Here is the widely held opinion of a well known evangelical about the Bible as the Word of God. Jerry Falwell wrote this in Finding Inner Peace and Strength:

The Bible is the inerrant ... word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible, without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc.

That’s a thoroughly absurd statement to make about ANY out of date text. But what happens to the inerrant Word of God when the translation used needs to be changed to a different version. Jerry Falwell was one of the people who blamed 9/11 on gays and lesbians, among other things. He was certainly against anything done by or originated by a homosexual.

Yet people like him in the Family Research Council, the Christian Coalition and Americans for Truth About Homosexuality have all urged their members to stop reading what used to be the inerrant Word of God, the King James Bible, because they have only just realized that King James was a homosexual, with an Earl and a Duke as lovers. Ignorance of history has its own rewards.

Prejudice has to rule however. You may remember Gary Bauer, who announced his presidential candidacy for 2000 and who is very right wing. He said, “Anything that has been commissioned by a homosexual has obviously been tainted in some way.” So maybe it wasn’t the true Word of God that has been used to persecute people for the last four hundred years? They can’t have it both ways. Every translation is tainted by the assumptions of the translators. Just look at the Jehovah’s Witnesses New World version where Jesus is impaled on a stake instead of being crucified on a cross. Some other, different translation is now going to become the inerrant Word of God, and a fat lot of sense that makes.

I’m really interested in which version is going to have the honor. I’ve read 26 translations of the Bible in English and a lot of it in French, Welsh, Spanish, and Esperanto. They are all different in numerous ways. Who decides? Probably not a homosexual, even if he is a stunningly brilliant scholar of the various languages and histories involved. The army got rid of most of their people who could speak Arabic and other languages when they got rid of the homosexuals. That caused problems. Evangelicals are likely to do the same.

I can recommend the translation of Fenton. He became fed up with all the different meanings in the different translations, each group claiming that theirs was the only true one. So he studied Chaldean and Hebrew and Greek until he could read them like a newspaper and then translated the whole of the Bible by himself. A brilliant piece of work.

In his translation, made without a bias to the previous versions, many problems are resolved, including such problems as the miracle of the whale swallowing Jonah and the cock crowing to tell Peter what a bad thing he had done. No domestic farm animals were allowed near the Temple for many blocks. There were no cockerels to crow.

When Fenton read the Jonah story without prejudice he realized that of a couple of possible meanings the translators had without good cause chosen the one that produced a miracle. In Fenton’s translation Jonah was thrown overboard and later picked up by a ship named The Great Fish. He was allowed to stay in the hold, the belly of the Fish, and put ashore at their next port of call which was Nineveh. God got him back to Nineveh in spite of his efforts. That’s enough of a miracle. You don’t need a marine mammal that can’t swallow anything larger than a shrimp to suddenly be able to swallow a full grown man.

The cock crowing always bothered me until I read Fenton. Palestine was an occupied country under Roman occupation. Next to the Temple was the Antonine fortress that always had a minimum of 500 Roman legionaries in it. Every country that has foreign army bases is used to hearing the bugle calls for Reveille and Lights Out and other signals. Every country has its own name for them. Roman slang for the trumpet call signaling the morning changing of the guard was The Gallus, the cockerel, the rooster who never lets a sunrise slip past him. That trumpet call would be heard all over town. Probably everybody in Jerusalem used that army slang word for the early morning call.

I’ve just put those introductory words in to highlight a problem that faces America, and it’s a problem nobody is going to talk about in the media. Over 80% of people polled at several times and places in this country say that they regard the Bible as either the straight up exact and literally true Word of God, or it was inspired by God. The problem as I see it is that people who believe that can be made to believe anything. As the famous old lady said, “Yes, I believe the Bible when it said that Jonah was swallowed by the whale. And if it said that the whale was swallowed by Jonah I’d believe that too.” She wasn’t brought up on Fenton.

So, it is important that we others know what is important to these politically influential people who believe that the Bible is the Word of God. Recently one of their spokesmen spoke out against another prominent evangelical who thought that just maybe gay marriage could be a legitimate civil ceremony. That unfortunate person was Cizik who opined that maybe global warming was more important than the gay marriage issue. He was forced to resign from his appointments and Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council mentioned above, complained in a letter to the NAE leadership that Cizik was "using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time," which they defined as abortion, homosexuality and sexual morality.

