The following is a guest post by OpenDiary blogger Atheist Under Ur Bed. This is part of an ongoing series that will be posted each Monday. You can read the introduction to this series by clicking here.

Time once again for Monday School – “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense You Learned Yesterday!”™

I happen to live in America. Americans seem to overwhelmingly believe that the Bible is the means God chose to convey His most important laws for this life and the requirements for getting into heaven in the next.

This is extremely difficult for me to believe.

Consider:

1. The Basic Mismatch Between God And This Means

God, by common definition, is perfect: that is to say, all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful. The Bible, in contrast, is one of the most imperfect and confusing collection of words I’ve ever encountered. That such an imperfect work could be inspired by such a perfect being seems highly unlikely, to put it mildly .

2. The Unnecessary Added Complications Of Working Through Intermediaries

Why would a perfect, all-powerful God “inspire” imperfect people to write the Bible rather than write it Himself? Why would He compound all the problems inherent in sending any message through writing by adding the additional and unnecessary steps of having people pass it down orally for years and years, then write it down, then copy these writings, then try to assemble these writings correctly, then translate these writings, then distribute these writings, then have an endless succession of flawed ministers have to endlessly explain them?

3. The Terrible Flaws Of The Work Itself

The Bible consists of well over 1000 pages of small print. Phrases are repeated again and again, rather pointlessly. The same stories are told again and again, often with contradictions between them, starting in the first few pages of Genesis (which gives two separate accounts of creation) and going right through the Gospels (which give four varying accounts of Jesus’s life). No strict chronology is adhered to. At times, no order at all seems to be detectable. In short, it’s a confused mess which could benefit from a good editor, innumerable footnotes, an elaborate index, and a simple synopsis. Many mere mortals who have attempted to put forth a life philosophy have done far better than the writers of the Bible with respect to clarity, brevity, consistency, and logic. How is it that God Almighty managed to inspire such an extremely poor job?

It seems that either the Bible isn’t the work of God, or that God is flawed, or that God is purposely being deceptive and malicious. This last possibility is in fact baldly stated as one of God’s methods by the Bible itself. (See Ezekiel 20:25, as well as Mark 4:11-12.) Other passages assert that God creates evil as well as good (Isaiah 45:7; Amos 3:6). Is belief in a God like that really better than atheism? How?

The Book of Revelation is so full of indecipherable symbolism and gibberish that no one seems to have ever been able to figure out what it is really saying. Such mysticism and obscurantism seems calculated to play upon the fears of people, not enlighten them. Coming in a book that allegedly was inspired by an all-good deity who has all the answers and our best interests at heart, it amounts to an insult to the reader’s intelligence.

4. The New Testament’s Failure To Convince The Authors Of The Old Testament Of Its Claims

If the Bible is as clear and convincing a document as American Christians claim it is, why are there still radically different Jewish and Christian interpretations of what it all means? Why do the people who created the Old Testament and know it best reject the New? Why do Jews vehemently reject the Christian interpretation of the Old?

“[I]n this author’s national sample, no Jews expressed belief in original sin or expected Jesus to return someday, and only 4 percent believed that the Devil actually exists.” Ronald L. Johnston, “Religion and Society in Interaction,” p. 258.

5. The Many Different Interpretations

If, in fact, the Bible is clear, complete, and perfect, why has it inspired well over 250 distinct religious groups in the U.S., including at least 3 major types of Judaism, 27 brands of Baptists, 21 brands of Methodists, 12 brands of Lutherans, 10 brands of Presbyterians, not to mention Catholics, Episcopalians, Mormons, Christian Science adherents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists, Amish, Mennonites, Pentecostals, Nazarenes, Quakers, Calvinists, Greek Orthodox practitioners, and countless sects, cults, and splinter groups – all of which call themselves Christians and many of which hold mutually exclusive beliefs? It’s as if an allegedly “perfect” math book had inspired dozens of mutually exclusive systems of algebra – all of which claimed to be the one true way, all of which were untestable, and all of which demanded absolute “faith” from those who used them.

7. The Minority Status Of Christians And Jews

If the Bible is so clear and convincing, why are well over 60% of the world’s people neither Christian nor Jewish?

8. The Bible’s Highly Problematic Initial Release

If God does exist and if He did decide He had a message He wanted people to get, why did He send that message only to a single, small, ancient tribe in a world teeming with better choices? Why didn’t He simply broadcast that message into everybody’s head directly, the way TV news bulletins are broadcast to every TV? Wasn’t His message as important as our own news bulletins? Or have we somehow exceeded God’s power with our communications technology?

9. The Bible’s Late Release

If God’s message was so important, why did He allow untold millions of people to live and die before He even attempted to send it?

10. The Bible’s Imperfect Distribution

If God’s message is so important to both human morality and the eternal disposition of our souls, why does He permit so many people (from those who die in infancy to those who live a lifetime in illiteracy or in faraway lands) to miss out on all contact with the Bible through no fault of their own?

Once again, the Bible makes far more sense as the imperfect work of an imperfect little group of people. It simply does not make sense as the work of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God.