When is a book not a book?

Answer - when it's the Bible.

It's been a strange week my children, strange and quiet. Mrs B was in Spain for a few days, tracking down Nazi war criminals which is a hobby she picked up when she got fed up of knitting.

Now to more serious matters, the week started with a discussion on the telly about the value of the Bible, and it still makes me laugh and cry in equal measures that some people take the words written in that book as an absolute truth.

For me the Bible is a collection of stories, all written by different hands, which makes it an ideal source for quoting odd lines that seem to back up how we feel about different things. Does that make sense?

Let me expand - Mansfield is a place full of tension at the moment as a young local man was murdered last week and the alleged offenders are Eastern European immigrants. The outpouring of hatred towards them on a Facebook site was quite sickening. Ignorance, anger and threats of revenge and at one point we had the usual Biblical quote used to excuse this attitude - 'an eye for an eye'.

My guess would be that if you asked the contributor of those five words which book of the Bible they were taken from, or even to expand the quote, they would not have been able to answer.

They also forget that elsewhere in the Bible the main man, Mr Jesus, rejects this quote and offers instead this advice 'If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also'.

There are also many who have offered their own take on 'an eye for an eye', Gandhi and Martin Luther King both suggesting all these eyes being destroyed only makes the world blind.

The angry, and perhaps rightly very angry contributors of this hate talk also quoted the old Mafia phrase, 'revenge is a dish best served cold', - so I would offer to them Romans 12:19

'Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord'.

They don't want to hear this message of course because it does not fit in with their state of mind nor their perceptions of what is wrong with our country and our town.

The truth is a very complicated thing, and part of the truth of this situation is that many do feel dispossessed of their own future and perhaps some feel a little angry with themselves because the young immigrants that have moved to the area are in employment.

Another of the vitriolic comments was ' they come over here and take our jobs' - I leave you to ponder these words and the implications for those who are born in Mansfield, fail to get the best from their education and then fail to find a job either through a lack of qualifications, willingness to work or lack of opportunity.

I think anger is a proper response to the loss of life in these circumstances, I fully understand how a family will be consumed with all of the emotions that come with grief - but some of the people who have written on the Facebook site did not even know the victim, yet they felt compelled to express their own hostility towards others, ignoring the request made by the family for calm and reflection.

The family have shown considerable dignity in their loss and it is a shame that angry and racist comments were attached to their tribute to a lost loved one.

My feeling is that the people who wrote the words were angry and racist before this awful murder and that they will never change their opinion, but they feel justified in their actions because the Bible says
'an eye for an eye'.

Finally let me offer these words, they are not from the Bible but they are from a book and by my token should be as equally valued as any words from any book:

'Do not hurt where holding is enough, do not wound where hurting is enough, do not maim where wounding is enough, do not kill where maiming is enough'

Stephen Donaldson - Lord Fouls Bane