What good the Bible?

The Bible is usually noted for its three basic controversial ideas--first, there is a God. Second, He so loved the world that He took human form and was called Jesus; he was then crucified so as to succumb to sin of and resurrecting give new life to those who believed in Him.

These three ideas are central, but it inter alia contains other gems. The first meets Satre's observation (or is it a claim?) that 'no finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point'.

The Bible locates this infinite reference point in God, opening to us at once some of the great, and long struggled for, in some cases, features of Western thought. These are the conspicuous other gems derivative of that one:

The equality of all men qua men, at least before the law, but also ethically and with equal dignity.

Perhaps also a robust epistemology established by the grounded reality of the creation. It's opening passage gives the material world and human discourse a status that is elusive for animists, Eastern monists, and indeed, strict materialists. It has made modern science possible with its open invitation to explore the cosmos in its foundational propositional rationality (that is, God spoke and it happened, and no dream time serpent involved; rational causality with propositional identities is applied to the real world). Thus it has opened the possibility and indeed the fact of the cosmos being available for investigation and this to produce knowledge.

It also locates an ethical substrate in what is (God, I mean), not in a Foucaultian power play or mere genes to be truncated by a humean guillotine. Ethics has meaning and it is not socially derived and therefore not amenable to the manipulation of either the powerful or the noisy.

Finally for here, it invites us to both the caution of humility and the joy of this wonderful world (albeit much marred by human rejection of the creator) where art, music, and simple good fun are really there, and really substantially enjoyable; and were compassion is a true movement of the soul and not a transiently convenient play of the genes.