Homosexuality and the Bible

(This is a concise version of an argument I put together last year that I may flesh out further because my blog posts always need to be incredibly verbose.)

Christians commonly will cite 1Corinthians 6:9 and 1Timothy 1:10 as verses that call out homosexuality as a sin. However, both verses in the original Greek use the word "αρσενοκοιται", which is a word found nowhere else in 1st century Greek literature, because Paul made it up. The truth is, nobody really knows what it means, so people have had to guess. 

Modern English is a relatively young language, really dating back to the publication of the King James Bible and Shakespeare's works. There are lots of older languages that had the Bible before that, most notably, German. In German Bibles, "αρσενοκοιται" is translated into "Knabenschänder", a word which we do know the meaning of; it's "boy molester". 

Now of course some scholars will make the claim that Paul's "αρσενοκοιται" is a neologism that comes from the Greek version of Leviticus 20:13, which in the KJV reads "If a man also lie with mankind," or in Greek, the phrase ends with "ἄρσενος κοίτην". However, there's a problem with this translation as well. This command comes in the middle of a list of defined sexual sins, mostly reading "If a man lie with..." In the original Hebrew, each and every one of those instances of "man" is the same Hebrew word, "אִישׁ", so one might expect that verse 13 would read: if an "אִישׁ" lie with an "אִישׁ"; but it doesn't. It reads: if an "אִישׁ" lie with a "זָכָר". Why use a different word here, unless you mean a different concept? "זָכָר" is translated into a number of different English words, but one of them is "child". Indeed, looking at the German again, they translate it "Knaben" or "boy". 

Throughout the Bible there are a lot of sexual sins listed, and almost every one comes with an explanation of why it's a sin. Why is homosexuality a sin? I don't know, but if all the verses that are claimed to be about homosexuality are actually about paedophilia, is any explanation needed?

Mimi's Last Coffee

I was in the process of putting together something for my other blog, and it occurred to me that one of the issues that I was bound to be addressing was the fluidity and vagueness of language. Really, it's not just about the Bible either, but about the way people nitpick details in literature.

Anyway, many years ago, Scott McCloud had made an improvised comic strip called Mimi's Last Coffee. I say improvised because it was part of McCloud's "Morning Improv" project, in which he was taking suggestions from readers for titles and then making them up as he went along. In the associated discussion forums, some discussion broke out after McCloud published the first panel of the comic:

Somebody wondered where the story could go since this appeared to be Mimi enjoying her last coffee, and since that was the title of the story, what else was there to tell? Well, it's been at the back of my mind time and time again over the years, and I thought it would be an interesting exercise in examining the fluidity of language. The fact is, comic strip aside (although McCloud does play with possible meanings of the title in his storytelling) the phrase "Mimi's last coffee" has a near-unlimited range of possible meaning.

Starting at the end of the phrase with the word "coffee", I think a lot of people don't realize that they're dealing with a word that has so many meanings. People probably assume most of the time that "coffee" is referring to the hot brown liquid that many people enjoy with breakfast, but that's just one of a number of meanings. "Coffee" is a word that refers to many aspects of related concepts to that beverage. Coffee is a beverage, yes, but not only can it be prepared in numerous ways (Have you ever tried Turkish coffee? It's a whole different experience!) but the word refers to different parts of the process of making coffee. Starting from the beginning, there is a tree called "coffee", and it produces a fruit called "coffee". The seed of this fruit is known as "coffee", and this seed is commonly dried out and roasted to make a substance known as "coffee". The dried, roasted "coffee" is ground to a variety of different granularities and packaged as "coffee" which people buy and combine with hot water to make the aforementioned beverage. After the grounds are used, they're still "coffee" although nobody consumes them; they either thrown them away or use them for fertilizer (I think).

