Read The Scriptures
And Become An Atheist
Lynn Anderson
From: "Lynn Andersen"
To: "Positive Atheism" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 21, 2001 7:54 AM
Subject: The Bible
Dear Cliff,
My first time writing to you. For several weeks I've been enjoying everything on the site. In my opinion, you have the greatest site I've found.
You probably saw David Gibson's article "We Revere the Bible ... We Don't Read It." It caused me to rethink my early teen years about four decades ago. At that time, I went through several years of devout religious faith (Mormonism).
My travels from theism to atheism were actually launched, I think, as a result of reading the scriptures. After much reading of The Book of Mormon, I finally faced the fact that all I read was nonsensical. I really fought against that fact. The Bible soon joined the list of the unbelievable. My question to you:
Is there any other book you can think of that would do more to save young and old from religion than the Holy Bible? I'm wondering if it wouldn't be a great idea to actually force kids to read that book. I mean really read it. Not just the selected stories but to actually have to think while reading in order to pass exams. Make them consider the kindness of Jehovah in sending the she bears to devour children only for insulting the prophet's baldness.
Just wondering about your opinion. With all the great books by noted scientists and other thinkers, without the nonsense I discovered in the scriptures, doubt if I could have left the throngs. Thanks for you consideration.
Helaman
From: "Positive Atheism Magazine" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
To: "Lynn Andersen"
Subject: Re: The Bible
Date: Sunday, January 21, 2001 1:35 PM
Many have considered the Bible to be the single most frequent cause of atheism. This opinion dates back to shortly after Wycliffe was burned at the stake for translating it into English and publishing it far and wide.
| I am fond of saying that reading the Bible turned me into an atheist. -- Ruth Hurmence Green It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand. |
Hope you've checked out our National Bible Week Poster. Sometimes I just grab my stapler and post a few of them on telephone poles and the like -- just to get it out of my system. As for Gibson's article, it touts the newer, simpler "translations" underwritten usually by Evangelical Bible Fundamentalists such as Pat Robertson and Zondervan Publishing. I have made quite a study of biblical errancy, and have noticed that these newer "translations" tend to "fix" a lot of the problems, and usually do so without any justification other than their presupposition that the "original" work came to us without error: in several cases that I have found, there is little or no textual or manuscript justification for the changes. Check out my original discussion in "Atheism: A Position of Convenience?" with Mike Boston, as I discovered this discrepancy while doing the research for this piece. There's some further work in this area in "Gospel Contradictions" with Kameron Schulz and also in "On Quoting The Bible Out Of Context" with Matthew Rupert, which repeats part of my discussion in the Schulz piece.
As for the Book of Mormon, Mark Twain called it "chloroform in print" and said that if they removed all occurrences of the phrase "And it came to pass," it would be reduced to a mere pamphlet.
Cliff Walker
"Positive Atheism" Magazine
Five years of service to
people with no reason to believe
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