Tracy Wang, Period 6, 3/20/2023

Blog #3: Literacy and Learning – The Bible is Parent Function 

After our Bible unit, I found the way I approached religion changing. Rather than a set of restrictions, I learned to think of the Bible the same way I enjoyed Greek and Norse mythology– just stories.

Asking a child to do anything, in my experience, simply makes them not want it more. When I was younger, I discovered that my brother would always do the dishes before I requested that he do them if I said I didn't want him to.  My relationship with religion has always been convoluted because of situations similar to this. The way I was introduced to religion can be summarized as very poor. When my parents had me switch from public elementary school to a religious institution, I considered prayers and sermons a nuisance and frankly, incredibly dull. Later on, I began to blame the Bible for being ostracized by my classmates. Coming out of Catholic school left me incredibly confused. Religion was presented to me as the only way the world could be and was. I was at the age where anything that came out of an adult’s mouth was the absolute truth. However, the Bible directly contradicted what other adults had told me about Buddhism, so which one was I supposed to believe? To younger me, religion was a bunch of confusion that ultimately led nowhere.

When I entered my preteens, I began to correlate the Bible with purposeful ignorance of modern-day science, rejection of progressive thinking, and right-wing ideology. As I had been persecuted for my culture around my religious friends, I associated Western religion with oppression and white privilege. My personal experiences made me disdainful. When I reached the age where I began to explore my political standing, I saw religion utilized to support conservative ideas that I disagreed with, from abortion to LGBT rights. I held an incredibly stigmatized mindset– as progressive and “woke” as I wanted to be, I was indirectly going backward. While I thought that everyone has a right to believe in whatever they want, I don’t believe in using it to justify hurting others.

Although I had realized that there was value in the Bible’s teachings despite being a nonbeliever, I never revisited the Bible after leaving Catholic school until our Bible unit. Yes, I remembered the gist of the stories we went over in class, but having discussions as a class and listening to our class discussions allowed me to truly understand what I was meant to learn all those years ago. Whether I believed in God or not, the lessons the Bible conveys can still be reached. The Book of Job and the Book of Revelation taught how even facing when great adversity, you must have faith in God as there will always be a positive after negative. I don’t believe in God and see these stories as fact, but I can still take away the importance of hope and perseverance when challenged. In the same way that I can love The Song of Achilles without believing in Zeus and Hera, or in the way I don’t think children-terrorizing clowns who fell from another dimension are real but still enjoyed reading IT, I can appreciate the stories in the Bible without seeing it as absolute fact. In the Bible unit, I had a revelation(!)-- the Bible could be meaningful to me in a way different than what Catholic school wanted it to be. I am now able to apply it in reading critically outside of class in my personal time and appreciate the lessons taught in the Bible without resentment.

Throughout the year, I’ve become increasingly aware of how literature builds upon other literature. As we progressed further in our syllabus, I grew to appreciate how each unit builds off the next. This makes the Bible an incredibly good read due to how greatly it’s influenced Western culture. After our mythology class, I’d argued that to be well-read you must have some understanding of the Bible (much to my younger self’s dismay). Having even just a little more insight deepened my understanding of how prominent the Bible was in contemporary culture. Biblical allusions are everywhere. In my journey to read English classics two summers ago, not being able to pick out these references in literature put me at a disadvantage in truly understanding the purpose of the text, much less appreciating its nuances. When revisiting Hamlet around midwinter break, I made it a point to approach the play with a focus on the behavior, consciousness, and self-reflections of the main characters. Challenging myself to think critically without instruction, I was able to pinpoint biblical allusions myself. For example, when Hamlet faces his father’s ghost, he compares his father’s death to Cain and Abel as Claudius (his brother) is who murdered him. “The serpent that did sting thy father’s life” referring to the devil, and the “unweeded garden” alluding to the story of the Garden of Eden were all details that went over my head in my initial read. Rereading Hamlet made me realize that not knowing the Bible made me not understand what institutes a classic.  The Bible is the y=x of literature: a parent function of English writing, as it is forever referenced and modified, but ultimately, comes down to the same origin.

In the same way that we are always encouraged to read the introduction of books, the Bible serves as a giant introduction to reading: often, it places a work of literature in context and includes a degree of valuable information on the author, time, and circumstance in which they first appeared. And while I now consider the Bible a fantastic work of fictitious literature, I also feel as though “fiction” is an inadequate word to describe it— it is uniquely meaningful not only in its impact but its exploration of truths and realities teach in a way that nonfiction is incapable of.