We read the Bible not for its imagery to comfort and pacify the ego, that little sense of separate self, but to amplify, expand the soul. We do not look here for salve-ation of the ego, salving its wounds, thus keeping it in its small bounded place, but we look for opening our souls, our psyches to new strangeness, to boundless realms previously unknown. When read in this way, the Bible does not clothe us in chain mail of dogmatic certainty, but throws off our pre-determined clothing and allows us to move more closely to the likeness of God, our Source who births us even as we birth ourselves. (This also applies to reading the Tanakh, the Qur'an, the Sutras, the Upanishads, the Gita, the Tao Te Ching.) Amen
