The Bible as bad writing

**When I was a Bible student, reading it every day, reading about it often, interpreting it for various audiences I would deal with the obvious mess that the Bible is by explaining that the message got so polluted by various political, mental, technical and cultural influences that the REAL meaning, the SPIRITUAL meaning became obscured.

This is how Mary Baker Eddy explained it. She of course set herself up —as so many have —as someone who had the unique divine inspiration to comb through it and discern the SPIRITUAL meaning that others mostly missed. But in the end she did what just about every Bible thumper does: cherry-pick passages here and there and weave them into support for a particular thesis. (Her "proof" that she was indeed this inspired scribe was that the system of "spiritual healing" that she invented based on it worked. But it doesn't.)

I didn’t grasp this at the time because I, too, was working under the assumption — delusion — that there is a divine Agent active in the universe who is trying to get through to us but for some never-explained reason has to use these woefully inadequate scribes to do it. As I studied more about the history of what we today call the Bible, I learned that it was a particular compilation of various myths, rumors, cultic rituals and other so-called doctrines of christianity, which freely circulated within that halcyon land mass we today call the middle east. Which stories got compiled into the present Bible depended on the opinions and political clout of various church authorities and scholars at the time. The Emperor Constantine, knowing that nothing unites like a common delusion — diverse people holding to the same religious precepts — decided that there should be one religion, and therefore one religious document that everyone would have to take as the final statement on the truth of Christianity. So he commanded that it be created. Yes, the Bible was created at a certain time and place. Those texts that became the canonical “winners” excluded many — most — of the “gospels” floating around in the 4th century and earlier. With the discovery of the Nag Hammadi, an ancient library, biblical scholars had to deal with some of those contemporaneous texts: The gospel of Thomas, of Mary Magdalene, and a slew of other luminaries that would have been quite well known to the average person in the 4th century but who got obliterated by the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. Not that those other pieces of oral tradition were much clearer or more “inspired” than what got canonized but they illustrate the arbitrariness of what so many people consider a finished, divine work. And reading them was one of the reasons why my faith eventually crumbled.

From Southern Skeptic article

Recently, it was refreshing to encounter a blog called Southern Skeptic, since I now live in the middle of the Bible belt where the State legislature is currently working on six or seven bills about “religious freedom,” which obviously is only about freedom for the mainline christian religion, preferably of the evangelical variety, and oppression for everybody else. (You can imagine what atrocities they will try to push through.)

The writer, known only as “Matt,” explores his journey from fundamentalism to skepticism. His article, 7 Reasons God is a Terrible Writer does a good job of filleting this revered mashup that has been directly responsible for so much evil in human history. He asks: 

“So what would we expect to find in a book that was written by God (or “divinely inspired”)? Here are seven suggestions.

 (I’ll just quote the top line items and encourage you to read the details:)

1. It would be well-organized.
2. It would be more specific.
3. It would be easy to understand.
4. It would be perfectly consistent.
5. It would have specific, verifiable prophecies
6. It would contain knowledge that humans couldn’t have had.
7. It would have beautiful, heart-rending poetry and stories 

While many would object to that last feature, he makes a convincing case that most of the stories are strange, pointless and/or disgusting. He prefers hundreds of other, human writers. As do I.

Ask a believer why the Bible is inspired and the answer you get is, the Bible says it is. That's known as a tautology. But even if you accept that it could be inspired and absolutely true and an unerring guide to righteous human living, that acceptance would most likely crumble once you start reading it Because the writing is so bad.