Category Archives: The bad book

God must be crazy

God really doesn’t want Adam to eat fruit from a certain tree (even though God apparently thinks that tree and its fruit are very good). So he puts that tree right in the middle of the garden Adam lives in.

According to Paul, both sin and death entered the world when Adam ate from that tree. So that would mean humans were originally immortal, right? Then what was the point of God making that other tree, the tree of life, which could make people immortal? If humans were already immortal, that tree wouldn’t do anything. And God didn’t intend to let them eat from the tree of life after becoming mortal. So there was no reason for the tree of life to exist.

And there was a good reason for it not to exist: God didn’t want humans to be both sinful and immortal, which would have been the outcome if they had happened to eat from the tree of life first. The existence of the tree of life was not just pointless but counterproductive for God, but he was stupid enough to create it anyway. Along with the even more pointless and counterproductive tree of knowledge. And he was stupid enough to put both of them where the humans lived.

God thinks Adam needs a “helper” for something, so he goes through every kind of wild animal, considering and rejecting each them as a potential helper, before it occurs to him to make another human.

Elihu seems to think that God causes people problems and then expects that to make them cry out for help from the guy who caused their problems. Even though according to Job, who speaks the truth about God, God intimidates people so they’re too scared to talk to him at all.

God warns Laban in a dream that he supposedly needs to “be careful not to say anything to Jacob, either good or bad”. Laban then completely ignores this pointless command, with no consequences.

God talks about God in the third person, then apparently realizes that’s kind of confusing, and feels the need to clarify that he wasn’t talking about some other God.

When God tells Moses to go convince Pharaoh to set the Israelites free, Moses points out that he’s not a good speaker and probably isn’t the best choice, but God insists that Moses has to do it anyway. Why does God always choose such incompetent people to be leaders?

Actually, God is apparently letting Moses’s brother Aaron do the actual speaking, while Moses tells Aaron what to say, and God tells Moses what to tell Aaron to say. Why does Moses need to be involved at all, then? Just because God can’t admit that he was wrong to choose Moses? He’s making Moses into a pointless middleman. (But Moses still gets all the credit as the leader, for some reason.)

God tells Moses to tell his people “I am has sent me to you“. Is he trying to make people think Moses is an idiot? Moses was already ineloquent enough without God giving him incoherent things like this to say.

After sending Moses on this important mission, God decides to kill Moses for no reason. Then Moses’s wife touches Moses’s feet with their son’s foreskin, which somehow convinces God to stop trying to kill him.

Then God decides to fight against himself, doing miracles to try to convince Pharaoh to let his people go, while also making Pharaoh stubborn so he’ll refuse to let his people go. God tells Pharaoh to do something, then forces him not to do it, and then punishes him (and his innocent son) for not obeying him, when God had forced him not to obey him.

God threatens Egypt with plagues that will kill some of their livestock… after he’s already sent a plague that killed all the livestock of Egypt.

When some of the people of Israel ignore God’s instructions, God gets mad at Moses and acts like he’s the one disobeying.

God apparently decided to help his chosen people in battle only when Moses had his hands up in the air.

In the story of the Golden Calf, God communicates with the Israelites through Moses incredibly inefficiently, making Moses go up and down the mountain way more times than necessary. Good thing Moses can teleport. Apparently.

God likes to describe himself as compassionate, forgiving, and slow to anger, even though he is constantly getting angry and killing people over nothing. And when God decides to punish people, a lot of the time he ends up punishing the wrong people for some reason.

God killed two of Aaron’s sons because by making an offering to him, they supposedly did something contrary to God’s command. I have no idea what command they’re supposed to have broken by doing that. But Aaron and his remaining sons weren’t allowed to mourn, or God would kill them, and he would also get angry at all the other Israelites who had nothing to do with it. “Everybody else gets to mourn your sons that I just killed for no reason, but if you mourn, I’ll kill you, and then I’ll also get mad at all the people who didn’t disobey me.”

According to Moses, when God said he would be proved holy and all the people would honor him, what God was really talking about were his plans to kill people for no good reason, like he did to Aaron’s sons here.

God punished the land of Canaan. He didn’t just punish the people there, who were having sex with animals and stuff. He specifically says he also punished the land, for the land’s sin.

God threatens to punish his people excessively, and then he says “if in spite of these things” they “continue to be hostile” toward him, he’ll punish them excessively some more. Apparently it’s never occurred to him that the reason they don’t like him might be because he’s being hostile to them and punishing them disproportionately. He thinks it’s the opposite. He thinks if he can just punish them enough, that will somehow get them to like him. He also says he’s going to force them to eat their children. Because that will definitely make them better people.

God tells Balaam not to put a curse on the people of Israel, because they’re already blessed. That sounds more like a reason to curse them than a reason not to curse them. If they were already cursed, then that would be a reason not to curse them, because cursing them would be unnecessary.

God tells Balaam to go with Balak’s men, so he does. Then God gets angry at him for going, and sends an angel to kill him if he doesn’t stop going where God told him to go. As soon as Balaam finds out that now God doesn’t want him to go, he agrees to go back home. So God changes his mind again and tells him to go ahead… Later, God tries to make it sound like Balaam tried to curse Israel, which he never did.

God tells Moses to stay with him, immediately after telling him to go tell everyone else to go home. What’s Moses supposed to do, stay or go? This is why people don’t do everything you say to do, God. It’s impossible.

God thinks he can teach people “that man does not live on bread alone”, by feeding them nothing but bread.

God says he will test Israel by making a prophet make Israel rebel against God, and then God will make Israel kill the prophet for making Israel rebel against God. He’s having people killed for doing what God sent them to do. Later, God decides to destroy everyone who prophesies, even though he’s the one enticing them to prophesy.

God says the way to tell if a prophecy is really from God is to wait and see if it comes true. If it doesn’t, then it’s a false prophecy that God had nothing to do with, and the false prophet has to be killed. So apparently you’re not supposed to believe a prophet is a real prophet of God until all of that prophet’s predictions have come true. And God wonders why his people ignore the prophets.

God thinks there are women who are so sensitive and gentle that they never dare to touch the ground with their feet. And he thinks those sensitive and gentle women would eat their own children if they didn’t have anything else to eat.

God is apparently so worthless that he has worthless inanimate objects for rivals, and he’s very insecure about it.

When Joshua wants to know why God has stopped helping his people, God explains that one of them has stolen something that God claims belongs to him. And therefore God is angry with the whole nation for what one person did. God tells Joshua to have each tribe come before him so God can say whether the culprit is in that tribe or not, and then do the same with each clan in the guilty tribe, and so on, until they narrow it down to the individual thief. But God is already speaking directly to Joshua, so why doesn’t he just tell him who’s guilty right now?

God wants his people to keep his laws, such as the commandment against stealing, so he has them help him steal the land of Canaan for them to live in.

The Israelites anger God by worshiping foreign gods, so God decides it’s a good idea to make sure there will always be foreigners living among Israel to tempt them to worship their foreign gods.

Saul makes an offering to God to make sure he has God’s favor. Then Samuel comes and tells him that God has rejected him as king, for supposedly breaking some command. I have no idea what command Saul is supposed to have broken by making an offering to God.

God tells David to take a census, so he does. Then David decides that he has somehow sinned by obeying God, and God agrees that David needs to be punished for obeying God. Then instead of actually punishing David, God kills 70,000 other people who had nothing to do with it.

