Nascent Thinker | Contemplations Along The Way

The Bible, Propaganda?

Speak­ing of The New Chris­tians, Tony Jones said some­thing else that caught my attention:

“The Bible is pro­pa­ganda.… Pro­pa­ganda has a point and a pur­pose.… It doesn’t claim to be objec­tive. It’s try­ing to con­vince some­one of some­thing. It’s try­ing to get peo­ple to join a cause, to join a move­ment. Isn’t that exactly what the Bible is?.… It is a liv­ing, breath­ing doc­u­ment that makes a claim on its read­ers’ lives. It’s like the pam­phlets sur­rep­ti­tiously printed by Paul Revere and his com­pa­tri­ots in 1776 — pro­pa­ganda in that sense. It’s God’s man­i­festo, Jesus’ Lit­tle Red Book“¹

Depend­ing on what one means by pro­pa­ganda, yes and no. If by pro­pa­ganda one means sim­ply ‘to prop­a­gate infor­ma­tion’ with the mod­i­fi­ca­tion ‘as accu­rately as pos­si­ble’ then yes, the Bible is and so are many other things, such as school text books, cer­tain his­tory books, med­i­cine bot­tle labels, instruc­tions, … (Read more)