If you’re looking for good advice, I don’t recommend consulting the Bible. Just like the Bible’s rules, the Bible’s advice is unbelievably bad.

When God first created humans, he announced that he was giving them “every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth” to be their food. Even though a lot of them are poisonous.

Solomon (supposedly the wisest person ever) claims that the prudent keep their knowledge to themselves. But that’s obviously not always a good idea. Would Esther have been more prudent to keep her knowledge of Haman’s plans to herself, instead of telling the king so he could stop Haman from getting all the Jews killed?

The rich king Solomon also says you should never say, or even think, anything negative about the king, or about the rich. Because they will find out about your thought crimes, because apparently they have mind-reading birds spying on you.

Solomon claims that it pleases the eyes to see the sun. He fails to mention that looking at the sun actually makes your eyes hurt, and that anything more than a brief glimpse is likely to damage your eyes.

One saying of the “wise” says you shouldn’t build a house until you’re finished with all your outdoor work, getting your fields ready. As if building a house so you have somewhere to live is supposed to be a low-priority luxury or something.

Jesus has some horrible advice about what to do when you’ve sinned. He thinks you should just cut off whichever part of your body “causes you to sin”. He claims you’ll be better off if you gouge out your own eyes and cut off your own hands. Because apparently you can’t go to heaven otherwise. Though apparently when you’re living in heaven, you’ll still be missing whatever body parts you cut off. Anyway, Solomon says sinners don’t know what makes them stumble, so luckily it’s not really possible to follow Jesus’s advice here.

But Jesus has lots more bad advice! He says it doesn’t matter what you put in your mouth, or whether you washed your hands first, because it’s just going to come back out of you. He thinks if you’re generous, that will magically make everything clean for you, so you’ll never need to wash your hands. Jesus also gives needlessly limiting advice to students, telling them that they can never become better than their teachers.

Jesus advises people to be like the good Samaritan, but neglects to mention the fact that seemingly needy strangers are often scammers, and some of them are dangerous violent criminals. Jesus doesn’t think you need to worry about that kind of thing, since people who have killed you can’t harm you any further, so you shouldn’t be afraid of being killed! And anyway, Jesus wants you to hate your life. And your family.

Paul says you should do everything without complaining or arguing, ignoring the fact that complaining and arguing are useful and important things to do. When there’s a problem, people need to identify it and point it out, so it can get solved. When there’s an objective disagreement, people need to discuss it, so that whoever has a false belief can stop having a false belief. Preventing these things from getting done is wrong.

But Paul insists that his followers need to be sheeple, completely agreeing with each other about everything, with no independent thought allowed. He says they all have to insist on going along with his own dumb ideas about slavery and stuff. And he claims that anyone who is so conceited and confused as to teach anything that disagrees with him must “have an unhealthy interest in controversies and quarrels” that can result in nothing but trouble.

More advice from the Bible: You’re no worse if you don’t eat, and no better if you do, so you might as well never eat. Welcome enemy spies and aid them in destroying your country, because you’ll get killed if you don’t. And don’t love anything in the world, because anyone who is a friend of the world is an enemy of God.

Irresponsible advice

When God created humans (and also again after the flood), he instructed them to increase in number, fill the earth, and subdue it. Overpopulate the world until it can no longer support you, so you can defeat the earth!

God told his people to take a year off from working in their fields every seven years, and also every 50 years. He assured them that he would make the land produce enough food in the sixth year to last for three years. Which is necessary because it will take around a year after they start planting again before the food planted in the eighth year will be ready.

But God didn’t think this through quite as well as he thinks he did. He didn’t realize that sometimes the next year after the 7th year will also be the 50th year. Then you’ll need to save up enough food for four years: the sixth (last normal year), seventh (Sabbath rest), eighth (Jubilee rest), and ninth years (while planting). But God will only provide enough to last you three years.

Solomon says it’s pointless to spend a lot of time working for food, because if God loves you, he will make sure you can afford to rest. Then he contradicts himself with an even less reasonable admonition. He says you should never get even a little sleep, or you’ll suddenly become poor. (This message is repeated several times in Proverbs.) Solomon also says the wise store up their food, while fools gulp theirs down. What’s so wise about keeping food lying around till it rots?

According to King Lemuel (whoever that is) and/or his mother, the proper use of beer and wine is to help poor suffering people forget about their situation. And Paul thinks wine is good for sick people. But I’m pretty sure drinking isn’t the best way to deal with your problems. If this book was really written by God, it would have better advice than that.

Jesus expects his followers to forgive any debts that people owe them, which is absurdly simple-minded. This would mean Christians who lend money will never get it back. So Christians are going to have to either lose all their money to the people who notice that Christians never insist on being repaid, or just refuse to ever lend money.

I guess the latter is more likely, since people who actually do what Jesus said won’t have any money to lend. Jesus requires his followers to sell all their possessions and give the money to the poor. Seems like it would be kind of hard to live if you’re not allowed to own anything, though.

Jesus thinks cleaning the inside of a cup somehow makes the outside clean too. And he apparently agrees with Solomon that people should never sleep. Jesus expects you to keep watch all day and night, every day, for the rest of your life, so your master won’t catch you sleeping when he returns. Because your master thinks it’s wrong for you to sleep at night, apparently.

