uberkuh

You might point out to a Christian sometime that some things just don’t add up in the Bible. “There are contradictions everywhere,” you might argue. But you would be wasting your time, because logic rarely ever applies to a Christian. To a Christian, the Bible is infallible, plain and simple. It never makes a mistake. It can’t, because it was written by God and God never makes a mistake. And it never lies, because God would never tell one of his creations only part of the truth (even though, by definition, he always knows more than we can comprehend).

So it makes sense that the Bible has to be perfect, right? Wrong, and here’s why. The Bible was written by imperfect people. The Bible was, according to it, dictated to imperfect people by a perfect God, either directly or indirectly through the medium of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, in case you’ve been living under a rock, is a tiny little invisibile translation device that gets implanted into the base of a person’s skull the moment he or she converts to Christianity. Convert and get a free upgrade!

And because the Bible was written by imperfect people, it has to have some imperfections of its own, either injected into it by a poor speller with a fifth-grade education, which was all-too-common in the days before No Child Left Behind, or about it as it got communicated to millions and millions of people around the world in many different languages. Somewhere along the way, you know, without a doubt, that some idiot fucked up somewhere and made a mistake when interpreting a story that came to be included in the Bible. Or, worse, it’s probably the case that the star of a story in the Bible embellished that story to ensure future fame.

For instance, suppose that Jonah never actually lived inside of a whale. Suppose the truth of the matter is that Jonah got his leg bitten off by a shark and lived to tell about it. Only, to tell about it and prove to his friends and family that his manhood remained intact, he had to transform his story into, shall we say, a tall tale and boast that it wasn’t only his leg that got swallowed up inside the mouth of a gigantic sea creature. It was his entire body! And that gigantic sea creature wasn’t a shark the size of his camel. No! It was a gigantic killer whale the size of his house!

But it really doesn’t matter what happened, because something, somewhere in the Bible is bound to be wrong, even if just a little bit. You know it and I know it. And if you really press a Christian to admit it, he or she will tell you that he or she knows it. Because it’s common sense that people make mistakes and nothing God says or does can cure that. Obviously.