David says he has heard two things, even though God only spoke one thing. He says what the two things were, and neither of them make any sense for God to say. Apparently God talks to himself and assures himself about how powerful and loving and just he is.

David also says God announced that he has a dove with gold and silver on its feathers while people sleep among sheep pens.

The death of God’s faithful servants is precious in his sight. God just can’t get enough of that precious death.

According to Solomon, God told David that since the day his people left Egypt, he had never chosen anyone to be ruler over Israel. That’s obviously not true, since the person God was talking to was someone God had chosen to be ruler over Israel. And he wasn’t even the first one.

God has Solomon build him a temple, and then he fills the temple with a cloud so the priests can’t perform their service in it.

Solomon claims that the results of casting lots are actually controlled by God. If he’s right, that would mean that God’s decisions are so completely random that they’re indistinguishable from the results of a random decision generator.

Solomon also says that God’s decisions always override any decisions that humans might try to make for themselves. So that means every bad decision that anyone has ever acted on was actually God’s idea. But that doesn’t stop him from punishing them for doing it.

Some of those bad decisions are apparently God’s idea of a punishment. Solomon seems to think that God punishes people by letting them have unethical sex. And God told Jeremiah he was going to let his people worship other gods, to punish them for worshiping other gods.

Proverbs 30 is introduced as “an inspired utterance“, so you’ll know that everything in this incredibly stupid and nonsensical chapter was God’s idea.

God wants to punish Solomon by taking the kingdom away from him, but he has promised David (who is already dead) that he will never take the kingdom away from David’s descendants. So God decides to wait till Solomon is dead, and then take the kingdom away from his son, as if that makes any difference. Well, I guess it does make a difference: Now God is punishing the wrong person. But it doesn’t change the fact that he’s breaking his promise.

God sends Elijah to a widow, who he claims to have told to supply Elijah with food. The widow doesn’t actually know anything about this, and she doesn’t even have enough food for herself and her son.

God tells Elijah to go out and stand on a mountain. When Elijah does, God asks him what he’s doing there, apparently having already forgotten what he had just told Elijah to do.

God tells Isaiah that all these people are annoying him by bringing him meaningless offerings of dead animals. God asks who has asked this of them, apparently having forgotten that he has.

God plants a vineyard, which turns out to be a complete failure. He can’t figure out what he did wrong, so he decides to stop protecting the vineyard, destroy it, and make the rain stop falling on it. That‘ll make it more productive.1

God has Isaiah comfort the king of Judah by telling him that those two kings he’s worried about won’t defeat him; this other king will. And he goes on about that and other bad things that are going to happen to Judah, with a mildly good thing or two randomly thrown in. Among those predictions are that the king of Assyria will shave the king of Judah’s private parts, and that a person will keep alive a young cow and two goats.

God thinks his people shouldn’t be afraid of the Assyrians when he causes them to beat them with a rod. God attacks people, and then can’t figure out why they’re not seeking him. So he says he’ll force them to eat their own children, because that’s always a good way to improve people’s behavior.

God has a day of crying out to the mountains.

God makes people queef. Painfully.

God wishes there were briers and thorns confronting him, so he could march against them in battle and set them all on fire. Or maybe let them make peace and come to him for refuge. Whichever.

When people complain that they’re not getting anything useful out of God’s pointlessly obvious messages, God’s response is to be even more unhelpful and start talking to them in languages they can’t understand at all. That’s how God’s going to try to get his people to listen to him. Of course that won’t work, and he knows it, but he’s going to do it anyway.

In the middle of talking about his plans for mass destruction, God randomly says he’s crying out and gasping and panting like a woman in childbirth.

God says someone is going to wear her children as ornaments, because he thinks that’s what brides do.

God also wants to make people eat their own flesh and drink their own blood, because he thinks that will be good for his reputation.

God thinks of himself as a righteous savior, but his idea of righteousness and salvation doesn’t rule out letting everyone on earth die.

God calls to people who have no money, and tells them to buy food from him, because he thinks you can buy things without money.

God says what he wants from people is “fasting“, but when he specifies precisely what he wants them to do, it has nothing to do with fasting, and when people actually fast, God is not pleased. God needs to learn to say what he means.

God thinks he can make people happy by not letting them do what they want. And he thinks he can keep people from being afraid by threatening to terrify them, and by telling them that multiple nations are about to attack them.

The first vision God shows his prophet Jeremiah is an almond tree branch, which has no purpose other than to make an opportunity for God to make a pun.

God withholds rain from his people, and then wonders why they don’t appreciate him always giving them rain.

Not satisfied with the circumcision of their penises, God demands that his people also circumcise their hearts.

After describing his plans to poison his people, pursue them with a sword, kill their children, and ruin their cities, God describes himself as “the Lord, who exercises kindness“.

God says he intends to fulfill a promise that he has already fulfilled.

God thinks he can show his people how much better he is than all the other gods, by ignoring their cries for help just like all the other gods do.

God makes Jeremiah buy a belt, bury it, and dig it back up only when it has become ruined and useless. The only purpose of this is so Jeremiah will have a comparison to make when he talks about God’s plans to make his people “ruined and useless”. But that won’t be very meaningful to the people he’s talking to, since they didn’t experience the thing with the belt.

After telling about some disasters he’s planning to cause, God concludes that “then they will know that my name is the Lord“. That’s his goal? That’s why he’s killing all those people? He just wants people to know what his name is? How about telling them, then? How about not discouraging them from saying his name, so they won’t forget what it is? And how about not using a euphemism instead of his actual name while attempting to convey that he wants people to know what his name is?

God says he has driven his people into many foreign countries. But when others scatter his people, he calls them evil and punishes them for doing the same thing he did.

God tries to reassure his people that he’ll “save” them from the hardship he’s subjecting them to. But it sounds like he might only be planning to save the descendants of the people he’s talking to. “Don’t worry, I’ll save… somebody else! After I let you die in the land of captivity I sent you to.”

God knows that somebody has a wound and a “pain that has no cure” (both inflicted by God, of course), but God can’t figure out why this person is crying.

God implies that the children of the people he’s talking to are dead. Then he says their children will come back, acting like the only problem is that they’re in another country right now.

God says some particular houses will be filled with dead bodies, forgetting that he just said those houses have been torn down so the materials can be used for other things. Those houses can’t be filled with anything.

God tells people he will restore them to their land, when those people have never had to leave their land in the first place.

God tells people to do something. Then, because they haven’t done it (because they haven’t had a chance to do anything, because he just told them just now, and he hasn’t even finished talking yet), God acts like they’re being stubborn, and decides to kill them with the sword, famine, and plague.

Admitting that his intentions are not good, God says he’s going to kill most of the Jews who have gone to Egypt, because he thinks then all the Jews who went to Egypt will know he was right. When most of them are dead. Another time, God says he intends to kill everyone in Israel, because when they’re all dead, then they’ll know who he is. He says the same thing to the Ammonites and the Egyptians.

God laments for Moab because of what he’s planning to do to the people there. If he’s so bothered by what’s going to happen to them, why doesn’t he just not do it to them?

After talking about how he’s going to completely destroy Babylon and so his people need to get out of there, God then tells his people in Babylon not to worry about the rumors of violence in that land.

