The Bible isn't just a holy book for Christians.
It's also the best tool that atheists have to turn Christians away from Christianity.
I mean, when you think of all the contradictions in the Bible, and all the stories of rape and murder.
Or the story of how God wanted Abraham to kill his son Isaac as a sacrifice in order to show his devotion;
It's kind of horrifying that so many people take this book seriously.
It's not a good book by any stretch of the imagination.
And why do so many Christians take that book seriously?
Well, a lot of them haven't actually read it.
And a lot of them have only heard sanitized versions of those stories.
And some Christians have just rationalized away all of the crazy stuff that's in there.
I mean we hear that last one all the time.
Like, oh, don't worry about that genocide, it's in the "old testament".
If Richard Dawkins did the stuff that God commands people todo in the Bible, we atheists would never hear the end of it.
But if you actually read the book, there's a good chance you're not gonna finish it without becoming an atheist if you're not on already.
It helps that the opening chapter of the book is absolutely ridiculous.
I mean, God creates light on day one but forgets to make th sun until day four.
There's also a talking snake and the idea that all the evil in the world happened because someone decided to eat an apple.
You don' have to read very far into the Bible before the warning alarms start going off in your head.
What's scary is that a lot of Christians don't see the book as a metaphor or a collection stories.
They take the book literally.
They really think that Adam and Eve are our distant ancestors. I mean, that's how deluded they are.
I mean, no one should believe this stuff.
And it doesn't get any better in the New Testament. I mean, just look at the miracles of Jesus walking on water.
Healing a paralytic man. Feeding the multitudes with a very limited amount of food.
Coming back from the dead. I mean it's unreal, literally. It's unreal; it didn't happen.
I mean, if anyone said "oh yeah, I did that exact same thing". Today, we would just say. "no you didn't". We would call that bullshit.
Just because these stories took place supposedly, you know, 2000 years ago, it doesn't make it any more legitimate.
If you read the Bible for the first time as an adult, and you had never heard any of these stories before.
you know what your reaction would be. It'd be like, you got to be kidding me.
People actually believe this? But it turns out, yeah, a lot of people believe this stuff and it's because they were indoctrinated in it from childbirth.
They just grow up with these stories, so they just assume they are real.
What you have to do is look at these stories with fresh eyes, as if you have never heard them before.
And atheists do that really well. And that's why reading the Bible, to me anyway, is so much more powerful than the God Delusion when it comes to shedding your faith.
When you actually read it, you realize the Bible is full of sexism, and violence, and bad science.
And if you have to wade through all that to find the wisdom, ah, maybe you need to find another guidebook to you life.
I think Bill Maher made this analogy, before, but, if you saw a barrel of apples and the whole top was where all the rotten brown ones
and there were only a couple good green ones on the inside, you wouldn't say "this barrel is awesome".
No, you would say "you know what. I think I live without apples". That's what the Bible is like.
The Bible is also like a mirage in the desert when you're desparte for water.
It looks amazing from a distance. The idea of it is so powerful that you'll keep going after it no matter what condition you're in.
But it turns out, there is no substance there at all.
My name is Hemant Metha and I write at friendlyatheist.com.
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