I found this little book interesting and useful. It was written by a formerly strongly Christian fellow who studied the Bible to a point that most do not, and his interest in and knowledge of associated languages led him to recognize, on allowing himself an unusual degree of self-honesty, a massive quagmire of problems with the Christian Bible that were, in and of themselves, strong enough to convince him that a well-meaning, all-powerful being would not likely allow those humans who penned his scriptures over centuries to produce a book with the numerous glaring problems he came to find in it. In that regard, it is a convincing and useful read.

Reading that was useful to me, because I have ongoing questions about religion and Christianity, as the predominant faith in my country. I had for some time understood that there were contradictions in the Bible, but I am not a Christian (I am an atheist), so I have not read the entire Bible or studied it to the degree that I would recall contradictions that were spread over a distance of numerous pages. As such, what he had to say was resoundingly interesting to me. It added to my conviction that Christianity is as preposterous as any other prevalent religion.

That being said, my primary problem was with his chosen title. There are numerous things wrong with the Bible beyond the contradictions and absurdities that he discusses. He discusses only the problems in the Bible as they relate to the Bible itself--different verses that contradict each other, actions of God that do not support the image of the caring father that the Bible depicts him as being, and such. I do not mean to outline the entire makeup of the book, and he offers much more than simply that, but all the criticisms are tied to problems within the Bible as it relates to its own story.

A large part of what is wrong with the Bible, though, are things that were entirely missed by the Bible, in its having been written by ancient peoples who, unlike a purported all-knowing god, had only so much access to knowledge of the universe as they could at the time, and as such, these problems do not feed back into the Bible, itself, in that same way, but arise from our modern day knowledge of the universe and how things really work and when things really came into being, that the writers of the Bible could not have known. Any book that should rightfully be called "All That's Wrong with the Bible," should certainly cover these areas, as well, and there is no mention of the modern arguments against the Bible, at all. In fact, to put what I am saying into context, a knowledgeable person with such interest and knowledge as he has expressed and without fear of being hung or beheaded (it certainly would have been a rare soul!) could have produced what this author has done hundreds of years ago, I suspect.

In terms of the more modern arguments against the word of the Bible, the same could not have been done hundreds of years ago (although some of the ancients did have their suspicions, they had no evidence to support them).
I speak of things such as the idea of a god having masterminded and created all things and all beings, as was an ancient, simple explanation in distant days before we recognized evolution and learned of astronomy and quantum physics. Knowing what we do of evolution and evolutionary-geology, it is clear that the Bible is absolutely mistaken in terms of the order of creation. We know without doubt that the time factor tied to the unfolding of events in the Bible is absurd. Those who have gone to the trouble of calculating the age of the earth as being somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years, presumably responsibly done in response to careful consideration of the ages of generations and the history of occurrences outlined in the Old Testament, come to an absurd conclusion, when we know that if creation had been that recent and existence that brief, we'd not yet have received light to allow us to see most of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, when in fact, we can see light from distant galaxies that has taken billions of years to get here. In fact, most of the starry sky that seems to surround our globe would have been invisible to us if a God had created the universe only ten thousand years ago. There would be little more to see if it had been created a hundred thousand years ago! The only thing we'd see of stars would be part of our Milky Way Galaxy, and it would far from fill the sky--at any time, if you can even see it, it is only in one side of the heavens. I find it preposterous to believe that a well-meaning god would allow his scribes to misrepresent fact so absolutely. Why would he not want to take credit for the even greater grandeur of the universe he created, that the ancients could not yet appreciate?

I do not respond in this way to start a new book or to admonish this author. I was impressed with what he wrote and found it interesting and useful information to pleasantly add to what I already understand of problems with the Bible and religion. I simply think he needs to pick a more accurate and less overstated title. His little book far from covers "All That's Wrong with the Bible."

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All That's Wrong with the Bible: Contradictions, Absurdities, and More