[T]he best thing a believer in any actual God can do is to admit that a lot of the Bible is hate-filled blasphemy. (Maybe God Rejects the Bible)
What Frank Schaeffer says here is obvious to any believer who has taken the time to read the Bible. Unfortunately, not many believers have done that, and those that have aren't honest enough to admit the obvious.
And believers have another problem, too. 2 Timothy 3:16 -- what Schaeffer calls "the scariest verse in the Bible."
There is a verse in Timothy that says that all Scripture is for our edification. This verse, not the many Bible stories of the many killings "ordained by God," is the scariest verse in the Bible.
But there's a good reason for an honest believer to throw out 1 and 2 Timothy anyway: they're forgeries. They weren't written by Paul as they claim to have been, so they weren't inspired by God (God didn't inspire forgers) and shouldn't have been included in scripture in the first place.
So now that we've disposed of the scariest verse, we can deal with the rest of the Bible.
There is another choice besides rejecting religion outright or adopting an all-the-Bible-is-true fundamentalism, one too rarely made The fact is too few religious people are willing to suffer the loss of approval by their religious leaders, friends and family to make this other choice: embrace faith in God by thinking for themselves and openly reject the parts of one's scriptures outright that fly in the face of fact, compassion and decency.
Reject the parts of scripture outright that fly in the face of fact, compassion and decency.
Amen to that!
