Ah the Bible. This particular version is the King James version of 1611. Contained within this volume are illustrations of biblical passages, a history of the King James Translation as a whole, and the entire text of the Bible in tiny print. I guess I have a love/hate relationship with this book, since a great deal of it has always confused and angered me. Perhaps wiser people than I can enlighten me about the purpose of hell to a loving and all forgiving God. But no matter, we have Jesus right? The guy that cursed a fig tree for no reason.

Okay, I would say I am a religious skeptic, but that would be an understatement. I started my doubts when I was around ten or eleven years of age. Back then I distinctly remember finding Church service depressing. Oh don't get me wrong, it was boring, but that isn't what bothered me. I hated the way of worship itself. All the bowing and scraping to the "All Mighty God" seemed stupid to me. The tone is all wrong for what we are saying. What evidence is there of a God that actually cares for us one whit? Isn't God supposed to want our happiness? Why isn't Church fun? These are the things that bothered me as a child. Even if I was to pray, what does that mean to God at all? It's not like anything ever happened due to prayer. It can't be proven to have any effect, and in some cases it is actually detrimental. Take the Christian Scientist. Certainly prayer offers a piece of mind, a crutch to stand on, hope for the future, but healing a disease? Ridiculous. My great-grandfather was a Christian Scientist. He had a massive buildup of water in his lungs and body, but refused to go to a doctor. Then my great-grandmother went and said she was leaving him if he didn't go since she didn't want to go and bury another husband. The doctors removed over forty pounds of fluid from his body.

So these are the things that bothered me as a child. Take the Biblical story of the Fall of Mankind for instance. How in the seven seas does God not know what is happening to his creation at any given time if he is supposed to be omniscient? Does that mean something other than knowing everything that is to happen? Why does he ask these stupid questions? Doesn't he know that some random demon or creature in the form of a snake told Eve to eat a fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? Moreover, if he is Omniscient, what does that do to Free Will? This is only the story of the fall, I'm just getting started.

So God made it so that childbirth would be painful. I think some web cartoonist summed it up best when they had Eve sardonically comment that having a child come out of your vagina was going to hurt now and not before. So anyway, we have more of the Bible being vague and useless. Where do the other people come from? Are you seriously telling me that Eve had enough sex with Adam to populate entire villages? Or did God make more human beings that aren't mentioned? I guess the bible does mention that Adam lived for ... what was that figure... something around 900 years, so they might have had time. Still kind of disturbing with all of the incest though.

Then we get to Abraham. So God blesses him in his old age with a son, and in a typically Bipolar manner demands that Abraham kill him as a sacrifice. I know this is written off as some kind of test of faith, but I can't help feeling from this and other stories that God just enjoys screwing with people. Take Job for instance. Job was all happy and a great follower of God. Then the Devil who just so happens to be on speaking terms with God has a little talk and convinces God to "taketh away." Horrible things happen to Job, his family is killed, maimed and enslaved. His property is destroyed or killed. He develops horrible boils and disfiguring ailments that make his life a terrible living hell. Then he continues worshiping God and God is all like "This was only a test of the emergency broadcast system" and gives him back all of his stuff. As if a family can be replaced.

Did I miss Noah? I probably missed Noah. So God commands some guy named Noah to build a giant boat to put all the beasts of land and air into so that God can do a clean reinstall of the Earth. Noah does this. His boat is not only big enough to house all of the beasts, but also food for them and his family. I don't know how long a cubit is, but I was told that it was roughly the distance from your elbow to the tip of your middle finger. I just never believed that a boat like that could hold all of creation.

So we get to Lot. Sodom and Gomorrah were cities back in the day. God hated them though and wanted to destroy them, since he is filled with so much love. So God spares Lot and his family, but tells them not to look back or else. So God doesn't understand human nature huh? God doesn't realize that when your home is being destroyed by fire from the sky that people are going to look at the spectacle? So God turns Lot's Wife (who doesn't even get the dignity of a name) into a pillar of salt. Seems like God just wanted an excuse to go and turn someone into a pillar of salt to me. That doesn't end the tale of Lot though. His daughters want some offspring and get their father drunk enough to sleep with both of them. Read that sentence again. Lot's daughters somehow get Lot so drunk that he doesn't realize he is having sex with them. And God doesn't care, or at least he doesn't seem to.

New testament stuff is all good though right? Right. Jesus talks about how the fires of hell will consume you and how you should abandon everything to follow him for no reason. One minute he talks of turning the other cheek and in the next he is whipping people that set up shop in "his father's house." Seems legit. Most of the New Testament is about the early Church right? Letters to Bishops and other stories. Then you have The Revelation of St. John the Divine, which I guess I thought was cool when I was younger. The weird drug fueled beasts, the end of days, blah blah... all of that stuff seemed really cool I guess. I was a pretty weird kid. His other miracles are suspect too. Like the multiplication of loaves and fishes. They even tried to explain that miracle to me by saying that it was the miracle of sharing. He did the water to wine thing though right? The raising of the dead? Making the blind to see? Curing leprosy? Wow. Couldn't he do something better? Flying might be neat. Though I guess he did calm a storm and walk on water.

Then there is the whole Judas thing. So basically in order for Jesus to even die for our sins, someone had to be the heel right? Why isn't he venerated as the greatest of the apostles, the only one that followed through with his destiny and allowed us to be saved? Peter denied being Jesus' friend three times, none of the Apostles besides John were with him in his time of need. Oh that's right, he "betrayed" Jesus for silver. Blah. This is enough for the ultimate forgiveness of putting him in the ninth circle of Hell, where he is chewed on by one of Satan's three mouths for all eternity. He loves you so much after all. Then again, I am taking that scene from Inferno by Dante...

So basically, I really doubt that Jesus was the son of God born of a virgin. I don't doubt that he existed, since there might be census records and things. His acts don't really make me believe, and the acts done in his name aren't really flattering his memory.

So all in all, the Bible is ... okay. There is stuff in there that might have happened with artistic license. But it is quite a silly book to base a faith on when someone is capable of reading what it says. Two out of five, miiiiiight read again. Who knows. ( )