Several times in the Bible, Jesus is called the first person to rise from the dead. But he wasn’t. Not even close. According to the Bible, lots of people rose from the dead before Jesus did.
Continue reading Was Jesus the first to rise from the dead?Category Archives: The bad book
Contradictions in the Bible
For a supposedly error-free book supposedly written under the influence of a supposedly perfect God who supposedly wants everyone to know the truth, the Bible sure contradicts itself a lot.
When the Bible contradicts what we know about reality, Bible believers have the option of denying those inconvenient facts. But when the Bible contradicts itself, the only thing that can be wrong is the Bible.
And the Bible does contradict itself, constantly. On this blog, I plan to write about hundreds of biblical contradictions,1 many of which you won’t find documented anywhere else.
Here are all the biblical contradictions (questions that the Bible answers in multiple incompatible ways) that I’ve written about so far. I will be adding a new one every two weeks.
Continue reading Contradictions in the BibleShould people be wise or foolish?
People should be wise.
Those who are foolish need to become wise. Kings should be wise, and people should listen to their kings so they can become wise too. Speaking with wisdom is what righteous people do; foolish talk is inappropriate. So get wisdom and understanding, even if it costs everything you have, and don’t let them out of your sight. Foolishness may be more fun, but you need understanding to keep you on the right track. Even ants possess wisdom; you could learn a few things from them.
Wisdom is better than strength, and much more valuable than silver and gold and rubies. Those who find wisdom are blessed with happiness and prosperity. Wisdom will keep you safe from wicked men and women, and enable you to live longer and save other people’s lives. Wisdom makes you inclined to do good deeds. Only wise people will be rewarded with everlasting life in the kingdom of heaven. Wisdom even makes you look nicer.
Wisdom is better than folly in every way. Wisdom brings honor, but foolishness brings shame. If you are wise, your parents will be happy with you, but if you are foolish, they will be disappointed in you. Wisdom brings rewards, but foolishness brings punishment and suffering. Even the companions of fools are in danger of harm, so you should hang out with wise people instead. Listen to the constructive criticism of the wise, not the mindless songs and shouts of fools.
Fools deserve to be beaten, because they are not upright. Fools will come to ruin; they will be cursed and die, because they are envious and resentful, and because they just don’t have the sense to preserve their own lives. It’s better to be poor than foolish.
Paul wanted his followers to live wisely and not be foolish. He asked God to fill them with wisdom and understanding so they would be better able to please God. He encouraged them to instruct each other with wisdom and to deal with outsiders wisely. He thought it was shameful that there seemed to be no one in the Corinthian church wise enough to judge their own disputes.
God wants his people to obey his laws in order to show the world how wise and understanding they are. God is disappointed to see that his people don’t have the sense to obey him, and he wishes they were wiser. Fools give God no pleasure.
Eliphaz said God is no friend of the wise and likes to foil their plans, but God said Eliphaz did not speak the truth about him.2 God actually thinks highly of the wise.
God gives people wisdom, knowledge, and understanding. He wouldn’t do that if it wasn’t good for people to be wise, would he? Anyone who lacks wisdom should ask God for it, and they will receive it. God offered to give Solomon whatever he asked for, and when Solomon chose to be given wisdom and knowledge, God was so pleased that he gave him bonus gifts as well. God is also incredibly wise himself. We should follow his perfect example and seek to be wise like him.
People should be foolish.
Wisdom is nothing to boast about. Not relying on wisdom is what’s worth boasting about. Wisdom and knowledge will lead you astray. Wisdom inevitably leads people to reject God, and he will punish them for it. The king of Tyre was full of wisdom and understanding, and he knew it, which led to his ruin.
Solomon wisely advises us3 not to rely on our own understanding and not to think too deeply. He had more wisdom and knowledge than anyone else, but that only made him more miserable. If you want to be happy (which you should!), you’ll have to abandon wisdom. Being foolish and senseless can bring you great joy!
