young and happy and smiling and "Wooo! I'm having fun!" And then you get married, and that's very serious, and you have kids, and that's very, very serious. So as you get older, you start thinking about passing away, and that becomes extremely serious.
I read a quote by James Dean when I was 17; he said, 'I'd rather starve than do a whole bunch of work that I don't care about.' The older I got, the more I understood what he was saying. If I want to do a whole lot of work that I don't care about, then I would probably be working in a law office somewhere.
I don't care about people kissing my ass or telling me how great I am. I don't really give a damn. I read the bad stuff a whole lot more than I read the good stuff. I read that because there are always going to be critics who are going to say how good you aren't.
[ My mother] went, OK, I've read the Bible. I've read the Bible again. I'm reading the Bible again. OK, let me - where does this Bible come from? What does this Old Testament speak - who are the Israelites? Who - what is Judaism? And then she went, and I'm going to study that. And, you know, she wanted to almost get to the core.
If you actually read the Bible, you can see there's a whole lot more information in there than the way we interpret the Bible. Because there are single lines in the Bible where if you just take them at face-value, they don't make any sense whatsoever in the world we see, we know, and we understand.
That happened when I was a freshman in high school. The guy reading it [the Bible] was dating my older sister. I thought he was the cutest thing that had ever happened in Nashville. He was nine years older than me and I thought, 'Mimi, I hate to do this to you, but I'm going to steal this guy away.' So I went to this Bible study thinking I was going to make this guy fall in love with me. I was fourteen. Hey, you know. But I was so overwhelmed by what they were talking about at this Bible study. I became a very serious, committed Christian.
When you look at the Bible, and I read the Bible very seriously, for a lot of my life, I believed the Bible ordained the death penalty, and the Bible seemed to be very clear about that. But the more I look, the more troubled I became because it's not that simple. In the Bible, there's some 30 death-worth crimes, like working on the Sabbath, or disrespecting your parents. Are we that fundamental that we should bring back that death penalty?
I am thinking about those things now. More so than all my friends - they're a lot older than me, but they're not even thinking about babies.
What I mean by context is worldview - having the ancient Israelite or first-century Jew in your head as you read. How would an ancient Israelite or first-century Jew read the Bible - what would they be thinking in terms of its meaning? The truth is that if we put one of those people into a small group Bible study and asked them what they thought about a given passage meant, their answer would be quite a bit different in many cases than anything the average Christian would think. They belonged to the world that produced the Bible, which is the context the Bible needs to be understood by.
I read a lot of archaeology and early history in a general way, not thinking particularly of this book, and this provided me with the background. It showed me how, possibly, the people lived back then.
I haven't read for pleasure in 35 years. I mean, I get a lot of pleasure from what I read... For me, it's gotten so that it doesn't seem as though I've read a book unless I've written about it. It really seems the completion of the reading process.
I am excited to show people how, when you get older, you get deeper, you get more raw, you get more honest, and you stop pretending to be the person you think people want you to be. I stopped worrying about what people wanted me to say and just sort of dug deep into my personal arsenal of my mistakes and shameful thoughts.
To tell you the truth, the older I get, the less I know. I keep meeting people, both older and younger, who seem to have accrued so much more knowledge or expertise or certainty about who they are and the jobs they do. I just marvel at it.
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