Here’s some of the stupidest advice Jesus gave: 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 whatever natural beauty you might have to somehow replace the protective function of clothing. Also, never plan ahead. Don’t save up money for the times when you’ll really need it. Just spend it all today.¹

Paul thinks you should do what is right in the eyes of everyone. So if anyone thinks something is right, I should do it? That doesn’t sound like a very good reason to do things. This would be a dumb idea even if it was possible to please everyone.

Paul mistakenly believed the world was about to end, and he advised his followers to act accordingly. That means acting irresponsibly, living like there’s no tomorrow. For instance, Paul pressured poor people to donate more than they could afford. He expected his followers to look forward to the destruction of the earth, and to try to make it happen faster.

He also taught them that it was wrong to “think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh“. So don’t even think about getting food to eat! And definitely don’t think you can produce food by planting and watering. Don’t you know that only God can make things grow? Follow Paul’s example, and just ignore the fact that your body is wasting away. You were about to get a new one anyway!

When people are afraid, Isaiah’s solution is to tell them not to be. And in Revelation, Jesus sends a message to some Christians telling them they’re about to suffer and maybe die, but also telling them not to be afraid. Why should people not be afraid when these things are about to happen to them? And when Jesus isn’t even promising to protect them or anything?

I guess he just expects them to accept it for no good reason at all; in other words, to have faith. The Bible encourages you to embrace faith, and other irrational and anti-intellectual ways of thinking that are inherently opposed to truth.

Promoting ideas that will cause people to do wrong

Joseph said it was okay that his brothers sold him into slavery. He thought they shouldn’t feel bad at all for doing that, because God couldn’t have saved lives if they hadn’t done it. It’s not like he’s all-powerful or something…

Solomon is apparently too simple-minded to see that doing what other people tell you to do isn’t always a good thing. Paul similarly claims that it’s always right for children to obey their parents. As if it’s impossible for parents to ever tell their children to do bad things. He also says everyone needs to be obedient to rulers and authorities. And other epistles agree that you should submit to the authority of your leaders, to every human authority. All authorities are perfect, after all. You can tell because Paul said so, and he’s an authority!

One saying of the “wise” claims that if you punish your children with a rod, they won’t die, so you should punish your children with a rod to save them from death. (And to make them wise.) Not even the first part of that is true.

Solomon claims that those who seek the Lord fully understand what is right. I don’t think anyone fully understands what is right. So if people believe Solomon, and think that all they have to do to have a perfect understanding of morality is to try to find God, that means they’re going to be overconfident in their moral opinions. They’ll never bother to question their flawed moral thinking. That would be a disaster even if they hadn’t chosen a particularly bad source of moral guidance.

Solomon apparently advocates correcting servants by beating them or something. Because he thinks being a servant somehow makes you unable or unwilling to correct your behavior in response to being told what you did wrong.

Solomon says you need to be careful not to be too righteous or too wise, or you’ll destroy yourself. He says no matter what you find to do, you should do it with all your might. Even though it could easily be something bad that you shouldn’t be doing at all. He says following your heart and your eyes will bring God’s judgment on you, yet he recommends doing it anyway.

Jesus wants you to think you’re doing something wrong if you have lustful thoughts. But claiming that that’s wrong isn’t going to stop horny people from being horny. All it’s going to do is make sure that if you believe Jesus, you can never be happy, whether you’re having sex or not. And lead you to judge others for being tempted, or for being tempting. All without achieving anything good, because there’s nothing wrong with wanting sex.

(Unless Jesus only meant in the specific kinds of situations where sex would be wrong, in which case he should have said so.)

Jesus thinks that if people think you’re doing something wrong, that means you must be doing something right. And he says God will reward you if you continue doing it.

Paul tells his followers that it’s pointless to obey the law, which obviously encourages people to break the law. Paul claims it’s not like that, but fails to explain how telling people they don’t need to follow the law isn’t going to cause people not to follow the law.

The book of Hebrews approvingly mentions how faith in Jesus cleanses your guilty conscience, so you don’t have to worry about all the harm your causing in the world. Clean the sin out of your map so you won’t notice what a mess you’re making of the territory.

The Bible says needlessly killing animals is righteous, and not doing so is evil. But if you’re already a vile person doing wrong, it says you might as well just continue to be a vile person doing wrong.

Selfishness and selflessness

God says you should love your neighbor as yourself. So if you don’t happen to love yourself, you don’t have to treat anyone else lovingly.

Solomon says you should never share your stuff with strangers. (He’s actually trying to make a point about fidelity, but making an analogy equating it with selfishness is not a convincing way to do that.)

Jesus advises you to decide what to do to others based on what you would want done to you. I’d say that’s a bad idea, since it completely ignores what others want. That’s a pretty important thing to consider when you’re deciding what to do to others. But apparently Jesus would rather you be selfish. Don’t worry about what others want. It’s all about what you want.