So the great moral issues of our time are not genocide, or multiple wars, or corruption in financial and political circles that destroys the health and happiness of millions of people. Not included in the great moral issues are the millions of people without health insurance, those made homeless by the mortgage fiasco, the bugging, surveillance and arresting of innocent people, the famines, politicians who lie as standard operating procedure, and a myriad other matters of global importance.

No, the important moral issues according to the Word of God believers are all concerned with the genitals of other people, and what those people are doing with them. In other words, blatant voyeurism. So let’s look briefly at what one of the Word of God editions says about such things. I use the King James version because it was the book I first learned to read and I love the language.

If you look at 1 Samuel, chapters 18 to 25 you will read of the intense love that David had for Jonathan. David’s feelings of love and his tears at the parting, his grief over the death of someone obviously his lover, much to the dismay of Jonathan’s father king Saul, are beautiful to anyone who thinks that Jesus spoke truth when He said, ‘God is Love.’ The current crop of evangelicals would hate both David and Jonathan. They were both obviously bisexual.

David was certainly interested in genitals. King Saul was jealous of David because the people praised David more than Saul, 1 Samuel 18:6-11. Saul noticed that his daughter Michal was very taken with David, and if he looked like the statue sculpted by that homosexual Michelangelo, who would be surprised. So he hatched a little plot. He told David that he could marry Michal and therefore be the king’s son-in-law. All he had to do, since he was poor and could not afford a dowry, was to kill one hundred Philistines, cut off their foreskins as proof, bring them in and the girl was his.

Saul thought that David would certainly be killed if he tried to do something so dangerous and stupid and the problem would be solved. Happy with the opportunity David gathered his buddies and killed two hundred Philistines, cut the foreskins off the corpses in verses 26-27, and brought double the dowry to Saul, who had to give him Michal as promised. Don’t forget to let your children read this story. It will inspire them to keep their word. You may have to explain foreskins. Voltaire suggested that they might have been made into a necklace. But he was creepy. Not like the Word of God.

David had eight wives, which fact is not broadcast widely as a good example. So there were several brothers, half brothers, sisters and half sisters, not all of whom came from the eight wives. Absalom was a son of David and had an astonishingly beautiful daughter named Tamar. Another son of David was Amnon and he fell madly in love with Tamar, his half sister so to speak. But he couldn’t get to her because the men and women were separated, she being a virgin and all.

So Amnon pretended to be sick and got David to send Tamar to look after him. She brought him food and he grabbed her and said “ Come lie with me.” She pointed out that it would be incest and not a good idea. He forced her anyway and raped her. Make sure the kids read this part, II Samuel 13:11-13. Then he hated her because she hadn’t given herself to him and had his servants throw her out of the house. Her father Absalom told her not to fret about it because it was all in the family anyway, but he vowed revenge on Amnon and later on his men got Amnon drunk and killed him. Incest and murder, however beautiful the language.

And it was Absalom ironically enough who later did the incest thing with ten of David’s concubines, in public. This was prophesied by the prophet Nathan when he came to reproach David for getting Bathsheba’s husband killed so that he could marry her himself, a case of adultery and then murder. Tell your children about it. David’s first son by Bathsheba died but the second lived. He was Solomon who had seven hundred wives and princesses and three hundred concubines. We don’t hear the evangelicals complaining about that. The Mormons have been vilified for having plural wives. But then they only have the word of Joseph Smith not the Word of God.

Now Absalom rebelled against his father David and David discretely left Jerusalem. He also left ten of his concubines in the palace to take care of it. Absalom was anxious to show his total disregard for David’s authority so he had a large tent set up in public and had sex with all ten concubines, his father's property, in view of the assembled and doubtless interested masses. Make sure the kids read about this in II Samuel 16:15-23 but for God’s sake don’t let them read Harry Potter.

And then there was the other Biblical Tamar, a nice name that means palm tree. A man named Judah had three sons, Er, Onan and Shelah. He found a nice wife for Er; that was Tamar. The Lord however didn’t think much of Er and slew him, as it says in Genesis 38: 1-10.

So, according to the levirate law his brother Onan was supposed to get Tamar with child so that the family name could continue. Onan went down on Tamar but as he was about to orgasm he realized that her son would be above him in the inheritance stakes, and wouldn’t be his son anyway and he withdrew his penis and spilled the semen on the floor. The Lord, who like his followers is always watching the sexual acts of others, was very angry and slew Onan. Explain to your children when you read this to them that ‘slew’ means killed.