God makes Ezekiel do all kinds of outrageous and silly and unpleasant things that are completely unnecessary. He starts by confusing Ezekiel with a vision of bizarre otherworldly creatures when he’s not even a prophet yet, which God never explains and which seems to have no purpose. Then he tells him he has to go prophesy to Israel, though God doubts they’re going to listen to him. And then the first thing God requires Ezekiel to actually do is eat a scroll.

Next, God makes Ezekiel besiege a drawing of Jerusalem. Then he ties Ezekiel up, and makes him lie on his left side for 390 days, and on his right side for 40 days. And even though he’s tied up, God expects Ezekiel to somehow still be besieging his drawing. He also expects him to bake bread over burning poop and eat it, while he’s tied up.2 And he instructs Ezekiel to be afraid while he eats and drinks. That’s not how emotion works, God. You can’t just tell people how to feel.

God makes Ezekiel shave with a sword, then burn some of the hair, and attack some of it with the sword. And he says he’s going to punish his people by shaving them. Then he tells Ezekiel to talk to the mountains, more than once. (He makes Micah talk to mountains too.)

God tries to give his people a message by making Ezekiel dig through a wall and go somewhere, because “perhaps they will understand”. They don’t understand, of course, because this God sucks at communicating.

God tells a story about a woman who he insists on calling a prostitute, even after he acknowledges that she’s actually the one paying for sex, not getting paid, which makes her not a prostitute. And he thinks he can punish her by letting her lovers see her naked.

God calls Sodom Jerusalem’s “younger sister“, even though the Bible indicates that Sodom was destroyed about 700 years before the Israelites settled in Jerusalem, so Sodom is actually much older.

God says he’ll make Gog attack Israel, and then he’ll destroy Gog for attacking Israel.

God tells Hosea to name his daughter “Not Loved”. This God sucks at picking names.

God claims that a certain woman is not his wife, but then accuses her of adultery because she has sex with people other than him. He doesn’t like how “adulterous” she looks, so he decides to strip her naked. That’ll help. Then after describing how he’s going to ruin her garden, publicly strip her, imprison her, and withhold water from her until she dies, now he thinks he’s going to “allure her”, “speak tenderly to her”, and marry her “in love and compassion“.

God considers punishing some women, but then he notices that the men are sinning too, which somehow means that now he doesn’t need to punish them.

When God decides to turn against his chosen people and attack them and rip them open and devour them like a wild animal, he calls himself their “helper”.

God can’t understand why his people still don’t like him even after he starves them, deprives them of rain, destroys their gardens, sends plagues on them, kills them with the sword, and treats them like Sodom and Gomorrah. How cruel does he have to be to them before they’ll start liking him?

God predicts that his people are going to be afraid to mention his name. Why? Does he intend to punish people for talking about him?

God says he’s going to “darken the earth in broad daylight“.

God assures his people that Israel will be returned to its former glory… when the disaster hasn’t even happened yet, and the people aren’t even convinced that it ever will happen. So why talk about the recovery already? That will just make them not care so much, even if he can convince them that the disaster is coming. Is he trying to undermine his own threats?

God wants to send a message to Ninevah, so he chooses a messenger who is not willing to go to Ninevah.

God doesn’t like his people driving his people away, so God punishes his people by driving his people away.

God’s prophet Micah predicts that God will plead Micah’s case and uphold Micah’s cause against… God?

God describes a city that’s being flooded as being “like a pool whose water is draining away“. Like draining is the problem.

God still can’t figure out why his people don’t like him when he sends mildew and hail to destroy their work.

After making an already absurdly unconvincing argument that disobedience is the reason people from the past are dead now, God completely undermines his point by mentioning that his prophets died too.

If the nations had only done exactly what God wanted them to do, he would be a little angry with them, for some reason. But since they did too much of what he wanted, now he’s very angry with them. The more you do what God wants, the less pleased he will be with you.

God tells Zechariah to say that God says something that makes no sense for God to say. Something about having been sent by God. God wants us to know that God was sent by God?? Why does God keep saying he sent himself to deliver a message from himself?

God wishes for God to rebuke Satan. Why doesn’t he just rebuke Satan, instead of talking about himself in the third person like that?

God says he’s setting a stone with seven eyes in front of a priest who is apparently the branch that he’s talking to the priest about as if the branch isn’t there yet and which will supposedly also be a king.

God wants two people to serve him, so he chooses two olive trees.

God wants to promote truth and peace. But instead of explaining the real reasons to love truth and peace, God provides an incredibly weak extrinsic motivation involving depriving people of food. He thinks that will somehow make them happy and motivated to do what he wants.

God complains that no one is shepherding his people, and then he says he’s angry at the people who have been shepherding his people.

In Zechariah 13, God seems to randomly decide that prophecy is evil. All prophecy, not just false prophecy. He tells the prophet Zechariah to let everyone know that all prophets should be killed now.

God says he’s going to get all the nations to attack Jerusalem, and then he’s going to fight against those nations that are doing his will.

God describes himself as a slave owner, and can’t figure out why people don’t respect him.

God tells his people to plead with God to be gracious to “us”. So God is among the people God wants to punish? And he needs other people to intervene and try to convince him not to punish himself??

God threatens to curse the priests’ blessings. And then he says he’s already done it, without giving them any time to do anything about it, so what was the point of the threat?

God accuses his people of robbing him. How would you even do that? God’s evidence for his accusation is that… they’re doing the opposite. His people are offering food to him. Which he doesn’t even need. But they’re not offering him as much as he would like, so he claims they’re “robbing” him.

The Bible says Jesus is God, so of course Jesus is crazy too. His own family thinks so.

John the Baptist baptized people by immersing them in water, but he said he was just preparing the way for Jesus, who would baptize people with fire.

John thinks Jesus should be baptizing him, not the other way around. Which makes sense if Jesus is indeed God, since he wouldn’t need anything done to him that baptism supposed to do for people. Baptizing God would be pointless. But Jesus insists on getting baptized anyway. I don’t know what that’s supposed to accomplish, unless it’s to show that Jesus is not God.

Jesus requires his followers to give up everything they have. He tries to justify this by giving examples of some scenarios that have nothing in common with that. In fact, the people in his scenarios would clearly be even worse off if they were to give up what they had. The people in those scenarios need more of what they have, not less. But Jesus says you should give up everything, “in the same way” that these people… shouldn’t? And then he makes up another scenario which is not only irrelevant, but isn’t even a thing that can happen.

When Jesus goes to visit his home town, everyone there likes him. Then he starts ranting at them and acting like they’ve rejected him, until they get mad and try to throw him off a cliff. They had accepted him, until he offended them by falsely accusing them of not accepting him.

Jesus claims that any man who looks at a woman with lust has committed adultery. That’s obviously false, and not just because thinking about something is not the same as doing it. It’s possible for a man to look at a woman with lust when neither of them is married, but it’s not possible for him to commit adultery with her. It’s possible for a man to look at a woman with lust when he’s married to her, but it’s not possible for him to commit adultery with her.

Jesus advises people who sin to blame it on a part of their body and remove that part of their body, which he seems to think will somehow keep them out of hell.

Jesus asks what reward you’ll get if you only love those who love you. You’ll get love, duh. But what kind of person thinks you need a reward for loving?