Jesus says it’s best to deal with your own problems before you worry about helping other people with their smaller problems, which also seems kind of selfish. But that’s not enough; he also wants you to be hypocritically selfish, by demanding selflessness from others. He thinks it’s good to pester your neighbors at an inconveniently late hour until they agree to lend you stuff when they don’t want to.

Unlike Jesus, Paul says no one should seek anything good for themselves, only for others. One of those guys must be wrong here. But Paul also says that if that he was trying to please people, he would not be a servant of Christ. So apparently being a Christian means you’re not allowed to do good to other people.

The Bible says the only sins you can commit against your own body are sexual sins, which means suicide isn’t a sin. Therefore the best way to show love is by killing yourself, like Jesus did. Or by murdering your son, like God did.

When the Bible promotes things that are actually good to do, it tends to give bad reasons for doing them. It tries to motivate you with things like artificial personal consequences, instead of considering the real consequences that your actions will naturally have for everyone.

Just let people do evil

Moses brought all the Israelites out into the desert where they had no water to drink. Then he acted like they were doing something wrong when they complained that they had no water to drink.

Solomon says it’s good to overlook an offense, which is fine if by “offense” you mean a harmless insult. But “offense” can also mean much worse things (involving physical harm) that probably shouldn’t be overlooked.

Jesus claims that God will judge you the same way you judge others. Telling people this will discourage them from judging the bad things they do as bad. How are people supposed to stop doing bad things, if they’re not even allowed to acknowledge that the things they’re doing are bad? Unless Jesus expects people to use a double standard, and think something is bad when one person does it but not when another person does the same thing.

But Jesus says you should never judge people at all, and then God will never judge you. That way you and God both can just let people get away with doing evil. Don’t try to stop them. Don’t even think they’re doing anything wrong.

Jesus says you should forgive other people when they sin against you, so God will forgive your sins. But forgiving people isn’t inherently a good thing. If you forgive everyone unconditionally, you’re just making people more likely to do bad things to you. But maybe that’s what Jesus wants:

If someone wants to hurt you, steal from you, or kidnap you, Jesus says you should not stop them. Just encourage them to do it more. Jesus wants people who encounter criminals to end up lost, broke, naked, and dead.

Lamentations similarly claims that it’s good to actively encourage people to go ahead and strike your cheek. And Paul approvingly mentions how the Corinthians put up with everyone who enslaves them, exploits them, takes advantage of them, or slaps them in the face. He wishes he could be like the Corinthians.

Paul says you should walk in the way of love, which he says keeps no record of wrongs. He insists that it’s better to be wronged and cheated than to sue people who have wronged you.

Paul says married people should give up all authority over their own bodies to their spouses. So if one of them wants to have sex, the other should not feel free to say no. And Paul’s advice for slaves who become Christians is to just not let their slavery trouble them! He says they shouldn’t try to become free, because they’re already “the Lord’s freed person”.

James says it’s wrong for Christians to ever criticize each other. He acts like that would somehow be equivalent to criticizing God’s law. So that would mean when Christians are doing wrong, other Christians have to just let them do wrong. They’re not even allowed to talk about the fact that Christians are doing wrong.

Embracing suffering

God wants to make sure his people don’t get the credit for their own military victories. So he tries to keep Israel’s army too small to succeed without his help. He does this by telling the leaders to tell a lot of the soldiers to go home so that no one else will get to enjoy what they’ve left behind. What kind of reason is that? Why would you try to motivate people with a desire to prevent enjoyment, when you could get exactly the same result by appealing to a desire to get enjoyment?

Well, if the Bible is to be believed, it’s wrong even to have a preference for happiness. Solomon says everyone who loves pleasure will become poor. He says mourning is better than feasting and pleasure, which are for fools, because you are going to die, and you should keep that in mind. He says frustration is better than laughter, because being sad is good for you.

Jesus thinks being poor and miserable and hated is great. He doesn’t want you to try to improve your life, no matter how bad it is. Just keep making it worse! If you don’t hate your life, you can’t be his disciple.

Paul thinks suffering is a glorious thing that makes you a better person. He thinks it’s commendable to endure trouble, hardship, distress, beatings, imprisonment, sleepless nights, hunger, etc. He thinks people who live for pleasure might as well be dead.

Paul boasts about being imprisoned, being beaten and pelted and flogged severely, being shipwrecked, being in constant danger wherever he goes, and going without food or sleep or clothes. Because apparently he thinks those are good things, and that people should want those things to happen to them. And he thinks it’s good for other people to share in his troubles. He wants people to join with him in suffering, because that’s what good Christians do.

The epistle to the Hebrews expresses disappointment that they’re not shedding their blood in order to resist sin. It says you can’t be a real child of God unless you let him inflict hardship on you, because inflicting hardship is what fathers do. And James thinks you should consider it pure joy to have to face all kinds of trials.²

Peter thinks it’s pointless to be punished for doing wrong, but it’s good for people to suffer unjustly for doing good. It’s what Jesus did, and Christians should follow Jesus’s example. Peter thinks people should be glad to have the opportunity to join Jesus in suffering.³

When a book claims that unjust suffering is a good thing, how can anyone possibly think that book has any value as a guide to morality?