...If you didn\'t read through Leviticus, how\'d you get to the bear thing? If God is all good, how is he a jerk? There are some serious logical and critical flaws with this one.
Also, the Bible is an anthology, and complaining that the parts of an anthology fail to match up is practically nonsensical.
...Dagommit, just fed the troll. Nuts.
How original. Yawn.
I see how much potential this has to be fuel for a very serious flame war. Please, let\'s not fulfill that potential and try to keep it respectful about our comments about this. That being said, let me give some commentary. See that the Bible is not a precise historical record, many stories are meant not to be taken at face value and contain what I think are still some important spiritual truths to them, and even if several elements seem impossible or unrealistic, they\'re most likely part symbolism of some kind. And many traditions thought of as \"arbitrary\" or \"useless\" today arose from the political and social environment that the people of Israel faced at the time. Yes, God\'s people did some brutal things, but that just reflects on a lot of our own human nature. How we view and understand our faith changes throughout time, evolving to better fit what we realize God would want for us. In fact, technically, the New Testament, where Jesus comes in with his teachings, actually can be considered to be rewriting a lot of preconceptions about how we should follow God, emphasizing peace and forgiveness in a way that hadn\'t been before.
The ink flows into a dark puddle, just move your hand- write the way into his heart
Well...duh. Of course the Bible has Values Dissonance when it comes to slavery and stuff, it was published like 2,000 years ago. That\'s like complaining that Uncle Tom\'s Cabin is racist.
^ A fair point.
^^ While I consider myself an agnostic, I found your comment to be very interesting to read.
Personally, I don\'t have much to add, as religion has never been part of my life and I\'ve never read The Bible. I do agree, however, that The Bible likely wouldn\'t be nearly so influential if it were published today, but only because The Bible has had literally thousands of years to become the influential book we know.
On another (less religious) note, however, do you really have to insult those who have read it? It may be religious, but The Bible is still literature, and you shouldn\'t insult people who read it or even believe in it.
Somebody once told me the world was macaroni, I took a bite out of a tree
Aaaaaand yet another one who thinks himself smart by publishing a blatant anti-religion review while delivering criticisms that proves he knows nothing of the context in which the Bible was written.This is getting dull.
Should a moderator pass by, I would seriously suggest locking this review section. It's becoming harder and harder to not have it degenerate into religious polemics.
I didn´t want to be too offensive. I tried to review the Bible as a normal book. I´m not a troll, there´s apparently some Poe\'s Law here. Sorry if I annoyed anybody.
Put your trust in the wild lands.
Sorry if I sounded agressive. Honestly, there\'s nothing wrong with trying to review a book, but the problem is, you try to review the Bible as a book that was intended to be a cohesive ensemble, and by today\'s standards. Truth is, it wasn\'t. The Bible wasn\'t a book originally: it was a library, written by several different people who probably didn\'t all have the same idea of what God was supposed to be like. It\'s a very heteroclite ensemble of several kinds of pieces, from historical records to poems to just metaphoric tales, and so on. The people who made this book essentially assembled all these very different pieces and put them together. This is why someone trying to read this ensemble as an actual book can have some troubles; it\'d be like if you tried to read an entire library and then tried to analyze it as one big story.
In addition, as it has already been brought up above, the Bible suffers from Value Dissonance: sure, a lot of the stuff written in it is absolutely unacceptable nowaday (and I am saying this as a Christian myself). Sure, it\'d look horrible if someone tried to pass these parts as an acceptable moral system now. But it was written 2000 years ago, and really back then it was Fair For Its Days. My personal opinion is that the book was written back when the Hebrew people were exiled in Babylon, with a lot of cultural influences. There probably was some inspiration from other mythologies that was thrown in (as well as some Take That toward the people who had already started abusing the Hebrew). So yeah, I don\'t think everything in the Bible is to be taken to the letter, and I am confident that at least some Jewish and other Christians think like me. But I still believe there is some truth and some really instructive parts to remember in it.
Hope this will reassure you regarding how we read it. No hard feeling^^
I will try to elaborate a bit:
1) By God being a jerk, I meant that him being all good is an Informed Ability. 2) I am not against Christianity (assuming church state separation), what I am annoyed by and criticising here is creationism, the belief that even the bad parts are good. What I´m against is women rights problems being justified by Bible verses, not Christmas (Christmas is a great idea, by the way). 3) Most Christians take the good parts only, with occasional bad part rarely sprinkled in. that´s good, and Christians can do amazing things. 4) The Bible is an useful source of the culture of the time. That´s fine. But that´s science, not tropes.
I hope that I put a bit of sense here. Thanks.
Put your trust in the wild lands.
Old Testament: History mixed with allegory, really hard to tell them apart without advanced knowledge of early Hebrew culture
New Testament: History and also Revelation
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Wouldn´t be published today
I must admit- I didn´t finish it. Starting at Genesis, by the end of Leviticus, the various funny moments of Crosses the Line Twice stopped being funny and got repetitive. There are several problems with the Bible:
It is repetitive. There are nine chapters about how to kill animals for sacrifice, something that isn´t even actual in the New Testament! There is roughly 1000 instances of "I am Jahveh (I have a translation, so the title may be different), your God. I took you out of Egypt.". Which is related to second point:
It is very arbitrary. Why did God have to put ten plagues on Egypt (killing many people), making sure that they had no effect, and only then getting Jews out of Egypt? Why all the stuff with Jesus? Why did God have to sacrifice his son? And why animal sacrifices?
It has ridiculous morals. There is a verse (Exodus 20:21) stating that beating slaves to death is OK if they live for a day or two before dying. It has Noah´s son´s whole family being cursed just because Noah got drunk, naked and said son saw him.
It has long, boring passages. There must be a more sensible way to tell genealogies than to say:
Character A had sons B, C, D and E when he was 250 years old. He lived 350 more years. And he died.
Character B had sons F, G, H and J when he was 400 years old. He lived 150 more years. And he died.
And so on for the whole chapter. It borders on Overly Long Gag.
It is contradictory. Did Noah take 2 of each animal, or 7 clean and 2 unclean? And how did he even know which are clean? There´s hundreds of these, and not that hard to spot.
It´s unrealistic. A talking snake? Adam living to 900 years? Earth being flat (just Implied)? And much more.
It has too flat characters. Just about everybody is used to deliver some Anvilicious moral. The only morally ambiguous characters tend to become good after converting. God is all good.
God is a jerk. If he was in any other work with similar characteristics, he would be called a too flat villain, and Omnicidal Maniac. He killed everybody in the Flood when it was in his powers to make them good. He murdered 42 kids for mocking a bald prophet. But he loves you!
I could probably continue, but there´s another important part:
The Bible has some good stuff in it. Nice stories, good morals... it´s like if you mixed good food with a lot of plastic pellets (boring parts) and dog excrement. You wouldn´t eat it, but the people who like it for other reasons will defend it using the good stuff.
I seriously doubt that more than 5% of Christians have read the Bible. Both because it´s unreadable and because a lot of them would no longer be Christians.
You should at least try to read the Bible. You will see what some people believe and what influences many politicians.
And you may be terrified.
EDIT: Old Shame. I still hold most of the views, but the review is way too clueless and aggressive. Sorry.