Jesus has lots more terrible advice: Don’t bother doing any of the basic stuff you need to do to stay alive, because living is more important than living. Life is what matters, so don’t bother looking for food to preserve your life. Your body is what matters, so don’t bother looking for clothes to preserve your body. Live like a dumb animal. Rely on your natural beauty to somehow replace the function of protective clothing. Never plan ahead. Don’t save up money for the times when you’ll really need it; spend it all today.

According to Jesus, God judges people the same way they judge other people. So if you happen to think murderers are doing nothing wrong, and because of that belief you commit murder yourself, God will think you have done nothing wrong.

Jesus does a miracle in front of large crowds, and then tries to keep it a secret.

Jesus thinks burying the dead is a job for the dead.

Jesus attempts to insult his generation by saying they’re like children. But then when he describes the scenario involving children he has in mind, it turns out that he and John the Baptist are the ones acting like the children.

Jesus offers to give weary and burdened people rest by putting a yoke on them.

Jesus says anyone who does God’s will is his brother and his sister and his mother. And the Bible says Jesus did God’s will, therefore Jesus is Jesus’s brother and Jesus’s sister and Jesus’s mother. In addition to being his own father.

Jesus’s “explanation” for why he talks in parables is that some people hear but don’t understand, so now he wants to make sure it’s even harder for them to understand. God wants to make sure people never understand him, because if they did, they might repent!

Jesus says the crowds don’t need to go away, even though it’s getting late. Then after he feeds the crowds (who were going to go eat anyway), he immediately sends them away. Sounds more like they didn’t need to stay.

Jesus expects to be able to pick figs from a tree even though it’s not fig season. And I suppose he ought to be able to miraculously make that happen, if he really wants to. But when he sees that the tree doesn’t have any figs for him, he instead gets mad and counterproductively curses the tree so it will never produce fruit again.

This is the same guy who told a parable advocating waiting patiently and caring for a fig tree even after getting no fruit from it for three years. He knows he should wait longer and give the tree a chance to produce figs. Why doesn’t Jesus practice what he preaches?

Jesus thinks cleaning only the outside of a cup won’t make the inside clean, but cleaning only the inside of the cup will make the outside clean. He also thinks that nothing can contaminate you by going into you.

Jesus thinks the Pharisees are somehow “hypocrites” for honoring righteous people who have been killed, which he thinks is the same as approving of their death. He sort of acknowledges that the Pharisees don’t approve of the killing, but then he acts like they’re guilty anyway, just because they happen to be descended from the murderers.

Jesus decides that his generation should be held responsible for every prophet who has ever been killed. And then after complaining about the Pharisees supposedly murdering righteous people, he tells them to start actually murdering righteous people. Who’s the hypocrite now?

Jesus thinks that “whatever is hidden is meant to be disclosed, and whatever is concealed is meant to be brought out into the open“. No, Jesus, that is not what people intend when they hide things.

Jesus thinks that whoever welcomes him does not welcome him. He also thinks the least is the greatest.

One of Jesus’s parables makes God’s decision to send him look like a stupid mistake, at best. The character representing God decides to send his son to the people who have beaten or killed everyone else he has sent, because he has learned nothing from that. These people have a record of killing prophets, so because of this, God “in his wisdom” decides to send them more prophets to kill. He should have known better than to send his son to them by that point.

Jesus thinks there’s something wrong with expecting to be repaid by the people you lend to. There isn’t. That’s exactly how lending should be done. If you think there’s something wrong with lenders expecting to be repaid, either you’re confused about what lending is, or you’re deliberately promoting theft. Anyway, Jesus offers to reward people for not expecting to be rewarded.

Jesus thinks he’s going to take something away from you that you don’t have.

When a man begs Jesus to drive the demon out of his son, Jesus’s response is to randomly start insulting his generation.

More than one of Jesus’s parables indicate that to really make God happy, you have to sin.

Jesus seems to have a very poor understanding of the nature of moral disagreements. He’s the kind of person who thinks that people who disagree with him must think bad is good and good is bad. He imagines that “worldly” people would appreciate being cheated out of what they’re owed.

Jesus says that when he returns, some people will be “taken” and others left. But when his disciples ask where those people will be taken, Jesus tells them where vultures gather, instead of answering the question. As a result of Jesus failing to answer that question, a lot of people now mistakenly think he was saying that some people will be “raptured” to heaven.

Because people think the kingdom of God is going to appear at once, Jesus tells a parable… which doesn’t address that issue at all.

Jesus asks a woman for a drink, when what he really wants is for her to ask him for a drink.

Jesus thinks if people didn’t call him a king, stones would.

Jesus thinks if he has a second person agreeing with what he says about himself, people will have to believe him. So he claims that God has testified about him… silently. Which is completely pointless, because now Jesus has to testify that God has testified about him, which is no different from Jesus just testifying about himself. Which, according to Jesus, is no reason to think what he’s saying is true.

Jesus randomly accuses people of trying to kill him. When they object to this accusation, Jesus thinks they must be angry because of a miracle that he did two chapters ago, when he was somewhere else and these people weren’t around to see it. He thinks that’s what they’re angry about. He can’t figure out that they’re angry because he just falsely accused them of trying to kill him.

Jesus offers to make rivers of water flow out of thirsty people. That seems counterproductive.

The more Jesus talks, the more unlikable and insane people think he is. In John 8:31, Jesus starts talking to some Jews who believe in him. 14 verses later, they no longer believe him. Three verses later, they’re convinced that he’s demon-possessed. And 11 verses later, they want to kill him. All because of the unreasonable and needlessly insulting and arrogant things Jesus says to them.

Jesus has a very strange concept of friendship. He thinks he can demand that his friends do what he commands, or else they don’t get to be his friends.

Jesus claims that if people hate him, that must be happening to fulfill a prophecy that people would hate him without reason. But why did God have that prophecy written? To give people a reason to hate him for no reason?

Jesus tends to ignore the questions he’s been asked, and respond by saying something barely relevant or completely unrelated instead. Jesus starts to answer a question about when everything will end. But he ends up just stating whether certain things will end. When people ask Jesus where his father is, instead of answering, he just tells them that they don’t know his father.

When Peter asks him who he’s talking to, it says “Jesus answered” …but he doesn’t actually answer the question. Jesus instead asks something about the story he was telling. That’s not an answer. And when Peter asks him where he’s going, he doesn’t answer that either. He just says his disciples can’t follow him there.

Jesus explains why he thinks he doesn’t need to wash his hands before he eats. Then he tells a couple of brief parables, or mixed metaphors, or something. These metaphors are to explain why it doesn’t matter that he offended the Pharisees with his opinions. But then when Peter asks him to “explain the parable”, Jesus instead goes back to trying to justify his opinions on hand washing. His response to Peter says nothing about the topics of those parables, or about parables at all. But he still acts like he thinks he’s “explaining the parable”.

Jesus says people shouldn’t be surprised by him claiming that they need to be born again. But instead of explaining himself when asked, he says something dumb about the wind.

When someone asks Jesus if something is true, and he doesn’t want to answer, Jesus tends to falsely accuse that person of stating the thing they’re asking about. Does Jesus not know the difference between asking if something is true and stating that it’s true, or does he just like to lie?

Jesus wants his disciples to break and eat his body and drink his blood. He wants everyone to eat his flesh and drink his blood, because he thinks he’s bread. And don’t forget to drink his spirit, too.

