Jacques Berlinerblau - The Secular Bible (2004)

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Today's secularists too often have very little accurate knowledge about religion, and even less desire to learn. This is problematic insofar as their sense of self is constructed in opposition to religion. Above all, the secularist is not a Jew, is not a Christian, not a Muslim, and so on. But is it intellectually responsible to define one's identity against something that one does not understand?

Jacques Berlinerblau
Secularism, at its absolute best, comprises an unrelenting commitment to judicious and self-correcting critique. … Secularism's job consists of criticizing all collective representations. Its analytical energies should be inflicted on any type of mass belief or empowered orthodoxy, whether it is religious, political, scientific, aesthetic, and so on. … Secularism, as we envision it, is elitist and heretical by nature. When it aspires to become a popular movement, an orthodoxy, or the predicate of a nation-state, it betrays itself.

Jacques Berlinerblau
Let us never underestimate the motivational force that the belief in Scripture's divine proximity has upon exegetes. They open the book having already invested their faith in the proposition that it is underwritten by God.

Jacques Berlinerblau
The Hebrew Bible, as a document, displays an astonishing lack of textual self-consciousness. It alleges to know what God thinks, but it does not know itself. It is not aware that it is called the Hebrew Bible. … Jews and Christians have venerated an unself-conscious artifact, one whose embarrassing gaps in self-knowledge have always had to be filled in by later interpreters.

Jacques Berlinerblau