After some research, talking to the clergy of the Big 3, and a few years spent as a Zen Buddhist, I finally realized the worst thing religions do is make children believe religions have the answer. Because, in the end, the only thing believers care about is that we believe something, anything.

Not believing in the supernatural really freaks them out. If you believe in something, they have something to work with, but if you find the entirety of the supernatural or metaphysical fantasy to be nothing more than a fantasy, they are at a complete loss as to how to deal with you. Other than freaking out and screaming unintelligible slurs and condemnation.

Not believing anything, threatens everything they believe.

This is why they like to insist that Atheism is a religion, it just makes it easier to understand.

New International Version (NIV)
20 There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Atheism/Selected_quote

There are many gods, called the Elohim (or some such, based on various translations) who created the universe, including mankind. It was only after that when Yahweh, aka The Lord God and simply one of the Elohim, decided to take a corner of Missouri (according to some accounts), turned it into the Garden of Eden, and made his own little hoomans known as Adam and Steve, er… sorry, Adam and Eve.

It’s the descendants of Adam and Eve who are the chosen people of Yahweh and the rest of us don’t have to give a flying fuck about any of the drivel in the Holy Babble.

Further evidence for the panoply of gods known as the Elohim can be found in Yahweh’s commandment that states, “Thou shalt have no other gods *before* me” (emphasis added).

I made a private vow to never touch that stuff again.

When that plague of locusts hits they’ll be beggin’ for the likes of Gargamel and Azreal!

I’ve always felt the biggest problem for the bible’s credibility as a divinely inspired document was that the quality of the storytelling is so variable.  I mean, Jonah’s a classic epic fable.  But then you get fifty pages of genealogy and food service industry regulation.  Anything that was genuinely the word of god ought to need less copy editing.

If it did, it would have been about how horrendous that monstrous book is and how no one except perhaps a historian should ever read it again.

Anyway, I find the incredibly few bits Craig picked out of his readings to be the least interesting parts of the Bible – they are all the parts that are well known and least instructive or educational.

My favorite passage is the Jephthah episode.  Guy wants to win a battle. Guy “bargains” with Yahweh. Of his own accord, he promises to sacrifice whomever first comes through his house’s door to greet him, if God will just let him win this battle (what could go wrong?). Guy wins battle. Guy goes home. Oops! His only begotten daughter walks through that door to greet him. :picardfacepalm: With regret, guy kills daughter (no bargaining here?).  Well, a promise is a promise. Anyway, it gives an insight into what an all-loving, all-knowing god wants: he’ll abet you murdering people, but you really should murder your family, too.

You know what I find profoundly disturbing?  Modern dogma in fundamentalist circles predicates that the Lot story is about homosexuality, but it’s not, so say the religious moderates, it’s about hospitality.
Yet an essential part of Lot’s hospitality was throwing out his young, virginal, basically worthless daughters as carrion to the mindless salivating zombies.

In either interpretation, uppercase and bold, WTF?

And let’s not start about Lot’s wife turning into a salt pillar, just for the unpardonable sin of glancing back in an impulse of completely justifiable curiosity.

Joking aside, some obscure books in there are worth a gander to me, stuff like Joshua, Judges and Ruth, Ezra and Esther.  The Minor Prophets as well.  The Songs Of Solomon is ancient, weird sexiness.  The laws and codes of conduct in Numbers, Leviticus and Deuteronomy are also weirdness itself.

But wait till you get to Samuel, Kings and Chronicles, that could REALLY slow you down a bit, it gets more than a bit repetitious.
If you noticed I only mentioned the Old Testament, it’s because Paul takes up most of the New Testament, and I don’t much care for the man.  In my view, the New Testament should have been The Gospels and THAT’S IT.  This would have saved a whole lot of people a whole lot of grief throughout the ages.

Now here’s a true blue, serious question:  which version, Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox?

One last thing, unrelated but in a similar vein and pretty damned cool, a guy did a drawing for every page of Moby Dick, I may have originally read about it here, but can’t remember.  Anyway, here’s the link, the guy is now tackling Joseph Conrad’s “Heart Of Darkness”.

http://everypageofmobydick.blogspot.mx/search/label/works%3A%20moby-dick%20%28an%20illustration%20for%20every%20page%29