The Bible has to be one of the most abused books ever written. It's served as a doorstop and has been employed to level wobbly desks. Some have used the big family editions (the ones that require reinforced coffee table legs because they weigh as much as a railroad car full of iron ore) to press flowers or crush aluminum cans for recycling.

But the physical abuses are nothing compared to the shameful way the contents of the Good Book are sometimes handled. Some individuals chop, twist, and mutilate the message until their interpretations have more in common with a text on teaching "tarantulas to tango" than with something inspired by the Holy Spirit.

White supremacists have long recited verses they claim support their right to diminish other people's humanity. They elaborate on scriptural texts and end up sounding more like they're exegeting passages from "Mein Kampf" (a charming little tome, authored by Adolf Hitler, which extolled butchery and racial prejudice as two of the higher virtues).

When Satan tried to tempt the Lord in the wilderness, he didn't hand Jesus a highlighted copy of his own autobiography. Instead he quoted from the Book of Psalms. (See Matthew 4:1-11.) The Bible contains the recipe for successful living, but demented minds have contrived for centuries to use the Book of Books to cook up convoluted creeds that support their own odious chicanery.

Not all misuses of Scripture are as heinous or as obvious as the ones already mentioned. But all distortions have one thing in common: they substitute personal biases and blind spots for the enlightening Word of God. Nothing could be more foolish or counterproductive. It's like possessing the finest flashlight available and then taking a midnight stroll over terrain notorious for its sheer drop-offs without ever bothering to turn on the light.

We have no business trying to impose our preconceptions on the Bible. If that's what God wanted, then the Almighty would have given each of us a black leather-bound book with fifteen hundred blank pages so we could concoct a personal canon that allowed us to turn all of our warped perceptions into Holy Writ.

The Bible should be approached with an open mind and a searching heart. Through it, God is trying to speak to us in a way that alters our present perspectives and extends our current knowledge. May we be diligent enough to pursue God's message and undogmatic enough to discern it.