Living Biblically on a Sunday
I love Sundays, though they always make me a bit sad. I’m considering a career in politics, and my first act will transform Sunday into the first 48-hour day. We can skip Thursday to make up for it. Thursday is always a rough day in my mind – far enough into the week for me to exhausted, and tantalizingly close enough to the weekend to be frustrating. I like the sound of Tuesday, plus it’s the day I was born (full of grace – alas, no), and Wednesday is the funnest one to spell. So Thursday, you’ve gotta go to make room for my new 48-hour Sunday.
Changing tack from Twilight, I’ve started reading The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs. It’s his one year quest to live by every law, rule, and code of conduct in the Bible. As an agnostic who is also technically Jewish, for him it’s an interesting exploration of the behavior of religious folk and the reasons behind their beliefs. It’s also a journey of discovery – agnostic being another word for ‘religiously uneducated’ in his case, the project gives him a chance to actually learn about religion in order to make an educated decision about what he chooses to believe. I’m not skipping to the end to find out what he concludes on day 365. So far, one month in with an itchy beard and a confusing list of the obvious rules (a la the Ten Commandments), and the lesser-known, crazy sounding rules (such as attaching tassles to clothing), he’s wary of religion, but always respectful. In turn, his biggest reason for undertaking the experiment was so that he could raise his young son with a definite idea what to teach him, which is a totally respectable reason. No matter what the outcome is at the end of the book, at least when his kid asks him why he believes / doesn’t believe in this ‘God’ he keeps hearing about, Jacobs can give him an honest, and, more importantly, informed response.
