Response to Psalms

A response to SPACKLick's video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-dG8EX5yfw&playnext_from=TL&videos=TsMrFT83pTI

An atheist reads the whole bible Pt. 15 Psalms 42-150

(a.k.a. "150 of them! FUUUUCK!")

Hey SPACKLick - yeah, the response is going here because YouTube won't let me post walls of text in the comments! Oh deeear... :<

First off - what a trooper! I read through the entirety of Psalms fairly recently, and yes it's a slog. It's basically a songbook, and a lot of the songs are thematically similar, by the same artist a lot of the time and yes, there's 150 of them. FUCK. I really wish original music could have been included in some way or another - I'm a fan of Jewish music anyway, and it would have given the whole thing a lot more variety. What I did end up doing for some of it though was, like another commenter suggested, singing them aloud to myself.

The thing about Psalms is that it is a collection - like a songbook, or recipe book, or other anthology, it was never designed to be read straight through. So I guess we only have our own mad selves to blame if we try to. :) Advice that should have come to me beforehand is each time you read a section of the Old Testament, read a Psalm or two afterwards, and that way you break it up and get more out of it. If you struggle with Proverbs, maybe try that?

Right, next point. It's a man book. The book does indeed cover a lot of man's side of the relationship between God and man. You ask why this is even in the Bible at all. I think your expectations of the Bible as a holy book are skewed slightly. Its purpose isn't simply a handbook of dos and don'ts and teachings. It's a library, with a lot of genres, from history (eg. Exodus) to philosophy (eg. Job) to poetry (eg. Song of Solomon) to prophecy (eg. Isaiah) to official records (eg. Chronicles) to religious laws (eg. Leviticus) to letters to churches (eg. Ephesians) to letters to friends (eg. 1 & 2 Timothy)... I could go on for a while. God isn't thought to have dictated it all, but the common thing that ties it all together is that each book is considered to be 'God-breathed' or inspired by God enough to merit its place in the Bible (this isn't to say theologians aren't still arguing over it all).

Reading the Bible therefore, is a task in context - you have to bear in mind who wrote which part, who they were writing to, what their point was, and what you yourself can take from it. A lot of it may seem pointless and irrelevant, but just because you can't immediately apply 1 Chronicles 1 to your life doesn't make it unimportant, it's just that that part of the Bible was never intended to be used to better our understanding of God, it was intended to be a list of names. Ultimately, the Bible is a record in many different forms of the relationship between God and man through the ages, and the way it achieves this varies hugely from book to book.

And so with Psalms. It was intended to be a songbook and should be treated as such. I personally like quite a lot of Psalms, as someone will like a poem or song which makes them think about something - in this case a certain aspect of the nature of God, and I think the Psalms are valuable for obtaining insight in that respect.

That leads me on what you were saying about the 4 main themes of the Psalms... yeah you pretty much got it there. Although don't undermine them quite yet - theme number three you observed has always been important to me ever since I realised something from it - King David suffered from depression. I read some of those psalms and I see my own symptoms. And so I find reading them incredibly supportive, helping me to realise that I'm not alone in how I feel, that I'm not somehow failing as a Christian simply because I'm going through an emotionally hard time etc.

TL;DR: I said some things, really. Enjoy Ecclesiastes, I know it cheers me up no end, especially if I'm in a particularly nihilistic mood.