Greetings, Shane 🙂

I’ve always thought that the problem with the Bible (or any religious text) should be immediately obvious to anyone with a working brain. That is…at best it is a human interpretation of the word of God. It is muddied, perverted, and twisted by all the human failings that we all suffer from.

Anyone who takes the time to actually read, or even *skim* (that’s the best I’ve done), the Bible will find hundreds if not thousands of outright contradictions. Everything before Jesus is smiting and begetting and thou shalt. It includes all sorts of nastiness about slavery and beating one’s wife appropriately. Then Jesus comes along, and its all forgiveness and turn the other cheek and tolerance. Jesus bathed the feet of beggars, and befriended a “sinning” prostitute, for heaven’s sake!

How can this all be the direct and true word of God? It obviously can not be. The Bible is terribly buggered up by all the humans that have tried to interpret his ineffable wisdom in the context of their own petty and sin-filled lives. There is lots of wisdom in there (and likewise in the Koran, and nearly any other holy book you can imagine), but you have to distill it through knowledge of the highly flawed people who had a hand in mucking it up.