bible
"The Bible is like a telescope. If a man looks through his telescope he sees worlds beyond; but if he looks at his telescope, he does not see anything but that. The Bible is a thing to be looked through to see that which is beyond; but most people only look at it and so they see only the letter of the law. "
"To apply the metaphor to the Bible, the Bible is like a finger pointing to the moon. Christians sometimes make the mistake of thinking that being a Christian is about believing in the finger rather than seeing the Christian life as a relationship to that which the finger points.
"None of this would have happened without the Bible. Therefore, it is good to pore over this book day and night. The Bible is like an ever flowing spring and I wish you all success,"
"The Bible is like a spiritual scalpel in the hands of a divine surgeon. Powerful and probing, it cuts right through all our layers of spiritual blindness, misconceptions, prejudices and self-justification, and reveals the malignancy of sin and rebellion that is embedded deep down inside us."
"The Bible is like the elephant. To perceive a true picture, we have to examine all its parts not just a page here or a verse there."
This book is an essential element of The Western Civilization. But it's not the ONLY book. If you want to to understand the ancient base material for our culture you'd have to include Plato's Republic,the works of Aristotle, Euclid's Geometry and some others that I can't recall. These books have had a heavy influence on the thought patterns of just about every civilization west of the Nile, that is why it's called Western Civilization(I think). So the focus on JUST the Hebrew Bible is kinda silly.
Taken TOGETHER these books comprise the core of Western Thought,for better or worse. The thought process conveyed in all these books have mixed and mingled over the centuries. It's hard to untangle where the influence of one book ends and others begin. In fact much of the discussion about the Hebrew Bible is a dialogue, a form of conversation and learning found in Plato's Republic.
"The trouble is it's not like any other book. To read the Bible as literature is like reading Moby Dick as a whaling manual or The Brothers Karamazov for its punctuation."
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