When Jesus is expecting to be betrayed soon, he tells his disciples they need to sell their cloaks so they can buy swords. But then when one of them tries to use his sword to defend Jesus, Jesus seems to disapprove of them using swords at all. So why did he tell them to buy swords?

Jesus knows someone is on the way to betray him, so he tells his disciples it’s time to get up and go… to get betrayed, not to get away.

When the elders ask Jesus if he’s the Messiah, Jesus responds that if he asked them, they wouldn’t answer. Because they don’t know the answer, because he hasn’t told them. But he seems to think the fact that they wouldn’t have answered means he doesn’t have to answer. Even though the reason for them not answering obviously doesn’t apply to him.

God thinks he can demonstrate how “righteous” and “just” he is, by failing to punish people who have sinned, and then killing his innocent son instead. Nothing about God’s decision to try to solve the sin problem by getting his son killed makes any sense.

The reason God loves Jesus is that he got himself killed and then came back to life. That’s a pretty weird reason to love someone. If Jesus hadn’t died, or if he had died by accident, or if he had stayed dead, God wouldn’t love him.

Jesus wants to indicate how Peter is going to die, so he says a bunch of confusing stuff about getting dressed and going places and feeding sheep, which doesn’t make it at all clear how Peter is going to die.

God has entrusted all judgment to the Son. He has appointed Jesus, who judges no one and never will, to judge the world. Jesus, in turn, has handed off the responsibility of judgment to his stupid disciples. He says anyone whose sins they forgive will be forgiven, and anyone whose sins they don’t forgive will not be forgiven.

God talks to himself, which some people would say only crazy people do. I don’t think that’s right, but would a sane person talk to himself indirectly by telling other people to talk to him, and then telling them what to say to him because they don’t know what to say to him, but then the things he tells them to say to him are just wordless groans?

God wants to have mercy on everyone, but he can’t do that unless they’ve done something wrong, so he forces them to disobey him. (And then he doesn’t have mercy on everyone after all.)

God makes Christians seem crazy too, by getting them to say things that make no sense to anyone else. He goes further and gives them the completely pointless “gift” of talking completely unintelligibly so that no one has any idea what they’re trying to say, including themselves, which makes everyone think they’re crazy.

God considers slaves to be free when they become Christians, and considers free people to be Jesus’s slaves when they become Christians.

God has placed every part of your body exactly where he wants it to be. They’re not all in the best places they could be, but they’re where he wants them to be.

God sends Paul and his colleagues with God to talk to God.

God is going to present undead people to himself.

God sends people a powerful delusion so that they will believe a lie, so he can condemn them for not believing the truth. He appears to have the same goals as the satanic “lawless one” Paul says is coming.

The book of Hebrews claims that God said a bunch of stuff about himself in the third person, for some reason.

It also claims that when God says “today”, he doesn’t mean today.

James claims that scripture says that God jealously longs for a spirit that he has caused to live in other people. Nothing about that makes sense. Why did God put it in other people if he wanted it for himself so much? If it can live in multiple people, why can’t God have it too? And doesn’t God know that jealousy is a sin?

Peter claims that God thinks it’s only good for people to suffer if they’re innocent.

He also says God doesn’t know the difference between a day and a thousand years. Or maybe he does know that the difference between those matters very much for us humans, but he just doesn’t care about humans?

Revelation predicts that Jesus is going to come with a double-edged sword sticking out of his mouth, so he can fight people using the sword of his mouth.

It says Jesus is going to give some victorious person a stone with a name on it that nobody else knows. Similar to how Jesus has a name that only he knows. What’s the point of a name that only one person knows? That completely defeats the purpose of having a name.

Jesus is also going to let the victorious one have the morning star, which is the planet Venus. So the meek shall inherit the Earth, but the victorious shall inherit Venus, which is… not a nice place to live. That’s kind of like rewarding someone with hell.

Jesus sends messages to people who he thinks are dead, even though they “have a reputation of being alive” because of all the deeds they’re still doing. What makes him think they’re dead, then? And if he thinks they’re dead, why is he trying to send messages to them?

Jesus, calling himself “the Amen”, whatever that means, threatens to spit people out of his mouth for not being cold or hot enough. Why does he think people want to be in his mouth to begin with?

Jesus thinks he can be both a lamb and a shepherd.

Jesus is going to angrily trample the world’s grapes (either that or he’s murdering trillions of people) in a big winepress, causing a massive flood of blood.

God never learns. Revelation predicts that in the end times, God will still think people will like him if he tortures them enough. Or maybe he just needs to throw some giant hailstones at them.

God is going to invite all the birds to eat all the people.

Continue reading God must be crazy
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Did Israel have peace throughout Solomon’s reign?

A passage in 1 Kings claims that all of Israel had peace and safety on all sides during Solomon’s lifetime. (Perhaps because Solomon ruled over a lot of the surrounding nations, in addition to Israel.)

But later in 1 Kings, it says Solomon had foreign adversaries, including a man named Rezon. Rezon had been a conqueror since Solomon’s father was still king of Israel. Rezon was hostile toward Israel, and was Israel’s adversary as long as Solomon lived.

Continue reading Did Israel have peace throughout Solomon’s reign?
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The Story of the Circum-Schism
Paul Hijacks Christianity

Ignorant outsider declares himself the authority on Christianity

When a man named Paul (also known as Saul) saw that Stephen had been killed, he approved. With the high priest’s permission, Paul started beating, imprisoning, and killing all the Christians he could find.

But then, while Paul was going from Jerusalem to Damascus, Jesus blinded him with a flash of light from heaven, and then sent a Christian from Damascus to un-blind him. Paul had a change of heart, but he just couldn’t make himself stop sinning.

Paul spent several days with the Christians in Damascus, during which he didn’t learn anything about Jesus from them. Then he suddenly started proclaiming that Jesus was the son of God, which confused everyone.

The Jews in Damascus wanted to kill Paul now that he was promoting Christianity. But he escaped back to Jerusalem, and tried to join the Christians there. At first they didn’t believe that their enemy was really a Christian now, but someone convinced them.

But then the Jews there tried to kill him too. So Paul went away and started preaching his own foolish message of Christianity to the world. People thought he was insane. Paul preached only to foreigners, who weren’t familiar with Jesus and so had no preconceived ideas of what he was actually like. Paul and his companions suggested that they might harm people who didn’t do what he thought God wanted. And the terrified foreigners complied.

Three years later, Paul went to Jerusalem briefly and met the Christians there for the first time, again. The apostle Peter (also known as Simon or Cephas) also started preaching Christianity to Gentiles, which the other Christians of Judea thought was wrong. They thought only Jews could be Christians. But Peter said he had had a dream that God told him to eat animals that were forbidden by God’s law. Therefore, it must be okay for Gentiles to be Christians.

Paul briefly questions the reliability of his knowledge about Jesus

Over a decade later, Paul heard that Christians from Judea were teaching Gentiles that they couldn’t be saved unless they were circumcised. Paul, having never actually met Jesus nor learned the original church’s doctrine, had been teaching something quite different. He had taught his followers that Jesus had made all those useless old Jewish laws obsolete. Especially circumcision.

So Paul decided to go to Jerusalem again, to talk with the apostles and make sure he was getting the message right. He found that, contrary to what he thought the spirit of Jesus had revealed to him, the original Christian church believed that all Christians had to follow all the Jewish laws, including circumcision. Peter, who tended to say foolish things, discussed the matter with Paul, who he thought was awfully hard to understand. They seemed to come to an agreement, but that didn’t last long.