Somehow this only example of birth control in the Bible has been turned into masturbation by the theologians. They call it onanism and St. Thomas Aquinas regarded it as worse than rape. Go figure. So let your children read the story and explain that it isn’t masturbation but the least effective method of birth control, called coitus interruptus. And as the rabbi said, “If God hadn’t meant us to masturbate he would have given us shorter arms.”

Now Judah had only one son left and marrying Tamar seemed to be a pretty bad risk. So he told her to go and be a widow until Shelah was old enough to marry her. Tamar was not deceived. When Judah’s wife died Judah had a time of mourning and then went off to the sheep-shearing with his men. Tamar was told that her father-in-law was going to Timnath to shear his sheep. She figured out a plan.

She took off her widow’s garments and wrapped herself in an inviting manner, and put on a veil. That was the sign of a harlot. Maybe you should explain what this means to your children. The word occurs harlot in the singular 36 times in the Old Testament and 4 times in the New. There are other mentions where it is plural and possessive, but it’s obviously a word every God fearing child should know, being in Holy Writ so many times.

Anyway when Judah went by he saw this gorgeous lady and said, “Go to, I pray thee, let me come in unto thee.” Make sure the kids read these words. It makes it OK if the English is old. Genesis 38: 15-19. She asked what payment he would make to enjoy her charms. He offered her a kid from his flock. She asked for a pledge that he would send it and took his bracelets, his signet ring and his staff, to be exchanged when his men brought the kid. Then he went into her and she conceived. Judah honored his pledge and sent the kid to be given to the village harlot. The people said that they didn’t have a harlot in the village. So Judah decided it would be best not to make a fuss about it.

Three months later it became obvious that Tamar was pregnant. Judah figured that she had been guilty of promiscuity and illicit sexual relations. Quite a brain. For a woman that meant she would have to be burned to death. When Tamar was brought before Judah she told him that the man who made her pregnant owned these bracelets, this ring and this staff. Judah changed his mind and said he was sorry that he hadn’t given her his son Shelah as he promised.

Tamar gave birth to twins and the account in Genesis 38: 27-30 tells how the midwife put a scarlet thread upon the first hand that came out and it went back in again. The baby without the thread was born first, but because of her smart move they knew which one was really the first born. The names incidentally since the children may be interested, were Pharez and Zazah.

Jerry Falwell had a word to say about this sort of thing. It was: “Grown men should not be having sex with prostitutes unless they are married to them.” on CNN's Crossfire, May 17, 1997. And then of course there is the commandment “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”

Exposing one’s genitals to the public is a no-no to the evangelicals. Well they certainly don’t seem to read the Word of God carefully. One of their heroes did it. Tell the kids. It may be a good example they haven’t heard about.

There’s a famous story in II Samuel 6 about David and his men who were transporting the Ark of the Covenant. A man named Uzzah was alert enough to see that the oxen were shaking the Ark and helpfully put out his hand to steady it. The easily angered Lord killed Uzzah at once.

David got scared and left the Ark with a nearby family for three months. That family prospered immensely so David decided to get the Ark back. On that occasion the Bible makes it clear that he was wearing a linen ephod. Most people who read that, if they do, don’t bother to find out what it is. Just another funny word in the Good Book.

Well, an ephod is a very scanty garment worn by the priests. It is so scanty that the priests are warned not to ascend the steps of the altar during rituals because they didn’t ‘gird up their loins’ they didn’t wear underwear, and their privates would be public, so to speak.

That was what David was wearing when he danced and leaped vigorously in front of the Ark all the way home, thus displaying his genitals to all and sundry. His wife Michal, for whom he paid the dowry of two hundred foreskins cut from corpses was watching this display and the Bible says that she despised him in her heart. When he got home she reamed him thoroughly with a finely crafted piece of sarcasm, “How glorious was the king of Israel today, who uncovered himself today in the eyes of the handmaids of his servants, as one of the vain fellows shamelessly uncovereth himself.” I’d love to hear Meryl Streep deliver that as Michal to Brad Pitt’s David.