Being such a big part of our culture, "coffee"" is also used for a number of other concepts related to the food product in one way or another. For instance, "coffee" is a shade of medium-brown. (Mimi could be painting!) "Coffee" can also refer to the food product in a collective sense, referring to types or brands of coffee, as in, "I don't like Folger's coffee or any of the grocery-store coffees; I prefer Starbucks coffee." Actually, if you go to Starbucks or a similar coffee establishment, you'll find that they offer many different coffees. I used to work an opening shift at Starbucks, and before we opened the store, one of the things that had to be done was of course brewing up the coffee; I'd brew a pot of dark roast coffee, then a light roast coffee, and decaf would be my "last coffee". Many years before that, though, I used to have a social gathering at my house in college every week at which I served my friends coffee; such social gatherings are commonly referred to as "coffees". There may be other shades of meaning (including the idiomatic phrase "wake up and smell the coffee"), but that will do for this writing, I think.

So, how about "last"? Once again, devoid of context a person usually thinks of the word "last" as meaning "final" but I think even in that sense of the word there are shades of meaning. Someone who was going to quit drinking coffee and had a hard time keeping their resolve might repeatedly declare "This is my last coffee!" and then have yet still one more, and one more, etc. There are other senses of finality, however. Suppose Mimi were to treat two of her friends to coffees at the local cafe, and having only two hands in which to carry coffee cups, she might carry two cups to the table and then go back to the counter for her last coffee. Also, even if she is drinking her coffee alone, any particular cup of coffee might be her last coffee of the day. If Mimi were working at the coffee shop, even if she intends to come back for a drink after her shift concludes, she could very well call the final cup she serves her last coffee. If she's making coffee for herself at home, and she finds she has only enough supplies for one more cup/pot, she might declare that she has drunk her last coffee, and must go to the store for more.

Furthermore, the word "last" doesn't only carry the concept of finality, but the concept of previousness. Mimi may be enjoying a cup of coffee now, but may have a story about how bad her last coffee tasted. Or if she throws the sort of little coffee parties I mentioned earlier, and you attended one, you might hear about how things went at Mimi's last coffee. There are other senses of the word, too. Suppose that Mimi went to the cafe and found that they were serving a particular coffee blend that was her least favorite; she might declare that that is the last coffee she would ever drink, and have no coffee at all.

Finally, there is, I suppose, the question of who (or what) "Mimi" is. As I already hinted at somewhere above, Mimi need not be the consumer of the coffee, but could be the server, or some sort of host; I also implied the possibility that Mimi could be an artist painting a picture in mainly brown colors. Mimi could be a coffee grower, a coffee roaster, or a professional coffee taster. There's a chain of restaurants called Mimi's Cafe, at which I've never had a coffee, but I assume they offer it, and every day at every location there must be a last coffee served. Mimi could be a company that produces and sells coffee, and "Mimi's last coffee" could be a reference to their most recently introduced product. Mimi could be a family pet that found an unfortunate taste for coffee, unfortunate because coffee was poisonous to her and it caused her demise.

Language is a very fluid thing by necessity, and that has its good points and bad points. Namely, when you read what may appear to be a simple phrase, you can never be 100% sure that you've got a clear grasp on it, so it's best not to leap to conclusions about whether it is stating something right or wrong.

More is less?

I bring it up for a quick comment more as a matter of my penchant for ironic statements rather than strong disagreement (although I do disagree). Anna Quindlen writes a column this week in which she states, concerning Obama's election:

"It is impossible to overstate what that means to this nation."

Uh, Ms. Quindlen? I believe you just did.

The book of deuteronomy

This was a hard series of essays to figure out, at least for me. I sort of like these odd little series that take off on a theme and go wherever they go. Initially, when I wrote the "Book of genesis" one, my thought had been merely how interesting it was that Darwin was actually so little-known in a very personal way; what with his works being considered far more important to the modern secularist than the Bible, why is it that he is still not widely read? Actually, the practical answer for that is that while secularists do often claim the Bible to be a very boring book, the book of Genesis with its tales of incest and intrigue are bound to be more stimulating reading than a treatise on biology could ever hope to be.