The apostles sent Paul out with a letter telling the Gentile Christians that they only had to follow a few Jewish laws. But Paul really didn’t think even Jews needed to follow even those laws. He sometimes pretended to think people were still under the law though, in order to be more convincing to people who thought that way.

The original Christians attempt to debunk Paul’s misinformation

Then Jesus’s brother James convinced Peter and the rest of the Jewish Christian church and even Paul’s companion Barnabas that Gentile Christians did indeed have to live like Jews. Paul opposed them and called them hypocrites.

The Jewish Christian church in Jerusalem sent out their own missionaries to the foreign churches Paul had founded, teaching them their version of Christianity, which Paul disagreed with. They taught Paul’s followers that they had to obey the Jewish laws, including circumcision. They pointed out that they were Jesus’s own chosen apostles, and Paul was not. Some members of Paul’s churches started turning away from Paul and his comrade Apollos, and started following Peter.

So Paul started writing his followers defensive letters, proclaiming himself to be an apostle. He insulted and demonized the “other” apostles, insisting that they weren’t any better than him, and he didn’t need their opinions.

Paul’s insistence on lawlessness gets him arrested

Continue reading The Story of the Circum-Schism
Paul Hijacks Christianity
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Money rules

These are the Bible’s rules about money:

Don’t make money in deceitful ways, like extortion. If you gain riches unjustly, you will lose it all halfway through your life. (Protip: Wait until after the halfway point before you start gaining riches unjustly.)

Being rich is both better and worse than being poor. Remember, being wise makes you rich, but you can’t be both rich and wise.

Humans may value money, but God hates it. Don’t love money, or you’ll never have enough of it. Don’t trust money, because you can’t take it with you. Don’t even look at money, or it will sprout wings and fly away!

If, despite that, you don’t want to be poor, then…

(But if you are poor, that’s God’s fault.)

Don’t mock the poor. And don’t exploit them because they’re poor, only for other reasons. Don’t oppress them, or you’ll be punished. And don’t fail to defend their rights, or you’ll be punished again. Because only wicked people don’t care about justice for the poor. So don’t unjustly favor or disfavor the poor in court. Treat them the same as the rich.

Gifts, payments, and loans

Giving money to the poor is both mandatory and optional, and you have to both give up everything you have and save some for anyone who might ask you for it. When you give to the poor, don’t make a show of it.

And don’t give anything to the rich, or you’ll become poor. If you do favors to the rich, they will repay you, but if you do favors to the poor, God will repay you. (Protip: Don’t do favors for anyone, and then you won’t need to be repaid.)

The children and grandchildren of a widow should repay her and care for her, so that no one else has to support her. If you don’t provide for your relatives, you can’t be a Christian. Giving to your parents is more important than giving to God. But children should never have to save up for their parents, only the other way around.

You should donate to the church on the first day of every week. But anything you give to God should be an actual sacrifice, not something you got for free. Unless it’s plunder from war.

Jesus says you should also give away money to your enemies (reverse plundering?), and to anyone who asks you. But it’s better not to accept a gift that’s being given reluctantly.

Giving bribes is good for appeasing angry people and getting what you want.3 But don’t accept bribes; that’s a corrupt, perverted thing that wicked people do, and it could bring a curse on you or destroy you and your whole country.

Jesus thinks if a coin has Caesar’s picture on it, that must mean it belongs to Caesar, and that’s why you should pay taxes. (The logical conclusion of this dumb argument would be that everyone in the Roman Empire has to give all their money to the emperor, and the people don’t get to have any money ever, which would make the money useless.)

Paul, on the other hand, says the reason you should pay taxes is that all human authorities are God’s servants. Whatever the reason might be, Jesus is happy to give his followers free money to pay their taxes with.

Paying people for their work is both mandatory and optional. According to David, everyone should be paid equally, even if they don’t do any work. But according to Jesus, employers have the right to distribute their money among their employees any way they want, and workers should be content with whatever pay they get.

Samuel and Ahijah, who were servants of God, were prophets for profit. Paul thought he deserved payment too, but chose not to be paid for preaching, for some reason.

Jesus seems to think it’s very important that if you borrow money, you pay it back with interest. God’s law doesn’t allow Israelites to charge each other interest, though. It’s okay to charge foreigners interest, but not other Israelites. It’s also against God’s law to charge the poor any interest or profit. If you do, it will be taken away from you and probably given back to them.

You shouldn’t take a person’s livelihood as security for a debt. When you make a loan to a poor person, you should return their pledge the same day. Giving someone a security deposit is also a senseless mistake, and will make you suffer and lose your bed. And if you put up security for a stranger, you deserve to have your garment stolen.

No debt should remain unpaid, except the debt to love one another. So don’t love one another, but do pay all your other debts. Unless your creditor cancels your debt. All debts among Israelites are to be cancelled every seven years. But debts that foreigners owe to Israelites don’t have to be canceled.

But if you want God to forgive you, you should forgive all your debtors. If you ever try to make people pay you what they owe you, God will torture you until you pay him what he thinks you owe him. Which you can probably never do.

So, people need to always pay their debts, but people should never be required to pay their debts. And people need to always pay interest on their debts, but God’s people should never be required to pay interest.

Continue reading Money rules
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The Bible is badly written

Some people think the Bible is a “good book”, the work of a perfect God. If you actually read the Bible, you’ll find that this book is not actually good in any way. It’s a very poorly written book full of stupid nonsense, false claims, and terrible advice. This post is about how bad the writing in the Bible is.

The Bible repeats itself way too much. It’s full of random non sequiturs. It does a terrible job when it attempts to quote itself, and when it tries to make analogies. And it constantly contradicts itself.

The Bible says Adam named his wife Eve, because she would be the mother of everyone. But Adam wouldn’t have known anything about reproduction at that time, so that’s not a realistic thought process for him to have. He wouldn’t have known what a mother was, because mothers didn’t exist yet.

The Bible seems to indicate that God first gave humans permission to eat meat just after the flood. But two chapters before that, God gives Noah instructions about how many “clean” and “unclean” animals to take on the ark. How could God expect Noah to distinguish between those, if he hadn’t even given people permission to eat meat at all yet, much less told anyone which animals he considered “clean” or “unclean”?

The book of Job has God ask who did some things, where the answer is obviously supposed to be God. What’s the point of asking and giving away the answer at the same time? Maybe there would be a point to these questions if Job had ever said anything unreasonably arrogant, but he hadn’t.

Then it has God state that Job’s friends have not spoken the truth about God, unlike Job. Does the author not realize that he’s having God call himself cruel and unjust? Job is the one who spent almost the whole story talking about how cruel and unjust God was, while his friends did nothing but try to defend God. And now God confirms that Job was right.

Genesis says “Shechem had done an outrageous thing in Israel“. Looks like the author forgot that this story was set in a time before a place called Israel existed. Later, it says “the sons of Jacob came upon the dead bodies” in the city of Shechem. I guess that means the sons other than the ones who had left the dead bodies there?

Joseph says he was “forcibly carried off from the land of the Hebrews“. Did such a thing even exist in Joseph’s time? He had been carried off from the land of Canaan, which (according to the Bible) did not yet belong to the Hebrews.

