So, today we're going to talk about a book that roughly 2. 4 billion people on Earth consider to be the literal word of an all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect God. A book that has shaped laws, wars, cultures, and entire civilizations.
A book that people have killed for, died for, and built their entire lives around. And some of it is genuinely beautiful. Some of it is historically interesting.
Some of it has real poetic value. But then, there are other parts. Parts that when you actually sit down and read them carefully, make you wonder how anyone got through them with a straight face.
Not because we're being disrespectful, not because we're trying to be edgy, but because if this is genuinely the word of a perfect, omniscient creator of the universe, then some of these verses deserve some very serious questions. Let's start at the very beginning. Genesis, the opening act of the whole show.
God creates everything in 6 days and rests on the 7th. Fine. But then, in Genesis 1, he creates humans after plants and animals.
Then, in Genesis 2, he creates man first, then plants, then animals, then woman. Same book, two chapters apart, completely different order. If you handed this into a high school history class as a timeline, your teacher would hand it back with red pen all over it.
This isn't a minor detail. This is the foundational story of all human existence, according to the Bible, and it contradicts itself before you've even finished the second chapter. Now, let's talk about Noah.
Genesis 6 tells us God looked at the world and was deeply troubled that humans had become wicked. He decided the best solution was to drown every single living thing on Earth. Every man, woman, child, infant, animal, bird, insect.
All of it. Gone. Except Noah, his family, and two of every animal.
Here's where it gets interesting. God tells Noah to build an ark. The dimensions given are about 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high.
A cubit is roughly 18 in, which gives us a boat about 450 ft long. That sounds big. But scientists who have actually studied this estimate there are somewhere between 8 and 10 million species of animals on Earth.
Even if you only count land animals and birds, you're still looking at hundreds of thousands of species. Two of each means hundreds of thousands of animals crammed onto one wooden boat. The largest wooden ships ever built by humans in all of history have struggled to stay structurally sound past about 300 ft because wood flexes and warps in water.
Naval engineers will tell you a wooden boat that size would literally fall apart in the ocean. And then, there's the food. Where did they store enough food for every animal for 40 days and nights of rain, plus however long they were floating?
Where did the polar bear's ice come from? What did the koalas eat when they ran out of eucalyptus? What did the thousands of species of carnivores eat without eating each other or the other animals?
And after the flood, when two penguins somehow waddled off the boat, how did they get back to Antarctica? These aren't gotcha questions. These are just logical questions any curious 10-year-old might ask.
Now, let's move to Leviticus. Oh, Leviticus. This is the book that a lot of religious people today use to condemn homosexuality.
Leviticus 18:22 says a man lying with another man is an abomination, and that verse gets quoted constantly in culture war debates. But the very same book, just a few chapters earlier, also says in Leviticus 11 that eating shellfish is an abomination. Same word, same level of prohibition, yet nobody is standing outside Red Lobster with protest signs.
Leviticus also says you cannot wear clothing made of two different kinds of fabric. That's Leviticus 19:19. Most people reading this right now are probably wearing a cotton-polyester blend.
According to the same book of the Bible being used to argue about modern social issues, that shirt is a sin. Leviticus also says that if a man sells his daughter as a slave, there are specific rules about how that should work. Not that it shouldn't happen, just how it should be handled.
Exodus 21 gets into the finer points of slave ownership in general, including that if you beat your slave and they survive for a day or two before dying from the beating, you're not really guilty of anything because the slave was your property. The word of a perfect, loving God, everyone. Then there's Numbers 5.
This one is genuinely remarkable. God gives Moses a law for dealing with a husband who suspects his wife of cheating, even if he has no actual proof. The wife is taken to a priest.
The priest takes holy water and mixes it with dust from the floor of the tabernacle. The woman drinks this mixture. If she's guilty, her abdomen will swell and her thigh will waste away.
If she's innocent, nothing happens. This is essentially a magical poison test. It's like a witch trial dressed up in religious language, and it's in the same book that people consider to be the revealed truth of a being who created the laws of biochemistry, neuroscience, and physics.
The being who designed DNA thought the best way to detect adultery was a dirt-water cocktail. Let's talk about Psalm 137 for a moment because this one really catches people off guard when they read it in full. The psalm starts beautifully.
It's about the Israelites in exile by the rivers of Babylon. It's genuinely moving poetry about longing for home. People have turned it into songs.
It's lovely. And then, it ends with verse 9, which says, "Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks. " That's in the Bible.
That is in the Psalms, which are basically the Bible's book of poetry and worship songs. Right there, in a book considered sacred scripture, is a sentence celebrating the murder of babies by smashing them on rocks, and the word used is happy. It describes this act as something that brings happiness.
