Ian at Irreducible Complexity asks Is the Bible Special?:

The point is, if you actually read the bible without being primed to think it is holy, True (in some sense), important, or special, the text is simply not very impressive. It is tedious, tribal, occasionally uplifting, ludicrous, far fetched, even more tedious, and alienating. It takes hard work, perhaps sustained by naive enthusiasm, to get much out of the bible. But the same is true of any work of literature, spiritual or fictional or both. If I went back 30 years now, to talk to my former self about what to spend my life studying, I’d be hard pressed to give good reasons to choose the bible over Shakespeare, say, or Bach, or any other cultural artefact. At least those alternatives are easier to derive pleasure from, on a shallow level. I don’t regret the choice I made, I just don’t think I somehow picked perfectly.

Ian illustrates his point with this classic XKCD comic:

James McGrath asks about the positive side of the issue:

Certainly there are things which you appreciate in literature, wine, music, or anything else by really familiarizing yourself with the range of phrases, sounds, tastes, etc. Surely this isn’t always a bad thing, is it?

Obviously it’s not a bad thing to appreciate the subtleties in a subject which the uninitiated would miss. I think the problem comes in when your subtleties become so arcane that you have to question whether they are real or just figments of your own imagination. As an example, I point to the David Derbyshire article at the Guardian, Wine-tasting: it’s junk science, which is loaded with examples like this:

In 2001 Frédérick Brochet of the University of Bordeaux asked 54 wine experts to test two glasses of wine– one red, one white. Using the typical language of tasters, the panel described the red as “jammy’ and commented on its crushed red fruit.

The critics failed to spot that both wines were from the same bottle. The only difference was that one had been coloured red with a flavourless dye.

Wine is too complex for the human senses to fully grasp. This leads to a great deal of subjectivity in evaluations, even among those people who have carefully trained their palates. This results in a lot of bullshit analysis, like the above.

Perhaps language has a much complexity as a glass of wine. Extracting subtle meanings from a text is surely as tricky as detecting oak notes and tannin signatures. Maybe much of what we appreciate about the Bible – or any text – has less to do with the pattern of words and more to do with the projections of our own minds.

I’m not sure that’s a problem. The meanings may be useful or inspiring regardless of the source. The problem comes in when we try to privilege one bottle, or one book, over another. If much of the subtleties within the Bible come from our own minds, then why prefer it to other books? What special power or authority does it have?

It seems appropriate to end with a little Mark Twain, from “Concerning Tobacco:”