Yet once I started in on the thought, I realized there was more that could be said. These are the words of the Bible (and supposedly God) on one hand, and on the other hand, the secular world has its own words to live by. A guest speaker at my church a few weeks ago actually said something that stirred up a bit of controversy, although I hope I was far from the only one in attendance that got his point. He said that when we look for a basis for our morality in life, if we decide (among other options he discussed) that basis should be the Bible, we're actually making a bad judgment. The only basis we should have for our morality is truth. (Now as Christians, we probably have come to the conclusion that the Bible is true, so there's no conflict there, but it sounds subversive.) How that plays out may be problematic, of course, as most of us feel that "truth" is subjective.

In the end, whatever the truth may be, it's inescapable. If Darwin is speaking truth, if Marx is speaking truth, if people of religions and cultures differing from your own are speaking truth, then it doesn't matter whether you like what they say or not. It's still truth.

The Bible is claimed by Christians (and others) to be truth, but truth of what nature? The first five books of the Bible are supposedly truth given to us from God by way of Moses. But is this truth about the Bible itself true? The book of Deuteronomy is probably the one book in particular that is Moses' own. Genesis? Moses' book of ancient history of his people. Exodus? Moses' book of recent history of his people. Leviticus? Moses' book of the laws of his people. Numbers? Moses' book about where his people are now, and what they're going through. Deuteronomy? This is Moses giving a speech summing it all up in his own words, telling his people what it's all about.

It's Moses' farewell speech, and he takes a lot of time to say a number of things we've already heard, just for review. But there are a number of new things as well, and significant things. While Christians tend to view John 3:16 as a verse that sums it all up, Jews go for Deuteronomy 6:4: "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our G-d, the LORD is one." It's a prayer that virtually every Jew knows by heart, and holds dearest to their heart. Jesus, when asked what the "greatest commandment" is, didn't quote from the Ten Commandments back in Exodus, he quoted the very next verse, 6:5: "Love the LORD you G-d with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength." One of my personal favorite verses from the Bible comes from this book as well, 29:5, which paraphrased says, "Hey, did you notice that after walking in the desert for 40 years, nobody ever needed a new pair of shoes?" For some reason, I find that wild!

But detractors of the Bible find a favorite verse in Deuteronomy as well, one to highlight what they see as "truth" trumping over what those of "blind faith" see in the Bible. Deuteronomy 34:5, "And Moses the servant of the LORD died there in Moab, as the LORD had said." Hmm, how many people in history, when writing their autobiography, include a chapter on their own death? (Actually, I'd really like to know, as I suspect that Moses isn't unique in this respect, just rare. I believe Graham Chapman's autobiography includes info on his death, as well as a few interesting stories that happened years after he died that have to do with his life. Of course, these stories were "ghost written", a very appropriate term in these particular circumstances, and a possibility concerning Deut. 34 that few people seem to accept despite it being the most likely case.) Yes, it seems unlikely that the (whole) book was written by Moses after all; but then, who did write the thing?

I was in the library, looking for a book on this particular subject that I knew was out there. I didn't find it (Dewey Decimal section 222.1066 was unfortunately empty, which is apparently where it should have been; it was probably checked out.) but I did find another interesting book that referred back to it. The book I did come across was Kenneth C. Davis' Don't Know Much About the Bible, perhaps a very appropriate title for one of the subjects of the first essay in this series. Davis is the author of several books in this vein, such as Don't Know Much About the Civil War, which are largely books of interesting factoids about whatever subject. Good reads, but from the bit I perused, the author sometimes falls prey to the same sort of problems he accuses the Bible of having: he takes some bit out of the Bible and says "Hey, the Bible claims to know the truth on this subject, but it's way off, because actually I'm the one that knows the truth!" Cute. Not as bad as I make it sound, though; it's a good read overall, I think, but I base this on reading probably less than a tenth of the book.