Now, let's get to the New Testament because people often assume that's where things get more reasonable. Matthew 5:29. Jesus himself is speaking here.
He says, "If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. " And Matthew 5:30 says the same about your hand.
Cut it off, throw it away. Better to lose your hand than go to hell. Now, most Christians will say this is metaphorical.
Jesus is being hyperbolic to make a point. Fine, maybe. But here's the problem.
Throughout history, some Christians took this literally. Some early church figures actually did mutilate themselves based on these verses. Origen of Alexandria, one of the most influential early Christian theologians, reportedly castrated himself based on Matthew 19:12, where Jesus talks about men who made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven.
When your scripture is ambiguous enough that serious, devoted, intelligent followers took it to mean self-mutilation, that's a problem with the text. Then there's Mark 11. Jesus is walking along and he's hungry.
He sees a fig tree in the distance. He walks up to it, and the tree has no fruit because the text specifically tells us it was not the season for figs. Jesus then curses the fig tree for not having figs when it was literally not the time for figs to grow.
The next morning, the disciples notice the tree has withered and died. The son of God, who according to Christian theology is also God, and therefore created fig trees and the seasons, killed a fig tree for following the laws of nature that he designed because he was hungry. This is the moment a lot of Bible readers do a double-take.
Let's talk about 1 Timothy 2:12. This is the verse that says women are not permitted to teach or to have authority over men. They must be quiet.
This is the scripture that has been used for centuries to keep women out of pulpits, out of leadership positions, and in subordinate roles. And it's still being used today, in 2024, in thousands of churches around the world. The verse comes right after verse 11, which says women should learn in quietness and full submission.
And it's followed by verse 13, which explains the reason, because Adam was formed first, then Eve. And then verse 14, which says Eve was deceived, not Adam. So, the theological argument for silencing half the human population is based on the order in which two mythological people were created and the fact that a woman was tricked by a talking snake.
Speaking of talking animals, Numbers 22. Balaam is riding his donkey, and the donkey stops because it sees an angel blocking the road that Balaam can't see. Balaam beats the donkey three times.
Then God opens the donkey's mouth, and the donkey talks. It says, and this is a real quote, "What have I done to you to make me beat me these three times? " And Balaam answers the donkey.
He has a full conversation with his donkey. He's not surprised. He doesn't seem alarmed that his donkey just spoke to him in his own language.
He just argues back. The passage then has Balaam complain to the donkey about being made to look foolish. The donkey's argument is essentially, "Have I not been a good donkey up until now?
" And apparently, Balaam found this convincing. This is in the same book that people point to when they want to understand the origins of morality and the nature of the universe. Then there's the story in Judges 19.
This one is so disturbing that most people in church have never heard it preached from a pulpit. A Levite and his concubine are staying the night in a town. Men of the town come and surround the house demanding the Levite come out so they can gang assault him.
The owner of the house, trying to protect his male guest, offers the men his own virgin daughter and the Levite's concubine instead. The Levite then takes his concubine and shoves her out the door to the mob. She's assaulted all night and found dead on the doorstep in the morning.
This story is just told. There is no divine condemnation of what happened. No angel comes down.
God does not intervene. There is no "And God said this was wrong. " It's just presented as events that occurred.
In fact, the Levite then cuts her body into 12 pieces and sends them around Israel as a message. And yet this book is handed to children in Sunday school. Let's end with Revelation because no discussion of remarkable Bible content is complete without it.
Revelation 9 describes locusts that come out of the smoke of the abyss. These are not regular locusts. They have human faces, women's hair, lions' teeth, iron breastplates, wings that sound like chariots, scorpion tails.
Their king is the angel of the abyss whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon and in Greek is Apollyon. These creatures are ordered not to harm any plants or grass, which is what locusts normally eat, but only to torture humans who do not have God's seal on their foreheads. The torture lasts five months.
It's so painful that people will want to die, but will not be able to. This is presented as prophecy, as a literal future event. Millions of people today believe this is a real thing that is going to happen in the actual physical world.
The book of Revelation also describes a dragon with seven heads and 10 horns, a beast whose number is 666, a woman clothed with the sun standing on the moon, four horsemen, a lake of fire, an angel with one foot on the sea and one on land holding a little scroll that tastes sweet but makes the stomach bitter. And all of this, every single image, every verse, every instruction about slavery and shellfish and talking donkeys and fig trees and dirt water adultery tests, is considered by billions of people to be the perfect, inherent, divinely inspired word of the creator of the universe. All we're doing is reading it.
That's it. No special tools required. Just reading the text that's actually there, asking the questions that any curious and honest person would ask, and noticing that the answers aren't as comfortable as we were told they would be.
If a book is truly from a perfect God, it should be able to survive a few questions. And if it can't, then maybe the questions were always more important than we were told.
