The Skeptics Annotated Bible (2 page)

The SAB will help those who believe in the Bible to honestly reconsider that belief. It will help those who are unfamiliar with the Bible to resist the temptation to believe. And it will help those who have already rejected the Bible defend their position.

It is time for us all to stop believing in, or pretending to believe in, a book that is so unworthy of belief.

There are fourteen categories in the SAB, with the corresponding icons and number of marked passage shown below. No attempt has been made to rate the occurrences, since what seems trivial to one person may seem important to another.

Still there are some things we can all agree on. No one doubts, for example, that 1 Samuel 15.3, Ezekiel 23.20, and Leviticus 19.18 are cruel, filthy, and good, respectively.

But many other passages are not nearly so clear. Some will think a verse is important and should be included; others that it is trivial and should be left out.

Although I would like make the SAB as comprehensive as possible, I can’t include everything. So I apply this test when deciding what to include or leave out: How would an objective reader view the passage? Would she view it as cruel, absurd, intolerant, etc.—or good? If so, I mark it accordingly. If not, I leave it out. (And when in doubt, I leave it out.)

There is a lot of overlap between the categories, so often a passage that is marked cruel will be marked unjust and intolerant as well. Take 1 Samuel 18:25-27, for example, where David buys his first wife with 200 Philistine foreskins. That passage is marked with absurdity, cruelty, sex, misogyny, family values, injustice, and contradiction icons. And I probably could have thrown in language and science and history, as well.

I’ve marked passages as I see them. On some you may agree, on others you may disagree. This is as it should be. Read each passage and decide what you think about it. That is the whole point of the SAB.

Absurdity (2178)

I’ve labeled things absurd either because they seem absurd (ridiculous or unreasonable) or because they are just plain funny.

For example, the story about Samson and the 300 foxes in Judges 15.4 is absurd (and funny), while the whole town asking Jesus to leave in Matthew 8.34 after he killed 2000 pigs is just plain funny.

Sometimes, I admit, I get a bit carried away with this. When Paul, for example, talked about “refreshing his bowels in the Lord” in his letter to Philemon, he probably didn’t mean it the way it sounds in the King James Version. But I mark it anyway, because I like the way it sounds.

Injustice (1541)

Bible-believers like to claim that we all get our morality and sense of justice from the Bible. But we don’t. None of us do.

No one believes that it is just to punish children for what their parents did, that parents should be willing to kill their children for God, or that children should be executed for disobeying their parents, to name just a few examples. And yet these are considered moral imperatives in the Bible.

In the SAB, I highlight the verses that make us all cringe today, and make us all glad that we don’t actually get our morals and sense of justice from the Bible.

Cruelty and Violence (1316)

If I had to pick a single reason for rejecting the Bible, it would be its cruelty.

It’s not the cruelty
per se
that bothers me; it’s the biblical god’s role in the cruel acts. The God of the Bible ordered Saul to kill “man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” in 1 Samuel 15.3. And the Bible contains hundreds of other cruel acts of God, any one of which, if true, would be enough for me to reject the Bible and its vicious God.

I also object to the pointless violence in the Bible, even when God doesn’t seem to be directly involved. Judges 19, for example, is one of the most disgusting stories in all literature. If God was trying to communicate something in this chapter, I’d rather not know what it was.

Intolerance (701)

If there’s a point to the Bible and to religion in general it is this: God likes some people and religious beliefs more than others.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, the Jews are his favorite people, and he despises everyone else. Even so, he only likes certain Jews. Witches, homosexuals, disobedient children, and Sabbath breakers are to be executed.

And it’s even worse in the New Testament. People with the “wrong” religious beliefs are not just killed; they are tortured forever after they die for their supposedly mistaken beliefs.

Good Stuff (507)

But isn’t there some good stuff in the Bible?

Well yes there is, although surprisingly little for such a big book. Indeed, if the bad, boring, and useless passages were removed from the Bible and only the good retained, the bible would be nothing more than a small pamphlet.

But Bible-believers are unwilling to edit the Bible. So the good verses, when not invalidated by their immediate context, are contradicted elsewhere in the Bible. There is not a single good idea in the entire Bible that is taught consistently throughout. Consequently, it is worse than useless as a moral, philosophical, political, or scientific guide.

Still, I think it is important to point out the good stuff in the Bible, and so I have highlighted the good verses and provided a “thumbs up” icon to mark them in the text.

Contradictions (462)

Contradictions seem to be the only things that believers are concerned about. God can tell Jehu to collect 70 heads in two baskets, and believers are okay with that, since the Bible is consistent on that topic. But did God kill 23,000 or 24,000 for committing whoredom with the daughters of Moab? Now
that
’s a real problem to a believer. Not that God would kill so many people for so silly a reason. Who cares about that? No, it’s the number that’s important, because the Bible must not disagree with itself.

I’ve never seen a contradiction that believers can’t resolve, at least to their own satisfaction. It could have been this way, it could have been that. That’s what it says, but that’s not what it means. It was a copyist’s error. Whatever.

Contradictions are, in my opinion, the least of the Bible’s problems. I include them for just one purpose: it shows that the Bible, whatever else it may be, is not inerrant.

How do I define inerrant? Well, I’d say something is inerrant if it has no errors.

I should tell you, though, that I don’t believe there are any inerrant books, although many come very close. My old Physical Chemistry book, for example. Written by Peter Atkins and published in 1982, that book and I spent a lot of time together when I was taking P-Chem. And though I loved the book and know of no errors in it, I don’t think it’s inerrant. I’ll bet there are a few spelling or grammatical errors and maybe a typo or two. And in its 1000+ pages there is probably an important mistake in an equation somewhere—maybe an exponent left off, a decimal misplaced, or something. And since it’s been 30 years, it could use some revising to get it caught up with recent advances in Chemistry. And, of course, as with any book, there are probably some errors in structure, presentation, and style.

But if you want to call Atkins’ book inerrant, I won’t argue about it. And I promise not to write a Skeptic’s Annotated P Chem book or anything like that. But if I did, I wouldn’t have anything to highlight and nothing to say. Atkins need not worry about my snide remarks.

There are a lot of books that come close to inerrancy, but the Bible is not one of them. And its errors are not confined to missing exponents or poor choice of words. Of all the books that I know of, the Bible is the most errant. It is by far the worst book I’ve ever read (with the possible exceptions of the Quran and the Book of Mormon). I know of no other book, for example, that commands you to kill homosexuals, Sabbath breakers, nonbelievers, rape victims who don’t cry out loud enough, relatives if they believe differently than you, etc. These are serious errors; they should be taken seriously, especially since two billion people believe the Bible to be the inerrant word God.

Although contradictions are included in the book version of the SAB (see the list in the appendix), they more thoroughly treated at the SAB website (SkepticsAnnotatedBible.com), with separate pages and cross links for each of the contradictions.