Now that’s what I call embellishment.  The second story is a steamy novel that would sell like hotcakes.  The first story is true.  Boring.  

What absolutely blows my mind is when you start talking with a conservative about embellishments and overt lies and they try to tell you that you are misinterpreting the scriptures.  One of my favorite embellishments is the story of Jonas and the whale.  You remember it.  Jonas is swallowed by a big fish and he lives inside of it for a couple of weeks.  Now if you talk to fundamentalists about this story they will stop you as soon as you say the word “whale.”  They point out that it was not a whale and then they launch into a diatribe about how you cannot interpret the scriptures unless you understand them.  

Now you and I know that whether Jonas was swallowed by a whale or a goldfish, the story just simply ain’t true.  It is laughably false.  It is a cartoon image with a man in a rocking chair surrounded by the ribs of the big fish building a fire so the fish will sneeze and blow him out.  Hilarious.  How on earth can people swallow this crap?  Yet people who are otherwise intelligent will argue as if their lives depend on it being literally true.  God can work miracles.  

Catholics have learned to steer clear of stories like Jonas.  They really don’t want to admit that the Bible is full of nonsense.  But they also don’t want to admit that they don’t believe every word.  It is the single most enormous bit of doublethink in the world.  Let’s be frank. This story is utter tomfoolery.  And the Bible is full of stories like this.  Most Catholics have moved on.  Why then, has the conservative leadership not purged these stories from the Catholic Bible?  

Can you say “slippery slope?”  If you get rid of Jonah, you have to get rid of Adam and Eve.  You have to let go of Lot and his curious wife.  And then what do you do with Moses and Noah?  Yep.  The slippery slope should be one of the Sacraments.