Bible

To start their morning Sunday, about 20 Jews attended a Mechitza Minyan service in a ballroom of a Costa Mesa hotel, praying in Hebrew, with separate seating for men and women. A few doors down, a group wearing sweat pants and T-shirts began their day by breathing deeply and twisting their bodies in a class titled "My Body, My Temple: Yoga for the Jewish Soul." A couple of hours later, a third group engaged in a discussion about Israel's national security agenda.

You ran a couple of stories about (former Air Force) Lt. John Dickinson, the Amnesty International prisoner of conscience who spent the past year locked up for his refusal to participate in the slaughter of Iraq. I would like to add a couple tidbits of information that I find very confusing. John Dickinson is a gentle, caring man of peace, a teacher who loves his students and was willing to give up his livelihood, his family and his freedom to be true to his belief in peace and his abhorrence of war. But the military was (angry)

Re "Reading, writing and Revelation," Opinion, March 14 As concerned as Stephen Prothero might be about the current rate of biblical illiteracy, which anthropologists call religious reductionism, there is no reason public schools (and taxpayers) must pick up the slack for the failings of Christian parents using the guise of Western literacy and societal morality as an argument to favor promotion of this particular religion. Christianity and other religions do not have a lock on literacy, morality or truth.

The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible (NRSV), replacing a 1952 edition used widely by mainline Protestant, Episcopal and Eastern Orthodox churches, incorporates wording that reflects improved understanding of ancient linguistics and culture, scholars say. Translators also sought greater clarity and to substitute gender-inclusive terms for masculine references. Genesis 1:26 RSV: Then God said, "Let us make man in our image. . . . " NRSV: Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image.

I must take exception to the opinion piece by Phillips. There is a vast chasm between the laws of the United States and the laws of God as recorded in the Bible. It would be folly for anyone to attempt to use Scripture as the basis for civil liberties, either in justifying or denying them. It is folly, likewise, to use the Bible (whatever translation), in justifying homosexuality. To conclude that the destruction of Sodom was a result of that city's mistreatment of strangers is incomplete.

Re "Random Verses Don't Reveal Bible's Meaning," June 24: Thank you for William Lobdell's Getting Religion column. Many of us who have been through the "religious" crusade against nonwhites that began before our own Civil War of the 19th century, and/or through the anti-woman piety that even today exists, have long been aware of Rabbi Martin Cohen's remark about "the notion that you can get at the innermost meaning of Scripture by picking verses...

The tradition probably began sometime in 1908, when a group of traveling Christian salesmen left the first Bibles in a Midwestern hotel as solace for other road-weary journeyers. Today, stocked in an estimated 95% of the nation's 2.5 million hotel and motel rooms, the Bible has become as much a fixture as color TV and miniature soap. But leaders of a national atheist organization based in Madison, Wis., say the Good Book is one amenity they can do without.

In the beginning, the Earth was a fashion misfit and the Garden of Eden's serpent was one bad dude. Cain wasted Abel and Noah was one cool brother. So goes P. K. McCary's new slang version of the Bible, one in which the Houston author aims to inspire hope in young blacks dispirited by poverty and violence. The Scripture according to the Black Bible Chronicles is lean, sinewy and street-savvy. In slang, it's bad.