As I said, the book does refer to the other book I was looking for, Richard Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible?, a book that I think may be the definitive source for what is known as the "Documentary Hypothesis". For those not highly familiar with the concept, many modern scholars have come up with a theory as to how the Books of Moses came to be, and it involves the postulation of essentially five people given letters as code names, since their true identities are not known.

J is an author that writes a lot of the parts of the Bible that deal with people having more personal interaction with God, known in these sections of scripture as "YHWH" or "Jehovah", which is where the J comes from. In contrast, portions where God is referred to as "Elohim" are considered to have been written by author E, whose style is more prosaic. Author D is who is usually credited with writing the bulk of the Book of Deuteronomy (thus the D designation) and other sections that review and revise parts given elsewhere. Author P is mainly concerned with the establishment of the Jewish priesthood and codification of laws concerning it. Lastly, but far from least in importance, is R, the Redactor (a fancy word for "editor"), the one who took all the works of the other writers and wove it together into a single storyline, and rather poorly, if many textual critics are to be believed.

It's an interesting theory for a number of reasons. One thing that's interesting about it is that even being a strong Bible-believer, the first time I heard of this I was far from surprised. I don't know if it was something I was taught as a boy in synagogue, but I'd always believed that in particular the Book of Genesis was a collection of oral history put down on paper by Moses. Yes, those old stories came from multiple sources and were "redacted" by a later author, this person being Moses. As for the rest of the books of Moses, I do suppose that certainly that final chapter was likely to have been added after the fact, although given the supposed supernatural aspect of the books of Moses, it might be the case that Moses knew the circumstances that would surround his death and wrote about them before the fact. (It's also a possibility, although one purists would like much less, that Moses wrote about his death and then simply wandered off by himself, thereafter dying in a manner not actually recorded in Deuteronomy that remains a mystery to this day.) Be it a plus or minus to his authenticity, Moses is the fellow who called himself "more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth", as pointed out by Davis, who asks the obvious question as to whether a truly humble man would make such a statement. It seems like a rhetorical question, but if it were true, then couldn't he? No matter.

The fact is, in the end, whatever the source of the Bible, it's a very unique book. (Is "very unique" redundant?) Even assuming Moses is the one and only writer of these five books, the story would suggest to us that he wrote them over the course of forty years in a number of different situations, in a number of different locations, during a turbulent and difficult time for the country he was trying to lead. He traveled back and forth between continents, lived in different cultures, and played numerous roles in his life, including prince, outlaw, shepherd, prophet, and priest. Proponents of the veracity of the Bible often point out how remarkable it is that the Bible holds together so well given the fact that it was written across a vast span of time by a broad spectrum of authors in a variety of cultures and moments in history; much the same could be said of Moses' writtings alone.

The real problem with the Documentary Hypothesis is that it's just like the views that those of us of "blind faith" hold: it doesn't hold up to logical scrutiny. There are plenty of books in the Bible that have never been questioned as to being authored by a single person that have changes in style and/or preferred usage of certain names for God. The changing of style of writing within a single work can just as easily be a matter of change of mood or subject as change of author. So many of the bases for this theory have the same sort of self-contradicting tone as criticisms of the Gospels have: If a story is told twice in the Bible, and the two tellings match, critics will say that one was simply a copying of the other, and therefore meaningless. If, on the other hand, the two tellings do not match in any particular point whether major or minor, then there is a grievous contradiction that the editor has sloppily failed to fix. If a bit of the story indicates a prohibition of unusual practices, then it's labeled "intolerant", but if it allows unusual practices, it's labeled "inconsistent". If the story matches with a well-known event in history or in the folklore of other cultures' traditions, it's plagiarism, but if it tells a unique story, it's unsubstantiated. In short, just as there are certain people you will never be able to convince that the Bible has anything wrong with it, there are certain other people you will never be able to please when it comes to the Bible. To them, it's just plain wrong, and any and all evidence that supports this view will be accepted with joy.