God clearly doesn’t want people to be wise. He thinks human wisdom is foolishness. When God created humans, the first thing he told them they must not do was to eat fruit from the tree of knowledge, which would give them wisdom. When people become wise and learned, God makes fools of them. God wouldn’t do that if it wasn’t good for people to be foolish, would he?
Wisdom is scarce among Christians because God prefers to choose the foolish of the world to put the wise to shame. The gospel has no power to save people unless it’s preached in a foolish way, without wisdom.
Continue reading Should people be wise or foolish?
The Story of Noah’s Ark—
The One Where God Decides to Kill Everybody
More than 1500 years after the perfect God created his perfect world, he realized that creating humans had been a bad idea, because humans are evil. To correct his mistake, God decided to kill all the humans, and all the animals too, for some reason. But there was one righteous man in the world who God didn’t want to kill, and his name was Noah.
Continue reading The Story of Noah’s Ark—The One Where God Decides to Kill Everybody
Should people be happy?
Yes.
God’s people should praise him joyfully. Everyone should. That’s what righteous people do. There is no law against joy. Everyone should rejoice when they see bad things happen to bad people. That’s what righteous people do.
People should rejoice at home and in public. People should do good deeds gladly, and bring their parents and leaders joy. Don’t act like you’re mourning during religious ceremonies; you should be enjoying yourself. Even if your life is hard, you should be happy about it. Enjoying your life is the best thing you can possibly do!
God satisfies people’s desires and makes them happy. He commands people to celebrate and rejoice and to make other people happy, and he rewards them with happy lives when they do what he wants. He wants us to be glad to know that he will reward us. He rewards people for being delighted with him and for gladly doing what’s right. He even punishes people for not being joyful. God wouldn’t do those things if it wasn’t good for people to be happy, would he?
Solomon wisely wished for his son to have a happy marriage, and encouraged others to be happy too, because he knew that being cheerful is good for you. David, who always behaved just the way God wanted him to, rejoiced and celebrated a lot, and he said other people should rejoice, too. God himself is often delighted with people, particularly when they do what he wants, and he rewards them gladly. Everything God does is right, so we should follow his example.
No.
God does not approve of people rejoicing over their enemies’ misfortune. And according to Job, that’s not the only kind of rejoicing that’s wrong; it’s also a sin to rejoice over your own fortune. Job was the most righteous person on earth, so he ought to know what he’s talking about.
You should not gratify your desires by doing what you want, because your body’s desires are perverse, and will lead to your destruction. Shun life’s pleasures, so they won’t get in the way of your spiritual growth. You must not indulge in pleasures, or you might as well be dead. God will not answer your prayers if what you’re ultimately trying to get is pleasure.
Those who love pleasure will be punished. Pleasure is not good,4 and you should have nothing to do with people who are so foolish, disobedient, flawed, and depraved as to love pleasure.
Solomon wisely advised people to refrain from laughing, because he knew that being sad is good for you. Pleasure won’t do you any good; it only brings poverty. Only a fool would go and have fun at a feast; it’s better to join the mourners instead, because you are going to die, and you should keep that in mind.
When the Babylonians rejoiced and were glad, God thought it was a shameful disgrace. God will never forgive people who insist on joyfully laughing and partying when he clearly wants them to be crying. It doesn’t matter if you’re celebrating because it’s a holy day; God will make you stop.
Jesus wants you to suffer when you don’t deserve it, just like he did. Anyone who doesn’t hate their life isn’t a real Christian. So don’t laugh, or God will make you cry. Grieve over what God is doing to those around you, or you too will be punished. Don’t even think about enjoying your life, or you will die and go to hell!
Continue reading Should people be happy?Bible stories
Have you ever noticed how the serpent in the garden of Eden didn’t actually tell any lies? Have you ever thought about the implications of God’s statement that Job had told the truth about him and that his friends had not? Did you spot the huge flaw in Joseph’s plan to save Egypt from the famine?
