Blasphemy Day?

Apparently September 30th has been declared 'Blasphemy Day'. At first, I thought this was just a joke but I guess it is a serious event complete with a 'Blasphemy Contest' in which contestants compete with poems, literature, music, art, etc. to see who can be the most blasphemous or sacreligous. I had no idea such a day even existed. Apparently, this day was created in order to encourage people to declare their contempt for God as a way of promoting freedom of expression. I won't go in to much more detail, but I just thought this was interesting ... and a bit ridiculous.

While trying to read the Bible, I have been thinking a lot about the term lacunae, and there is no shortage of those in the Bible. The Bible is so full of these gaps and spaces I think it's no wonder there are so many questions when people actually get around to reading it. After taking a class based on rhetoric last semester, I studied the role of those 'gaps' in a text and how they make the text or argument weaker or stronger.

For the most part, these spaces allow the reader to fill up the pages with their own thoughts, ideas, opinions, and/or beliefs and interpret a text in a very specific way. When I'm reading a piece of literature and my thoughts are more focused on what the writer left out rather than the text at hand, I have found mixed results. Most often, I am able to understand the text at a deeper level because I am able to inject my own opinion in to the text. What do I think should happen here? Where do I think the text should go from here and what would make the most sense to me if it were inserted here? Other times, having those gaps in the text makes me feel incredibly lost and confused and find the questions in my mind to be too overwhelming. When this happens, I often put down the text.

I still have been having trouble getting in to the Bible, not because I feel like the stories are boring, but because I feel like they might be a bit repetitive and incredibly redundant. I have been doing some research on the story of Jacob and his family, and it is widely believed that God works through suffering and adversity to teach people how to depend on him. This seems to be a trend in the stories of the Bible...