Now that everyone in the U.S. is getting a post-election crash course on Scriptural interpretations, it's a great time to tell you about a site that is literally, out of this world.
It's called the Internet Sacred Texts Archive, "a quiet place in cyberspace devoted to religious tolerance and scholarship."
This site contains all the sacred texts that you could possibly think of, as original and varied as they can be. My pal John Bruno Hare is the tireless genius behind this project.
Just to give you an idea of what this man has wrought, Bruno recently posted on his site that he is "proofing the Mahabharata Book 12, which totals 974 pages in length. I have now completed the first section of this, the first 380 pages."
But while he's finishing that Mahabharata business, you can carry on with the hundreds of other categories, from Alchemy to Zoroastrianism! The primary texts are in all their glory. It is so fascinating, I have to warn you that you may start reading the Bible, but end up in Tolkien, Serbian myths, or Confucianism, as the hours wax on .
Bruno wrote me today:
"I've posted a new part of sacred-texts.com several months ago dealing with the LGBT people and various scriptures, particularly the Bible:
"I thought you might want to check this out because it has comprehensive responses to the fundamentalists use (or mis-use) of the Bible.
"For instance, there is a genuine same-sex union in the Bible, that of David and Jonathan. Jesus never says one word about gays (let alone gay marriage), one way or the other.The sin of Sodom was, depending on which interpretation you use, either being disrespectful to strangers, or oppressing the poor.
"Anyway, it's nice to have this material at one's fingertips if you want to give some bible thumper a coronary. It is possible to respond to this line of reasoning by fundies, on their own grounds, and win the argument. Why let them own this material?
"I also did e-texts of several of Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds books , who were pioneer gay rights advocates in the 19th century. The page also deals with other religions' sacred texts and LGBT issues, including Islam and Hinduism."
Thank you so much, Bruno! Whenever I visit his site, I feel like I want to drop whatever I'm doing and just devote myself to reading every single thing on his list. Or create a school where this is what we pursued from A-Z. The Sacred Text Homeschool!
I'm going to ask Bruno to come and comment here, because I bet he gets a lot of mail from readers, wanting to know WHICH Bible or WHICH editor he's using for all his texts. Authorship is everything, eh?
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