But there's a middle ground here, and one that's not often explored for some reason. Yes, there are certain issues that the Bible has that need explaining, but I'm not sure this is one of them. How great of a blow falls upon the faith of those who believe in the Bible to suggest the possibility that the first five books of the Bible were not written by Moses? Does it really matter when all is said and done? When we're trying to determine what basis we have for religious belief and for our morality, if saying the Bible is our basis is inherently less sound of a choice than calling for a basis of truth, then how much less solid is a foundation that bases our core beliefs on oral tradition about a translation of a book that is an edited revision of an earlier oral tradition? Bible purists, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to minimize the significance of the Bible here. What I am trying to do is point out that the real point of the Bible, the real meat of its message, is not in who may or may not have written any given portion of Scripture, but in what the source of that Scripture ultimately is. Does it matter whether God dictated the Torah letter by letter to Moses as he chiseled it into stone on Mount Sinai, directed Moses to write it down over the course of his forty-year wanderings, or inspired one of the followers of Moses to piece together the traditions of the people years after Moses died, so long as it is the case that God was the one behind the work in the end?

On the skeptics' side there is even something to be said. Robert Alter, in his translation of the books of 1&2 Samuel (The David Story), points out some interesting things about the nature of redaction. I've often quoted him on scriptural matters because although as far as I can tell from his writings he is an atheist, he also is a lover of the beauty of the Hebrew Scriptures, and doesn't let his theological bias detract from seeing a good story. Although he makes the claim that the book(s) of Samuel are likely the result of editing long after the death of David, there are parts of the story that are viewed by skeptics as contradictory, but in fact should be seen as a beautiful bit of artistry on the part of whoever put these stories together. Both 1Sam.10 and 1Sam.19 include a reason why "...they say, 'Is Saul, too, among the prophets?' " which is considered by many to be a problem.

"The doublet, far from being a stammer of transmission or inept or automatically inclusive redaction, is vividly purposeful...To the ancient audience, however, the recurrence would not have seemed a contradiction, and the conflicting valences given to the explanation of the proverbial saying add to the richness of the portrait of Saul, formally framing it at beginning and end." (The David Story, p. 122)

In other words, this is just an ancient style of writing that is out of the norm for today, but totally acceptable in ancient Israel. Sometimes we insist on interpreting ancient writings through our modern filters, and they simply don't fit. The problem may not be with the writings, but with the filters, which are being used in the wrong context. I understand and accept that people will refuse to believe the truths put forth in the Bible, but I have a hard time standing idly by when people reject supposed faulty logic on the basis of their own faulty logic.

Of course, I'm sure many skeptics feel the same way about me. Maybe I've just had too much coffee today?

Does a hairless ape have the Buddha nature?

I spend a lot of time thinking about things that atheists say about the world and how so often it doesn't seem to make sense to me. Case in point, something that I love to bring up is the question of how evolutionary theory (that is, of the sort that claims humans evolved from "lower life forms", that's the interesting stuff, right?) is often claimed to have solid basis in scientific fact, and yet, I've never heard of any specific evidence. Those who truly understand science realize that science never "proves" anything anyway, and that's an apparent weakness and yet in many ways truly the strength of science that at its core, science is eternally skeptical.

Not so theists, obviously. A common claim made by theists is the concept that the existence of God is simply self-evident. The mere fact that atheists exist would seem to be a compelling counter-argument, but my fellow theists insist. Usually, the claim is the if one simply looks at the world around us, sees how amazing it is, one cannot reasonably reject the concept of an all-powerful creator. Okay, if you really think so.

Something always seems wrong with it to me, but it's hard to put a finger on specifics. Then I remembered a fascinating little observation I've heard a few theistic anti-evolutionists make: Ever seen a dog say grace before digging into a bowlful of chow? Of course not, dogs don't have religion, nor do any other animals, and clearly, that's what sets us apart and makes us superior.