David was quite a vindictive fellow, probably took after his god in this regard, and he ceased having any relationship with Michal. In fact Michal was later taken from David because he had defected from the true king and she was given to someone else who loved her dearly. When David became king of the united Israel he gave orders that Michal must be given back. Her distraught husband followed her weeping copiously but David was adamant. He wanted Michal back so that he could pointedly ignore her for the rest of her days. Charming fellow. Explain that to the kids, unless you haven’t noticed them for years.

We’ll get back to David if I have space to check on venereal disease. The word comes from Venus the goddess of love and lust. Let’s look at another little story about a girl that could be in a book of Bible Stories called Tales of Terror for Tiny Tots. I may write it one day for my own special Sunday School for born-again pagans interested in other people’s belief systems.

There was a bastard called Jephthah, the son of a concubine, therefore a bastard. He was thrown out of the house and tribe by the legitimate sons and eventually, because of his military skill was asked by his tribe to come back and lead them. He led his army against the Ammonites and promised God that if he won the battle he would sacrifice the first thing that came of his house on his return as a burnt offering to said God.

Well the first thing that came out was his loving daughter, his only child, delighted to see him come back safely. He was pretty distraught at that and told her of his promise to God. She agreed that he had to keep his word and asked two months leave to grieve about not losing her virginity, and never being able to marry. He gave her leave. She came back and was burned as per protocol. Ever after, says the Good Book, it became the custom in Israel to spend four days every year lamenting the fate of Jephthah’s daughter. Tell that story to your daughters, it may inspire them. No good deed goes unpunished as they say.

That didn’t happen with Abraham and Isaac you remember. God intervened to save Isaac, probably because he was a boy. Girls were merely property. A woman who gave birth to a boy had a forty day period of purification. If she gave birth to a girl it was eighty days. If she was raped the father was angry because now she was spoiled merchandise and he couldn’t get such a good dowry for her.

Every literate person knows some version of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Lot had taken two angels into his house and they were obviously very attractive to the men of the town who beat on the door as a mob and demanded that Lot let them have intercourse with the strangers. Lot pointed out that it would be an inhospitable thing to do and offered his two virgin daughters to the mob instead, “Let me, I pray you, bring them out to you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes….” Daughters were property. Sons were people. Family values anybody? Maybe your daughters can explain it to you.

When Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by what was possibly an atomic explosion, the two not too well belovéd daughters found themselves hiding in a cave with their father. He would not allow them to have anything to do with the men of the Zoar area where they took cover. Their mother was dead, covered in ash like the corpses at Hiroshima. To a primitive reporter she had been turned into salt.

They got Lot totally drunk and lay with him on two consecutive nights. Probably incest don’t you think. Tell your daughter not to get you drunk. Or maybe she should read Harry Potter instead with its story of loyalty, affection and courage, and not a rape or incest in sight. It’s a plan.

Each daughter eventually had a son. The eldest’s firstborn, Moab, (of his father) became the ancestor of the Moabites and the other, Ben-Ammi, (son of my people) became the ancestor of the Ammonites, whom the children of Israel were constantly fighting, remember the story of Jephthah. The origin of both tribes was an act of incest. The Moabites are important in the ancestry of Jesus, incestuous though the family background happened to be.

You may know the beautiful story of Ruth and Naomi and the less beautiful story of how Ruth seduced Boaz to marry her. Ruth was a Moabite from a tribe born of incest. Boaz, through Ruth was an ancestor of Jesse and therefore of David, son of Jesse. In the New Testament Ruth is one of four women mentioned in the ancestry of Jesus, to prove he was in the lineage of David. So the family tree of Jesus is based firmly on incest as recorded in the Word of God. I wonder how many sermons you have heard about that.

It puzzled me as a boy that I kept reading in the Bible that so and so had to swear an oath by putting his hand under the superior person’s thigh. My research in later years showed me that it was the King James way of saying he put his hand on the genitals of the superior person when swearing the oath. Don’t let your children take as long as I did to find that out. Could be a way of making them keep their promises. It worked in the Word of God stories.

In one sense this was like acknowledging the alpha male. When Abraham’s servant swore an oath to make sure that his son Isaac would not marry a Canaanite he put his hand on Abraham’s penis to make the oath. Genesis 24:1-9.

Joseph had to hold the penis of Isaac when he swore that he would ensure that Isaac was not buried in Egypt.Genesis 47:29-31

When a king was crowned in Israel the princes and mighty men as they were always called submitted to the king. This involved holding his penis as they promised to be true to him.

