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Is the Bible Nonsense?

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This essay is about nonsense and I hope it is not nonsense. What I have demonstrated is a possible fallacy, namely, equivocation. When saying nonsense twice, I have subtly shifted from one meaning to another, first in the sense of logical fallacies, and second, meaningless utterances. This kind of rhetoric may work for literary purposes, but it constitutes a fallacy if the ambiguity from semantic meanings causes confusion to reasoning.

See as you may, fallacious ideas are all around, consciously or unconsciously. An orator who is well-versed in the art of deception can convulse people, even smart people. Often the untrained mind is deceived by and unintentionally commits logical fallacies. Well, enough nonsense. Let's take a glimpse at the real issue.

Fierce controversies prevailed in New York when the government proposed to ban gay marriage last year. Some religious people supported the ban because of the Bible. Arguments of this sort are flawed, for the speakers failed to give any reasons other than subjective judgment. Unlike moral philosophy, religious claims may lack reasonable grounds. From the libertarian perspective it is not hard to see that gay couples scarcely harm anyone, but the ban apparently causes harm to them.

Anyway, the squabble went on. People went through Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the books which declare homosexuality an abomination, and noticed the same thing said about eating shrimp, lobster, clams, and oysters. Leviticus 11:10-11 says,

And all that have not fins and scales in the seas, and in the rivers, of all that move in the waters, and of any living thing which is in the waters, they shall be an abomination unto you: They shall be even an abomination unto you; ye shall not eat of their flesh, but ye shall have their carcases in abomination.

Those who appeal to the Bible as the only moral authority are inevitably in a dilemma: if they refrain from eating shrimp, which sounds absurd, they will commit the same fallacy twice; or if they eat shrimp but condemn the gays, they will commit the fallacy of inconsistency. Plainly, they have a double standard - choosing what they want to believe while insisting on the Bible's authority.

Why then would such seemingly absurd Scriptures ever come in the first place? We can conceive that in the distant past, poor standards of hygiene and medicine meant a high mortality rate. People who ate shellfish might die of diseases like hepatitis. Without proper scientific knowledge, their inference to the best explanation was that, "this is a revelation: God hates shrimp." A wise man then wrote the Scriptures to warn his folks not to eat it. This is, of course, just a conjecture.

We humans as social animals have been accustomed to accepting beliefs and conventions, which is how we accumulate knowledge and progress to civilization. But the dark side of the fact is we have also been constantly reluctant to question, to reason, to contemplate. Logic is not a matter of intelligence – it is attitude. The root of fallacy is the lack of curiosity.