The Bible Can Be a Believer’s Worst Nightmare

And it’s a go-to book for sustaining ignorance and intolerance 

In my article here last week, I discussed six Bible texts that qualify as dealbreakers: upon analyzing these carefully, believers would be justified in saying, “Enough already,” and head for the exit. The cumulative impact of these six—and many more—should put traditional belief in the gutter. The feel-good Bible verses preached from the pulpit fall far short of cancelling the far too many terribly bad Bible texts. 

 

The worst nightmare becomes even more obvious when we step back and take a look at the big picture. There is no way the Bible meets the high standards that we would expect in a book written/dictated by a wise, perfect god. For a close look at this problem, check out Valerie Tarico’s article published in January 2018: Why Is the Bible So Badly Written?

 

For most of the folks in the pews, the Bible is a holy object. It has been touted as the word of god forever, and in so many churches it is there on the altar—a splendid version of it, no less—to remind the laity that it is supposed to be venerated, if not worshipped. But it doesn’t take long for shock to set in when the laity try to read even a few of the thousand pages of Bible tedium. Well, no surprise there, since it is the product of ancient cultures with which most modern readers have trouble identifying—produced by authors with varying degrees of skill. Tarico suggests that God is a terrible writer: 

 

“Although some passages in the Bible are lyrical and gripping, many would get kicked back by any competent editor or writing professor— kicked back with a lot of red ink. Mixed messages, repetition, bad fact checking, awkward constructions, inconsistent voice, weak character development, boring tangents, contradictions, passages where nobody can tell what the heck the writer meant to convey. . . This doesn’t sound like a book that was created by a deity.”

 

Tarico’s article is worth a very careful read because she highlights so many of the Bible’s flaws and imperfections. She points out that so much guidance that should be there is missing:

 

“As a modern person reading the Bible, one can’t help but think about how the pages might have been better filled. Could none of this have been pared away? Couldn’t the writers have made room instead for a few short sentences that might have changed history? Wash your hands after you poop. Don’t have sex with someone who doesn’t want to. Witchcraft isn’t real. Slavery is forbidden. We are all God’s chosen people.” Tarico notes that the “…minds of the writers were fully occupied with other concerns…. challenging prevailing Iron Age views of illness or women and children or slaves was simply inconceivable.” 

 

In other words, the Bible is an all-too-human document. And the failure to condemn slavery actually qualifies as a Bible crime. Many commentators have noted the failure of the Ten Commandments to include the prohibition of slavery—one law especially, as Tarico notes, that might have changed history. But this crime of omission appears to be a minor one when we see that the Bible has been used to approve and accept slavery. 

 

In 2018, when Noel Rae’s book, The Great Stain: Witnessing American Slavery appeared, Time magazine published a few excerpts. Rae pointed out that Genesis 9:18-27, the story of Noah getting drunk after the flood, sleeping naked in his tent, has been turned into a pro-slavery text. One of his sons, Ham, noticed his father and told his brothers, Shem and Japheth, who managed to cover Noah, without looking at their naked father. “Despite some problems with this story,” Rae says, “it eventually became the foundational text for those who wanted to justify slavery on Biblical grounds. In its boiled-down, popular version, known as ‘The Curse of Ham,’ … Ham was made black, and his descendants were made Africans.” The fact that Israelites owned slaves was also used to justify American slavery. 

Another text might have come in handy as well—Yahweh’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 15:13, “Know this for certain, that your offspring shall be aliens in a land that is not theirs and shall be slaves there, and they shall be oppressed for four hundred years…” Yahweh would allow slavery for four hundred years?  But verse 14 probably rendered this text useless for slave-holders: “…but I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve.”  

Rae notes as well texts in the New Testament that endorsed slavery, e.g., Ephesians 6:5-6: “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ, not with a slavery performed merely for looks, to please people, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the soul.” 

There were prominent churchmen who backed slavery. Rae reports that Bishop Stephen Elliott (1806-1866) “…knew how to look on the bright side”:

“At this very moment there are from three to four millions of Africans, educating for earth and for Heaven in the so vilified Southern States—learning the very best lessons for a semi-barbarous people—lessons of self-control, of obedience, of perseverance, of adaptation of means to ends; learning, above all, where their weakness lies, and how they may acquire strength for the battle of life. These considerations satisfy me with their condition, and assure me that it is the best relation they can, for the present, be made to occupy.”

Rae quotes Frederick Douglass, who would have none of it: “I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”

Just as an anti-slavery law is missing from the Ten Commandments, there is no Jesus-script in which we find a categorical condemnation of slavery. So Yes, shame on the Bible and the god who is credited with inspiring it.

Valerie Tarico also mentioned that the Bible authors had no interest in challenging Iron Age ideas about women. The Bible god, Yahweh, was male, hence patriarchy was the rule of the day: “Our Father…hallowed be thy name.” The irony, of course, is that most of the laity today, if asked, “What is god’s name?” —might be able to come up with Jehovah, very few with Yahweh. God is just God—and, naturally Jesus. The patriarchy, the rule of men, is taken for granted, as we read in I Timothy, 2:12-15:

“I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.”

This text has been used recently by leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention to exclude congregations that have female pastors. Women must not have authority over men! After all, the first woman became a transgressor. One woman pastor (see video at this link) pointed out the hypocrisy of quoting these verses, because of the verses that precede vv. 12-15: 

“…women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire, but with what is proper for women who profess godliness—with good works. Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness” (vv. 9-11).

Apparently the issue is not finally settled with the Southern Baptist Convention, but these evangelicals are stuck with New Testament words they insist are god-inspired. How pathetic that supposedly modern minds are still in the grip of ancient attitudes. We can review a long list of brilliant women who have contributed so much to human improvement: they should not be permitted to have authority over men? 

This distrust is reflected in Luke 24, which reports that women discovered the empty tomb on Easter morning: “Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them” (vv. 10-11). What a dense bunch! In Mark’s gospel we read that Jesus told his disciples three times that he would be raised from the dead. How can patriarchy, i.e., men are the smart ones, be defended in the face of such—well, what's the right word—stupidity?  

Hector Avalos once said that 99 percent of the Bible would not be missed, and Tarico suggests that getting rid of a lot of it would be a good idea:

“A good culling might do a lot to improve things…maybe, deep down, Bible-believing Evangelicals and other fundamentalists suspect that if they started culling, there wouldn’t be a whole lot left. So, they keep it all, in the process binding themselves and our society to the worldview and very human imperfections of our Iron Age ancestors. And that’s what makes the Good Book so very bad.”

 

 

 

David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of two books, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith (2016; 2018 Foreword by John Loftus) and Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also now available. 

 

His YouTube channel is here. He has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.

 

The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here.