30, Thirty, 3 decades, XXX, a score and a half, 30% of a century

I am coming up on my thirtieth birthday - thus being completely untrustworthy to hippies. Well that's good anyway.
I am not really flipping out about being the first person in my house to crack the decade. After all, my two best friends are already there. But I am taking the opportunity to reflect a bit. Where was I a decade ago? Ten years ago (aged 20), I was experiencing a spiritual crisis as an independent Christian. I was disillusioned with the people who brought me up in the Church, and more with the people in the Church supposedly studying the good word along side me. I focused the resentful disillusionment usually saved for the actual religion on these practitioners. In fact, I left organized religion but did not abandon the twenty years I had spent in it. Many people (including my mother) are so put off my the hypocrisy that they seem to spiritually rebound to that watered down Buddhism/Taoism so common in product marketing these days. Others join demagogues like Christopher Hitchens in proselytized atheism. They are free to do that, but I cannot help but maintain that the Jewish/Christian tradition is a core touchstone in Western (i.e. everything west of India) culture. So many analogies and memes are baseless without it. I cannot help but be little Jungian about its influence on our collective awareness.
The last time I cracked a Bible was when I was in basic training in 2001. I was twenty one years old. It was one of the few books we were allowed and being the vociferous reader I am, I managed to bully through the new testament NIV. I have decided to re-read the bible beginning on my 30th birthday. I am inspired by a series I read on the online magazine Slate, blogging the bible. The author read the Hebrew bible, which is pretty much the old testament, unassisted from cover to cover and commented on his thoughts and reactions as he did.

The Bible is a historic document. It is not a written history, but a product of western history from very close to its cultural beginnings. In it we can see the progression of Judaism from Egyptian/Syrian/Babylonian synthesis, through Greek and Roman reason, and - I believe - on to Eastern Mysticism. In it we can watch a religion progress through thousands of years from the gates of animism, through state sanction, to scholarship, to prophetic rebellion and back again to the state in a very few generations. It is a Mystic book and a legal book, a history and a collection of legends, it is uplifting and depressing.I am sure many people would say even angrily something along the lines of this commentator (on the Slate series):

"Wow, I find your assertion that everyone should read the Bible as smacking of so much relativism, I can't believe it. I have read the beginning of the Bible and I found it so silly and laughable that I stopped. I'd really rather the chatters and your readers get caught up on history, science, literature, etc. instead of a book of fables. Would you also push for the teaching of satanic texts? I'm so tired of people acting so high and mighty about their religious preferences. Write an article on the truly important texts that people have never read (Plato, Aristotle, Copernicus, DaVinci, etc.) and I'll take you seriously."

I would say that there are some very important books of fables that are also a part of the Western Cannon (just as the Eastern Cannon has its own): Grimm, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, etc.
And while I would suggest that anyone who wished to know about or contest satanism read the satanic texts, I would not say that satanism has a great and intrinsic influence, and that it is a direct reply to Christianity and borrows one of its main players.
And while I would say that one would certainly gain insurmountably from reading the great minds of western thought, it is precisely because people have not read them that they lack the broad influence of other works that have had consistent influences for millennium. These books' influence is mostly chronological: Socrates begot Plato begot Aristotle... begot Thomas Aquinas...begot Copernicus...Nietzsche, etc.

As for relativism...well there is a lot to read and you have to start somewhere. I am going to read the bible, cover to cover. I have not decided on the translation, but I want to read without commentary and with a nice red pen. I want to see how ten years of loose and undirected study directs my reading it now. I might comment on it here from time to time.