I find that to be a much more interesting and perhaps far more astute observation, although it may not be so clear what conclusions we can draw from the fact. I realize that I have repeatedly talked on this blog about how we really are not well served in comparing humans to animals, yet I think it is a wellspring of philosophical, sociological and biological insight to note anything that does actually clearly delineate us from the rest of the living creatures in the world. We're not the only animals to use tools, build structures, or even use language, so while those things fail to fully set us apart, the fact that we are somehow fundamentally religious is striking. Even atheists are likely to occasionally ponder the possibility that God exists, even if they easily reject it out of hand. Does this really make us somehow superior, however?

While an atheist might say no out of sense of surety that theology is a waste of brain power, it occurs to me that theists themselves are implicitly putting forth a very good argument that something is wrong somewhere. Maybe you personally disagree, but I have never doubted that many animals are thinking, feeling beings. Our favorite pets, dogs and cats, seem to be very able to observe the world around them and evaluate what is going on. Their thought processes may be somewhat more simplistic, but I don't believe they are completely unable to abstract from sense data. When I was growing up, I had a dog. Surely that dog could have looked up into the night sky and seen the stars twinkling away across the galaxy. Surely that dog could have looked at the natural world about him and seen the beauty of nature. Yet all of these things that are supposed to inspire us as humans to realize that there is something greater than us in the world simply fail to elicit such a response in animals. Why is that?

Think about it: If the existence of God is supposed to be self-evident by simply looking at the world around us, so much so that in order to deny God's existence one would supposedly have to fool oneself into denying it, then why do we not see any evidence of Godly reverence among other species? Is it lack of intelligence? I don't think so. It's an oddity that one has to be intelligent before one can be fooled. Ever try to play a practical joke on a dog? It doesn't work. Either you fail completely, or you're successful in a mere mechanical way while the dog has no idea what's going on. Who fooled the animals of the world into ignoring God?

Really, in my mind there are only two possibilities. Either claims that the existence of God is self-evident are fundamentally flawed, or the fact that animals are non-religious shows us that we as humans are inferior. If you can look at the stars in the sky and "see God", not in a supernatural way, but in a mundane sense of it being simply self-evident, then you're deluded. Our ability as highly intellectually evolved creatures to imagine infinite possibilities from the limited information we gather with our senses has caused a glitch: the imagining of God.

That's not to say that God does not exist. Don't mistake me, I'm still a theist. The problem here is a short-circuiting of reason, but that doesn't automatically imply that the conclusion is wrong, just logically flawed. If I believe that every time I wash my car, it will rain within 24 hours, it may in fact be true, but that doesn't imply causality, only that I have poor timing in washing my car. I think God exists, but not because the world is so beautiful.

It may be that there is something supernatural to it, like God opening the eyes of a person in the Bible and letting them see the realm of the spirit for a moment. Even then, however, one cannot say it's self-evident, as divine intervention is needed. Is a special kind of sight that which has set us apart from the animals? If so, it may not be given to all, and we cannot say that an atheist is fooling themselves for not seeing what we see; for better or worse, they simply aren't experiencing that same glitch.

Pluto is not a bird, he's a dog

I had been rolling around the idea of a post about the recent downgrading of Pluto from "planet" to "dwarf planet" in the back of my mind, but I wasn't sure it was worthwhile. Last night, I was reading the letters section of Newsweek, and there were many, many letters from people responding to a recent article about Pluto, and what I thought was funny about the letters was the manner in which so many of them seemed to be expressing the sentiment that it just wasn't something to get worked up about. What made this funny for me is that these people actually took a chunk of their valuable time to sit down and write a formal letter to express to others that this was a non-issue; it reminds me of those people who call in to news programs to answer their polls with "I have no opinion." I myself have never written a letter to the editor of any publication, so I'm not sure what gets people so worked up to do such a thing, especially if they're worked up about how getting worked up--oh never mind, you get it I'm sure.