It’s unclear what Joseph is trying to do when he tells his brothers to tell the Pharaoh, who apparently hates shepherds, that Joseph’s family tends livestock. Some translations have him tell his brothers to tell Pharaoh that they tend cattle, which implies that Joseph is continuing to take after his father and trying to deceive Pharaoh. But it still wouldn’t make any sense, because even in those versions, Joseph tells Pharaoh that they’re shepherds. If he’s trying to hide the fact that they’re shepherds, he’s doing a very bad job.

It says God avoided harming the Israelites during half of the Ten Plagues, but it doesn’t say so during the plagues of blood, frogs, gnats, boils, or locusts. It also never says the blood or the darkness went back to normal. Either God was being sloppy and forgetful here, or the author is.

While the Israelites were still slaves in Egypt, God told them they should celebrate the Festival of Unleavened Bread on that day because that was the day he had brought them out of Egypt. No, God, that hadn’t happened yet. Later, he told Aaron to put some manna with the tablets of the covenant law, which didn’t exist yet.

Leviticus 2 starts out like it’s going to tell what to do “when anyone sins unintentionally and does what is forbidden in any of the Lord’s commands“. It then tells what to do in several more specific scenarios, but doesn’t get around to telling what to do when an ordinary individual sins until 25 verses later.

God makes it sound like a unique attibute of unclean kinds of animals is that touching their carcasses makes you unclean. But then he says the same is true of the “clean” animals. So why didn’t he just say that all animal carcasses make you unclean? There was no reason to bring up the distinction between clean and unclean kinds of animals here.

Most of Numbers 2 is written like God is giving instructions, but the quotation of God ends in verse 2.

The verse that starts with “This is how the lampstand was made:” doesn’t tell us anywhere near as much about that as you would expect from a description that starts that way.

Moses starts a sentence with “When you are in distress and all these things have happened to you”, but then he tells them what will happen at a later time, instead of telling them what will happen when they are in distress and all these things have happened to them.

He starts another sentence with “As you know,” before telling his people a bunch of geographical details about the promised land. Why would they know all that? They’ve never been there. And if they really do know, why is he telling them?

Deuteronomy 12 is a rambling mess, giving rules about eating meat that sound like maybe they’re actually trying to give rules about sacrifices, but not actually saying anything about sacrifices when giving those rules, which makes the rules sound pointlessly obvious, though if the rules really were about sacrifices, they would contradict the other rules in this chapter that actually do mention sacrifices.

Moses lists the animals that Israelites are allowed to eat. All ten of them. Then he says they can eat any animal that has a divided hoof and that chews the cud. Surely that includes more than just the ten he listed? So what was the point of listing those specific ones?

Then, “of those that chew the cud or that have a divided hoof”, he lists a few specific animals that they’re not allowed to eat. But he implies that any animal that doesn’t have both of those properties is forbidden, so there was no need to list specific animals. It was also pointless for him to say “or that have a divided hoof” in that sentence, since none of the animals he listed in that sentence had those.

Moses tells the people what to do “if it is true and it has been proved that this detestable thing has been done”, when no detestable thing has been specified.

He says if a guilty person “deserves to be beaten”, then the judge should have that person flogged “with the number of lashes the crime deserves“. That’s awfully vague. This seems like the kind of thing you would want to have more specific laws about. Moses seems to think that this is important enough to make a law about, but not that it’s important enough that the law needs to specify exactly when someone deserves to be beaten, and how much.

When Moses is done giving Israel the laws that he already gave them, he states that he’s now 120 years old and no longer able to lead them. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was saying he was no longer able because he was old. But that can’t be it, because the Bible says he was not weak when he died. So what was he trying to say, then?

Then Moses sings a song where he states that when God divided mankind into nations, he set up boundaries according to how many sons Israel had. That doesn’t make much sense chronologically, since nations already existed before Jacob was even born. And what does the number of sons of Israel have to do with assigning land to all the other nations, anyway?

And then Moses gives a blessing to each of the tribes of Israel. For most of the tribes, the narration includes an introductory line stating that this is what he said about that tribe. But it fails to give the tribes of Reuben, Ephraim, Mannasseh, and Issachar their own introductory lines.

Later, it says “Joshua took the entire land” and gave it to the tribes of Israel. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was saying that Joshua had taken all of the promised land. But that can’t be it, because Joshua never did take all of the promised land. A lot of it was still unconquered when Joshua died. So what was that supposed to mean, then??

In the middle of telling what land Joshua gave the Levites, the Bible states that Arba was the forefather of Anak. Other than that, it doesn’t say who Arba and Anak are, or why we need to know about them. They don’t seem to have anything to do with what it was saying. Except that it had mentioned a place that had Arba in its name. But it doesn’t say how that place is related to Arba, whoever that is.

Then Joshua lets the Israelites know that God is going to bring on them all the evil things he has threatened, until he has destroyed them from the land. Was that statement meant to be conditional on what Israel was going to do? If so, Joshua forgot to say that part. And if not, what was the point of telling them that, if they can’t do anything about it?

The book of Judges tells about a time when the Israelites “turned from the ways of their ancestors, who had been obedient to the Lord’s commands.” It should have said some of their ancestors. Not all of their ancestors had been obedient.

It says Samson’s enemies were lying in wait for him all night at the city gate. And that his solution was to break off the city gate in the middle of the night and carry it away. How is that supposed to in any way help him get past his enemies?

In the story of Ruth, Naomi’s sons (who both die young) happen to have names that mean “sickness” and “wasting”. Not very realistic.

A story in 1 Samuel tells how big both the army of Israel and the army of Judah were, and a story in 2 Samuel has David count the fighting men of Israel and the fighting men of Judah separately. Looks like the author forgot that at the time of these stories, Judah was supposed to have been part of Israel. The author also forgets that Jerusalem didn’t belong to Israel yet, and has David go there after killing Goliath, like he’s coming home or something.

In 1 Samuel 20, Jonathan needs to inform David of something that he just found out, even though they both already knew it. So he conveys that information to David using an elaborate secret code, as if he’s unable to talk to him in person for some reason. Then he talks to him in person.

It says hundreds of people flocked to the fugitive David so he could be their leader. It doesn’t say why. It doesn’t say if he had ever done anything to make them want to do that.

In a psalm that David is supposed to have written while Saul was king, it says God has made David “the head of nations“. David was not the head of any nation at that time.

The author of 1 Samuel has a Philistine call David “as pleasing in my eyes as an angel of God“. Why would a Philistine talk like that? This author is not doing a very good job of writing a character who doesn’t believe in the God of Israel.

When David tries to get Uriah out of the war, to go home to his wife, Uriah objects that Israel “and Judah” (which is still not a separate entity, by the way) still have to camp out in tents because of the ongoing war. So, Uriah asks, how could he go home to eat and drink and make love to his wife at a time like this?

Well, when he asks this, Uriah is already eating and drinking at the palace. So the eating and drinking part clearly isn’t a problem for him. It seems the only thing that Uriah really objects to is specifically the prospect of having sex with his beautiful wife. Which doesn’t make much sense, except for the narrative purposes of implying to the reader why David had wanted Uriah to go home in the first place,4 and providing a reason for David to resort to getting Uriah killed.

