May 16, 2023

Jeruel Schneider's "The Holy Shit of the Bible" is a Shitty Book! No Shit!

Tom Jump contacted me to blurb a book for which he had written the Foreword. Jeruel Schneider wrote it and titled it, THE HOLY SHIT OF THE BIBLE: A Countdown of the 75 Best Obscenities, Absurdities, and Atrocities. Now THAT got my attention! So I looked into it and indeed I could happily recommended it, saying:
This book is full of shit. God's shit. The Bible is full of it. Two billion or so Christians are ignorant of it. Hopefully this ingeniously conceived book by Schneider will get their attention. He hopes, like I do, that by throwing this shit against the wall of an indoctrinated brain, some of it will stick. But don't be deceived, it's a well-written, well-informed book, concerning 75 well-informed choices of the shit we see in the Bible.
You can get it on Amazon.

In his Introduction Schneider aptly reminds us what Thomas Paine had said: “Any system of religion that shocks the mind of a child cannot be true.” Let's call this type of book the shock genre of counter-apologetics. Remember what Paine said as you read it.

His book is a countdown from #75 down to #1. It's a great bathroom reader! You get to read a little shit while you're, you're, taking one! Here is a sample. Enjoy.

#2

A Test of Faith: Burn Your Son

Genesis 22:1-18 NLT:

 1Some time later, God tested Abraham’s faith. “Abraham!” God called.“Yes,” he replied. “Here I am.” 2“Take your son, your only son—yes, Isaac, whom you love so much—and go to the land of Moriah. Go and sacrifice him as a burnt offering on one of the mountains, which I will show you.” 3The next morning Abraham got up early. He saddled his donkey and took two of his servants with him, along with his son, Isaac. Then he chopped wood for a fire for a burnt offering and set out for the place God had told him about. 4On the third day of their journey, Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance. 5“Stay here with the donkey,” Abraham told the servants. “The boy and I will travel a little farther. We will worship there, and then we will come right back.” 6So Abraham placed the wood for the burnt offering on Isaac’s shoulders, while he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them walked on together, 7Isaac turned to Abraham and said, “Father?” “Yes, my son?” Abraham replied.“We have the fire and the wood, “but where is the sheep for the burnt offering?”

8“God will provide a sheep for the burnt offering, my son,” Abraham answered. 9When they arrived at the place where God had told him to go, Abraham built an altar and arranged the wood on it. Then he tied his son, Isaac, and laid him on the altar on top of the wood. 10And Abraham picked up the knife to kill his son as a sacrifice. 11At that moment the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, “Abraham! Abraham!”

“Yes,” Abraham replied. “Here I am!”

12“Don’t lay a hand on the boy!” the angel said. “Do not hurt him in any way, for now I know that you truly fear God. You have not withheld from me even your son, your only son.” 13Then Abraham looked up and saw a ram caught by its horns in a thicket. So he took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering in place of his son. 14Abraham named the place Yahweh-Yireh; as it is said to this day, “On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.” 15Then the angel of the Lord called again to Abraham from heaven. 16and said, “Because you have obeyed me and have not withheld your only son, I swear by my own name that 17I will certainly bless you. I will multiply your descendants beyond number, like the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will conquer the cities of their enemies. 18And through your descendants all the nations of the earth will be blessed—all because you have obeyed me.”

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Abraham...The grand patriarch...The father of three faiths...The man, the myth, the legend...A man set in motion by the activa­tion of a unique set of traits; those that would find their way through the crippled helix of moral depravity and colonize the molecular fabric of his third great grandson, Moses. Both would be equally encoded with an attuned ear for hearing voices (especially those of the divine), and a readiness to execute their wishes on command. Today we call this schizophrenia. Additionally, those who wish to burn their children are imprisoned. Nevertheless, we are much obliged for the many clinical mental disorders that plagued this family lineage of fictional characters; those of which inspired countless stories such as this within our pas­sage. Stories that give us invaluable insight into the true moral nature of the god of the Bible.

Building up to this massively iconic story, there’s a key feature in Abraham’s meteoric rise to superstardom that conveniently remains unmentioned among those who uphold and teach the sacrality of this ‘test of Abraham’s faith’ found in Genesis 22. Beginning with Genesis 12 and through chapter 17, we find a staggering 18 instances where god himself promises Abraham fame, glory, land, and descendants like that of the stars. God’s fatiguing redundancy overemphasizes the fact that the deal is sealed. Heck, Abraham even whacked the top wing of his wanger to secure the agreement at the command of god.

We arrive at chapter 22 and the voices in Abraham’s head return with an additional stipulation: “Hey man, it’s me again, god. You’re doin good bud, but, um, yaa....There’s just one more thing I need from ya to seal the deal. Soo...I’m gonna need you to go ahead and burn your son. You know—to me...as a sacrifice.” Abraham obeys, and this obedience, exegetically speaking, is one of the defining moments that has created a fathomless chasm in dividing the faithful from the infidel (or any thinking agent).

It’s simply incomprehensible in finding these faithful adherents, many even being family and friends, deriving lessons out of this disas­trous debris of delusion, concocted from a clinically twisted mind. I question every ounce of their very nature and especially their morality; the supposed morality that comes from god. Like little mentally de­bilitated minions, they rush to their safe haven at the end of the story where Abraham is relieved of this duty in an attempt to intellectualize their sad and obvious miniature stature of a human being. Of course what follows as the gotcha hammer-fall is the cliche parallel of “and seeeee, god went all the way in killing his son!” Though quite embarrass­ingly, in revering just this one story, their mental framework is overtly displayed as one that is stripped of the beauty of true love and empathy, and warped into believing an infinitely flawed logical fallacy: ‘It’s in the Bible, so it’s ok.’ (Or, ‘The Bible says so.’)

Simply put, the Bible, and any ‘holy book,’ especially those con­taining the purported words of god, should contain nothing that we as humans would be unwilling to do and should make no requests that would violate our moral nature. Yes, the very moral nature that naturally defies the moral nature of god.

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John W. Loftus is a philosopher and counter-apologist credited with 13 critically acclaimed books, including The Case against Miracles, God and Horrendous Suffering, and Varieties of Jesus Mythicism. Please support DC by sharing our posts, or by subscribing, donating, or buying our books at Amazon. As an Amazon Associate John earns a small amount of money from any purchases made there. Buying anything through them helps fund the work here, and is greatly appreciated!

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