Have you noticed that despite how much the Bible tries to make him look bad, the guy with the talking donkey was a consistently obedient servant of God? Did you catch the fact that the story of Jonah is about God forcing someone to tell a lie? Or that when Daniel’s friends are disobeying the king so they won’t have to disobey God, the Bible suspiciously fails to mention what Daniel was doing at the time, and vice versa?
Probably not. Maybe you’ve never read the Bible. Maybe you’ve only read “sanitized” versions of the Bible that left out all the awkward parts. Maybe you’ve read the Bible, but you had preconceived ideas of how the stories were supposed to go and what the characters were supposed to be like, which got in the way of seeing what the Bible actually says.
Maybe you’re so familiar with certain passages that when you see them, you just recognize-and-ignore them, instead of thinking about what they’re saying. Maybe the relevant passages were just so far apart in the Bible that you forgot about one by the time you got to another, so you never realized what they imply if you put them together.
It’s easy to miss a lot of surprising things like these in the Bible, for one reason or another. In this monthly series of summarized Bible stories, I’m going to be making those things a lot harder to miss.
I will include a moral at the end of each story. Not all of them are good morals, and not all of them are ideas that Christians are likely to agree with, but they are all lessons that can be learned from the Bible’s stories. For the Parables, I will also include an interpretation at the end, so you can easily see what everything in the story represents.
Below is a list of the Bible stories I’ve published on this blog so far, as well as the rest of the stories I’ll be posting in the future. If you like these stories, you can subscribe to my blog to make sure you’ll get to read more stories as they come out each month. There are several ways you can stay updated, so find something that works for you:
- Get push notifications on this device by clicking the bell icon in the lower-right corner of the screen.5
- Use a tool like BlogTrottr to get my posts sent to your email.
- If you use a feed reader such as Feedly, you can get updates there.
Or if you don’t want to wait a month for each new story, you can read more of my Bible stories right now on Patreon.
Continue reading Bible storiesDo workers deserve payment?
It is written: Workers deserve their wages. Payment for work is not an optional gift; it’s an obligation. After all, the whole point of working is to be able to reap the benefits. If even people who don’t work have a right to be fed, how much more those who do? God does not approve when people make other people work for nothing. You must pay your workers without delay, or God will take away everything you have.
Continue reading Do workers deserve payment?
The Story of Cain and Abel—
The Picky Eater
Adam and Eve’s first two sons were Cain, who grew plants, and Abel, who raised animals. They offered some of their plants and animals to God, but God only liked Abel’s meat, and didn’t like Cain’s fruits. Cain got very angry, and the all-knowing God couldn’t figure out why.
Continue reading The Story of Cain and Abel—The Picky Eater
Should people do good things publicly?
Yes.
It is written: God’s people should let their light shine by doing good deeds in front of others, so everyone can see how good God is. They should do what is right in view of everyone, displaying their good works to both believers and nonbelievers. Hiding your good deeds would be stupid,6 like lighting a lamp only to cover it up. Only evil people are afraid to let their deeds be exposed.
Continue reading Should people do good things publicly?Sex partners the Bible doesn’t forbid
The Bible has a lot of rules about who you shouldn’t have sex with. There are whole chapters devoted to the subject. But there are also a lot of sex rules surprisingly absent from the Bible. In this post, I’ll be listing some of the latter.
Important note: By including something on this list, I am not necessarily saying it should be forbidden, nor am I necessarily saying it should not be forbidden. I am including both acceptable acts and unacceptable acts in this list.
The things that should be forbidden are interesting to note because you’d think a supposedly good and infallible God wouldn’t forget to include those things in his laws. There are some pretty important rules missing!
And the things that should not be forbidden are also interesting because there are probably a lot of people who think it’s wrong to do some of these things, but the only reason they have for that belief is the false assumption that those things are forbidden by the Bible.
So here’s the list. As far as I can tell, there are no rules in the Bible7 against having sex with…
Continue reading Sex partners the Bible doesn’t forbid