A prophet gives David a message pointing out that God has given David “all Israel and Judah“. The author continues to forget that Judah is supposed to have been part of Israel. (In reality they had always been two separate kingdoms, but not in the Bible’s version of history. Acting like Judah is distinct from Israel in David’s time is inconsistent.)

When Shimei accuses David of having shed blood in the household of Saul, David acts like Shimei is right, even though David doesn’t kill any relatives of Saul until later. And they act like God disapproves of David supposedly having killed Saul’s relatives, but then when he actually does it, it’s because that’s what God wants him to do.

2 Samuel 20 claims that the whole nation of Israel instantly went from supporting David to abandoning him just because one guy suggested it. But it says the men of Judah stayed loyal to him, which means that what it just said is false. “All the men of Israel” didn’t desert him.

2 Samuel 23 reports what David’s last words were, which is out of place. David doesn’t die till three chapters later. Before he dies, David says he expects Solomon to know what to do, because Solomon is “a man of wisdom“. Looks like the author forgot that Solomon wasn’t supposed to have been wise yet. He doesn’t become wise until the next chapter, after David dies.

When it’s telling about Solomon’s reign, 1 Kings continues to talk about “Judah and Israel“. According to the pseudohistory of the Bible, that’s like saying “California and the United States”.

The Bible’s description of Elisha returning a miraculously resurrected boy to his mother is ridiculously boring and mechanical.

It has the other prophets call Elisha “man of God“, a phrase which in the Bible means a prophet. The prophets are all “men of God”, so why would they call him that? Wouldn’t they call him something more specific, to distinguish him from the rest of the men of God?

The Bible says some time after Elisha died, some people threw another body into Elisha’s tomb because they were in a hurry. It doesn’t explain why his tomb was open.

The story of Esther has the king of Persia state that “no document written in the king’s name and sealed with his ring can be revoked“, while doing just that.

Isaiah takes almost 50 words to say “this is what the Lord says” before getting around to actually saying what the Lord says. And it wasn’t even necessary for him to say that he was going to say what the Lord says at all, since he had already been saying what the Lord says.

God tells Jeremiah he’s going to send four kinds of destroyers, which he names and tries to say what each of them is going to do. But instead of naming any specific ways of destroying, all but one of the things he says they’re going to do are pretty much the same thing, which is killing/destroying. There was no need to say that the destroyers were going to do that. And the other thing he says one of them is going to do doesn’t seem to involve destroying at all, so why is he calling it a destroyer? Or if it does involve destroying, why didn’t he mention that?

When some people are trying to get the prophet Jeremiah executed for predicting disaster, some other people argue that that would just make God angry, and that in a previous case, listening to a prophet who predicted disaster had had good results. After that, a story about yet another prophet is inserted parenthetically in the middle of that story about Jeremiah.

In this story, a prophet who is saying the same thing as Jeremiah does get executed for predicting disaster, and it doesn’t say anything bad happened as a result. So inserting that story into Jeremiah’s story was not only pointless, but kind of undermines the point they were trying to make.

Jeremiah tells the people that God says the people have done what they said they would do. But when they said they would do it, that was part of this same conversation. It doesn’t seem like enough time has passed since they said that just now, for them to have had time to do it. Hosea 6 and Haggai 1 both end in the middle

of a sentence for some reason. In Micah 2, God tries to convince his people that he’ll bring them back to their land, when they’re still not even convinced that they’re going to have to leave their land.

Zechariah sees four chariots, and asks an angel about them. The angel tries to explain what they are and where each chariot is going, but forgets one of them.

The author of the gospel of Luke implies that the Roman census required everyone to travel to wherever their distant ancestors lived, which makes no sense. “Luke” must have made up this part just so that he could claim that Jesus was born where a prophecy said the Messiah was supposed to be born.

The author of the gospel of Matthew has Jesus ride into Jerusalem on two donkeys, because he misinterpreted the prophecy that he was basing his story on.

Jesus complains about something that the teachers of the law and Pharisees do, and something that they don’t do. Then he says they “should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former“. If he wants them to do the former, then why did he complain about them doing it?? What was the point of mentioning it at all?

Matthew inserts the command “Let the reader understand” in the middle of a sentence as if that was part of something Jesus said. Which doesn’t actually help the reader understand anything.

In the parable of the lost son, Jesus says the lost son ended up desperately in need, because of his own irresponsible actions… and also because there was a severe famine affecting the whole country. Adding a famine to the story was completely unnecessary, and weakens the point that the story was trying to make. And then Jesus forgets about the famine, and has everyone have a big feast as soon as the son gets back home.

Mark says the disciples were astonished, and others following Jesus were afraid. It doesn’t say what they were astonished by or what they were afraid of.

Matthew has the Jews declare that the responsibility for the blood of Jesus will be on their children. That seems rather unlikely to have happened. Why would they say that? Doesn’t make any sense.

Jesus was put to death for allegedly claiming to be the king of the Jews, which was apparently considered treason against the Roman emperor. But then how did all the people who actually did call Jesus the king of the Jews get away with it? The Magi, Nathanael, all the people who greeted Jesus when he came to Jerusalem, Pilate, and all the Christians should have been crucified too.

That’s assuming it really was treason to claim that the Jews had a king. But I don’t see why it would be. Can’t a king exist under an emperor without undermining the emperor’s authority? Didn’t the Roman empire already have various kings who were subordinate to the emperor? Like the Herods. Should all those kings have been crucified too?

The Bible says Pharisees, unlike Sadducees, believe in spirits and angels and resurrections. And then it says some Pharisees said Paul should be declared innocent because “What if a spirit or an angel has spoken to him?” They said that, not because that was a coherent reason for them to conclude that Paul was innocent, but just because they’re the kind of people who believe in spirits and angels. Sounds like bad fiction writing to me.

In Romans, Paul says “this” will take place on the day when God judges people’s secrets. What will? You mean the thing you were talking about three verses ago?

Hebrews 11 tries to promote faith by telling about some Old Testament people who had faith. Then it admits that “all these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised.” Why is the author conceding that, and thereby undermining the whole point of this chapter, when it’s not even true? Half the people this chapter mentions weren’t promised anything to begin with. And the other half kinda did get what they were promised.

Revelation has someone claim that Babylon had boasted that she was not a widow and would never mourn. That does not sound like something that anyone would realistically boast about. The only reason it says she said that is to set Babylon up to be immediately proved wrong by God.

Revelation predicts that Satan will recruit vast numbers of people from multiple nations, and gather them for battle, and they’ll march up and surround Jerusalem… And then God will kill them all with fire from heaven. Well, that was over awfully fast.

Continue reading The Bible is badly written
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The Story of the Martyrdom of Stephen
The Speech of a Fool

Jesus had told his disciples that whenever they got arrested, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit would be there to tell them the right thing to say. He said God would make them sound so wise that no one would be able to argue with them. But when the Spirit tried to help them decide what to say, it mostly just made them groan and babble incoherently. This made people think the Christians were out of their minds.

Continue reading The Story of the Martyrdom of Stephen
The Speech of a Fool
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Should people support their parents?

Yes.

Jesus criticized the Pharisees for encouraging people to give money to God instead of using it to help their parents. So according to Jesus, giving to your parents is more important than giving to God.

Paul agreed, at least in the case of widows: He said if you’re a Christian with a widowed mother, you should take care of her yourself, so she won’t be a needless burden on the rest of the church.

No.

Continue reading Should people support their parents?
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