Stumbled across a series in Slate where a not-particularly-observant Jewish guy starts reading the Bible for the first time. It’s entertaining, enlightening and thought-provoking. And it points out the fact that if Fundamentalists were in any way consistent, they should be foaming at the mouth to ban the Bible on account of its content:
This chapter [Genesis 19] makes the Jerry Springer Show look like Winnie the Pooh … After the attempted mass gay rape, the father pimping, the urban devastation, uxorious saline murder, it looks like Lot and his daughters are finally safe. They’re living alone in a cave in the mountains. But then the two daughters—think of them as Judea’s Hilton sisters—complain that cave life is no fun because there aren’t enough men around. So, one night they get Lot falling-down drunk and have sex with him. Chapter 19 poses what I would call the Sunday School Problem—as in, how do you teach this in Sunday school? What exactly is the moral lesson here?