I have in recent months seen a couple of videos in which some naturalist or atheist or etc. agrees that the Bible is well written. I believe one should never concede this point and it is a point that the defenders of delusion like to insist on. I want to first point out why they insist on it, then I will defend the thesis that the book called book about a god named god and his son named son of god is not a well written book.
The reason theists, apologists etc. want it to be agreed that it is a well written book is because if it is not well written, it argues against the book's being divinely inspired. The argument they are trying to dodge is this one:
1 If the Bible was divinely inspired, it would be well written.
2 The Bible is not well written.
3 Therefore, the Bible is not divinely inspired.
The apologist/church rhetor hopes no one will ever assert the second premise above. I urge all enemies of authoritarian irrationality to assert the second premise above often and in front of all persons. Say it in front of your neighbor's kids. Give people permission to admit to themselves that the Bible is in fact a poorly written document. They know this from what little they have read from it, or had read to them. They know it is bad writing in their hearts, but everyone is trained to call the whole book beautiful and inspiring and deep and wise and so on. It is actually none of those things.
There are no beautiful stories in the bible and hardly any beautiful feelings. Most of the stories are ugly if not outright gross. The ones that are not exactly ugly or gross are still far from beautiful stories. Sentences in the bible can be quite difficult to read, and whole passages can be opaque due to this problem. Wooden dialogue, stilted action, very little character development, especially in the New Testament.
As for the cast of characters, well, the bible only discusses believers, church goers, sots of god, dupes of the divine, etc. All of the characters exhibit the same vice: being religiously worried all the time. There are no unworried, relaxed, easy-going religious characters. And when you think about it, such a character could not be a religious character at all. To be a religious character, one must be religiously earnest, religiously bothered, religiously driven. A regular person, who does not take religion more seriously than a ball game simply cannot be a religious character.
At the ancient Olympics, there were bull sacrifices in which the sacrificial bull was not entirely burned to a cinder, but instead cooked for a feast. When the parts were distributed, the priests got the legs and tails. The feasters got the best cuts of meat. That is the proper attitude toward religion. The Greek attitude. When the priest is overvalued, religion ceases to serve a public purpose and begins to serve ever more exclusively private interests. The Greeks seem to know that.
Making religion overly important, raising priests above scientists, mathematicians, statesmen, doctors, lawyers, poets and philosophers -- this is madness, and it is pure bible.