So I thought I'd let the issue drop. It really isn't a big deal for the most part, and by now, it's pretty much old news. Here in the 21st century, we seem to absorb information and quickly move on to the next big thing as soon as possible. Things must go more slowly on Pluto, where, as one letter writer pointed out, only about a quarter of a Plutonian year (248 Earth years) has gone by since it was discovered and placed on the list of planets in the first place. Pluto didn't change, our system of classifying celestial objects changed.

But that's what hit me with profoundness after setting down the magazine. It's something profound in its simplicity. For someone like me who spends a fair amount of his time explaining away the nitpicking of skeptics towards the Bible, this is a current-day moment that we can reflect on in light of some scientific issues people have with the Bible. Follow me here...

Back in junior high school, I took an astronomy class. In that astronomy class, among the many things we were taught was that Pluto was a planet: one of nine, actually. Since this is a new thing that has changed, you'll find Pluto called a planet in most science textbooks today that talk about planets; you'll even find it all over the internet. I ask you, were those textbooks and my instructor wrong? No! To say now that Pluto is a planet is technically wrong, but up until we changed the definition just a short time ago, it was not wrong. For 76 years, "Pluto is a planet." was a true statement. The fact that it has changed now is not the fault of those who said it then, but a natural result of a paradigm shift in astronomy.

Oddly enough, this is not the first time we have had a major paradigm shift in the definition of "planet". If you look up the word in the dictionary, and look at the etymology, you'll note that the word originally meant "wandering" and referred to "(def. 1c) a celestial body moving in the sky, as distinguished from a fixed star, applied also to the sun and moon." While until a couple months ago, we had nine planets which were Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, before the Copernican heliocentric model of the cosmos became popular, we had seven planets, which were Moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. A planet was an object that you could see in the sky that didn't stay in one place like the stars did. This ruled out the earth, since it was not in the sky, and included the sun and moon. Pretty much from Ptolemy to Copernicus, it was acceptable and entirely correct to say "The sun is a planet." simply because the word meant something else then.

So, to get to my point... A verse that's often been a darling of the Bible skeptics is Leviticus 11:13-19, which reads:

And these are they which ye shall have in abomination among the fowls; they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination: {long list of various birds, ending with} and the bat.

People love to point to this excerpt from the Bible and point out triumphantly that bats are not birds, some as though they are the first enlightened messenger in the history of Christendom to notice this fact. You are correct, bats are not birds. So what?

Do you think the Israelites thought that bats had wings and beaks and laid eggs? If you live in a place that has a lot of bats and you're interested in studying them, it's not hard to do. For a couple of months when I was a kid, I lived in a drafty old cabin in the mountains, and there were bats that nested in my bedroom. At night they would go out and fly around eating bugs, but in the morning when I got up for school, I could get out a flashlight and peek around in the nooks and crannies of the cabin and find them nestling down to go to sleep for the day. They don't look anything like the creatures we call birds; to me they actually looked like little furry winged pigs.

The Israelites knew the difference between bats and "other" birds, I assure you. It wouldn't be hard to figure out. So why does the Bible call them birds when they most surely are not? For the same reason the ancient Greeks called the sun a planet: at the time, it was the correct terminology. The word translated as "fowl" in verse 13 is a general-purpose word that might translate better to "flying things" than "fowl" or "birds". Case in point, the same word is actually used in verse 21 of the same chapter to refer to insects, and is translated "flying". The word is not wrong; the best one could say is that "fowl" is a questionable translation.

For those who wish to continue to think of Pluto as a planet, I personally don't care. By the 20th-century meaning of that word, it is a planet, after all. It's going to take some time for everybody to get used to the 21st-century definition, and in the meantime, while technically wrong, the old definition will still have cultural acceptance. For those ancient documents that want to commit the unforgivable sin of using terminology consistent with the time in which they were written rather than modern scientific terminology, I'll accept you, even if some people want to pick on you just for being what you are.