Giving Ecclesiastes too much credit

In previous posts I've said that Ecclesiastes is the best book (and pretty much the only good book) in the Bible. And I still think that's true.

But I may have given it too much credit. There's a lot of crazy stuff that I passed over when highlighting Ecclesiastes. (Once you decide that a biblical book is "good" it's easy to read it like a believer and ignore the bad stuff.)

Here, for example, are some verses that were previously unmarked in the SAB that Steve Weeks recently pointed out to me.  (I've since added them to absurdity.)

The fool foldeth his hands together, and eateth his own flesh. 4:5

Let thy garments be always white; and let thy head lack no ointment. 9:8

A wise man's heart is at his right hand; but a fool's heart at his left. 10:2

Give a portion to seven, and also to eight; for thou knowest not what evil shall be upon the earth. 11:2

So take another look at the Bible's best book and see what you find. Are there other verses that you think should be highlighted? If so, let me know in the comments.

The Best Book in the Bible (revisited again)

(Updated to include the recent Genesis - Ecclesiastes SAB revision.)

In my last post I tried to find a way to measure the goodness of the books in the "Good Book", but I wasn't completely satisfied with the results. So here's one more try. Let me know if you have any suggestions.

In the SAB, I identify the Bible's verses that contain good advice about how we should live our lives, whatever our religious views might be. For example, I think it's a good idea to try, at least as much as possible, to treat others kindly. So I include Leviticus 19:18 ("Love thy neighbor as thyself") in the "Good Stuff". Of course, not all the verses that I've marked good are as good as this verse, but I marked them good because they seemed (at least somewhat) good to me.

So take a look at the SAB's good stuff to see if you agree, at least most of the time, that the verses that I've marked good are, in fact, good. If so, then the following analysis should be reasonable for you as well.

I began my analysis by plotting the number of good things in each book of the Bible. (Of the 66 books in the Bible, there were 30 in which I could find nothing good.)

When size is taken into account, Ecclesiastes is the best (36.0 good passages/ 100 verses), with Proverbs second at 20.4. So Ecclesiastes has more good stuff (per 100 verses) than any other book in the Bible.

But what about all the bad stuff in the Bible? Shouldn't we try to find a way to rate the goodness of a book by weighing both the book's good and bad?

The simplest solution, I think, is to count up the good things in each book and subtract the bad. The result is the net good. (I totaled cruelty, injustice, intolerance, bad family values, insults to women and homosexuals to get the number of bad things, since the verses marked with these categories are all morally objectionable.)

When I did that, I found that there are only three good books in the Bible: Ecclesiastes (of course), Proverbs, and James. Three others have a zero net goodness. The other 60 books are all more bad than good.

Other goodness metrics that might be useful are the percentage of marked passages that are good and the net good number of passages per 100 verses. Since there are only three books with a positive net goodness, we can limit our analysis to these three.

Here is a table that summarizes the data.

	Ecclesiastes	Proverbs	James
Good	80	187	13
Bad	1	75	9
Net good	79	112	4
verses	222	915	108
net good/100 verses	35.6	12.2	3.7
Percent good of (good and bad) highlighted verses	98.8	71.4	59.1
good/bad	80	2.5	1.4

So no matter how you look at it, Ecclesiastes is by far the best (and pretty much the only good) book in the the Bible.

The Best Book in the Bible

(Re-post after revising Genesis - Ecclesiastes. I'll do it again when I get through Revelation.)

What is the best book in the Bible?

Well, that, of course, depends on how you define "best".

One way to try to determine it, though, would be to identify all the passages in the Bible that contain ideas that you consider good, and then compare the number of good passages found in each book of the Bible.

That's easy for me to do, since I have already marked as "good stuff" everything I can honestly call good in the Bible. Here are the Bible's books ranked according to the number of good passages.

So Proverbs, at 187, has the most good stuff.

But Proverbs is a fairly large book, with 31 chapters and 915 verses. How would it look if we adjusted the good stuff rankings to acount for the size of the book?

Here's the list when adjusted for size (number of good passages per 100 verses).

When we adjust for size, then, Ecclesiastes is by far the best book in the Bible (36.0 good passages / 100 verses).

(The overall average for the Bible is 1.5 good passages / 100 verses.)

America's favorite book

According to a new Harris poll, America's favorite book is a book most Americans have never read -- the Bible.

Richard Dawkins once famously said that "if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)." The same could be said about someone whose favorite book is the Bible.

Of course most people who that say about the Bible have never read it and are therefore ignorant of its contents. But anyone who has actually read the Bible and still considers it her favorite would fall into one of Dawkins' other categories: stupid (consider the absurdities), insane (Have you read Revelation lately?) or wicked (approving of 1 Samuel 15:2-3 among hundreds of other cruelties).

It's time to stop pretending that the Bible is a good book. It isn't. (Except for Ecclesiastes.)

If those of us who have read the Bible stop calling it good, maybe ignorant people who have never read it will stop believing it to be good (their favorite book, even), leaving the Bible to those who could honestly call it their favorite book: the stupid, the insane, and the wicked.