Different Biblical dictionaries and encyclopedias vary slightly about the reason for holding the penis of the superior. One says that it was because of the mystery of generation, whose source was God. Another says flatly that ‘thigh’ means the generative organ. So men would hold the penis or testicles of the superior when swearing an oath. Look up ‘testify’ and ‘testimony’ in an etymological dictionary. Both derive from the word for testicles in Latin.

I wonder what the evangelical crowd would think if they had to hold the penis of their pastor when they pledged their tithe. Problematic if their pastor is a woman. Maybe that's the reason so many are against women in high church office. Nothing to hold onto.

Notice that I said men did this when taking an oath. If a woman held a man’s organs, even when defending her own husband against the attack of another man she had to have her hand cut off by law. Look at Deuteronomy 24: 11-12. It describes how a wife might try to help her husband who was fighting another man by the obvious method of grabbing his testicles and squeezing hard. No matter what the reason it says, “then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her.” Testicles are often called by the old slang term ‘stones’ when mentioned in the Word of God.

These are the rules that the evangelicals revere because they are in the Word of God.

Now maybe that alpha male stuff has some validity in a tribe as savage as the Israelites, but look at Psalm 38: 3-8 where David is obviously whining about the discomfort he is having because his loins (genitals) are filled with a loathsome disease and his wounds stink and are corrupt because of his foolishness. Sounds a lot like syphilis. Not a good place to put your hand to make an oath to the king. Warn your children about doing that.

Moses had a sister Miriam who was instrumental into getting him adopted into the royal family of Egypt instead of being killed. The Lord however is very arbitrary when he gets piqued about something and he hit Miriam with a dose of leprosy. Aaron, her other brother implored Moses to get through to the Lord on behalf of Miriam with these words: “Let her not be as one dead, of whom the flesh is half consumed when he cometh out of his mother’s womb.” That’s in Numbers 12:12 in case you think I’m making all this up. And that verse was mentioned in the British Journal of Venereal Disease as being a description of a stillbirth due to 'macerated syphilis,' using bigger and less elegant words than the Bible version as doctors do.

When Jesus healed the woman with the issue of blood it is possible that her problem, which had lasted for twelve years, was a venereal infection that the doctors hadn’t been able to deal with.

I could go on for another fifty pages without any difficulty except possibly carpal tunnel problems. There’s a lot I haven’t even touched on. Enough has been said to show that the Good Book is filled with debauchery, adultery, incest, murder, injustice to women in particular and stuff that the evangelicals would rant about if it was in magazines or any other book. They do indeed rant about Playboy, Hustler and Esquire which contain pretty tame stuff compared with the Bible; and they don’t claim to be inspired.

Holy Writ is not fit for children of any age. It is filled with disgusting sexual adventures not suitable as life examples for inexperienced youngsters. So, don’t back off when some evangelical waves his pornographic literature at you and claims it was written by God. If it was, then he certainly isn’t any god I would respect.

Maybe the next inerrant Word of God won’t contain all that superstitious nonsense and cruelty. We must wait and see which one they choose to replace their current perfect and inerrant book. Maybe it will be the New World scriptures and Christians will have to get used to seeing statues and paintings of Jesus impaled on a stake. The word in the Greek testament is stauros which can actually mean stake. Messes up the story of Thomas however.

Or how about changing over to another equally inspired piece of nonsense, The Book of Mormon, described by Mark Twain as ‘chloroform in print.’ But he did read it. Have you read the Bible they wave at you today? If you haven’t then why believe them. If you have then why believe them.

Have you read The Secret Gospel of Mark about the inner teachings of the initiates of Jesus. If you do, and this is the new one chosen by the Family Research Council then a lot of folks will have to do a lot of back pedaling. It’s pretty clear from that eye witness full account of the initiation of Lazarus that if Jesus wasn’t homosexual he was bisexual like his ancestor David.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a god or goddess who would be happy if we got along together without some bunch of creeps insisting that everybody else had to ‘believe’ what they believed. The god of the evangelicals isn’t one of those. He is cruel, barbaric, paranoid, indiscriminating, arbitrary, merciless and nothing angers him more than someone enjoying someone else’s company. And as his decree of circumcision shows, a lot of it was his fault for an original flaw in the design of the male organs that he insisted had to be modified later.