Thoughts About the Bible

Dear Friends,

If you go on Google and type in, "What is the best-selling book of all time?" you will find the answer is, "The Bible." Yet, it's a book that has been both loved and hated, cherished and mocked, adored and loathed, defended and attacked; seen as the world's greatest blessing by some, while being feared as potentially dangerous by others - in a way (and to an extent) that few other books ever have been. So, what I'd like to do today is share some people's thoughts on the Bible. Three from some well-known opponents (past and present), and fifteen from avid supporters (also past and present)! Enjoy.

“It is because ye are sunk in the cruelty of superstition, or feel no interest in the honour of your Creator, that ye listen to the horrid tales of the Bible, or hear them with callous indifference. The evidence I have produced, and shall still produce in the course of this work, to prove that the Bible is without authority, will, whilst it wounds the stubbornness of a priest, relieve and tranquilize the minds of millions: it will free them from all those hard thoughts of the Almighty which priest-craft and the Bible had infused into their minds, and which stood in everlasting opposition to all their ideas of his moral justice and benevolence.”
Thomas Paine (1737-1809) Political activist and writer of two of the most influential pamphlets ("Common Sense" and "The American Crisis") inspiring patriots in the American Revolution.

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully... To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil, but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries."
Richard Dawkins

"Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived."
Isaac Asimov

“Believe me, sir, never a night goes by, be I ever so tired, but I read the Word of God before I go to bed.”
General Douglas MacArthur

“England has two books; the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare, but the Bible made England."
Victor Hugo

“To the influence of this Book we are indebted for the progress made in civilization, and to this we must look as our guide in the future...
Hold fast to the Bible as the sheet anchor of your liberties, write its precepts on your hearts and practice them in your lives.”
Ulysses S. Grant

“I have a fundamental belief in the Bible as the Word of God, written by men who were inspired. I study the Bible daily.”
Sir Isaac Newton

"What you bring away from the Bible depends to some extent on what you carry to it."
Oliver Wendell Holmes

"I believe the Bible is the best gift that God has ever given to man. All the good from the Savior of the world is communicated to us through this book. I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go."
Abraham Lincoln

"By the reading of Scripture I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be purer, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green, light is sharper on the outlines of the forest and the hills, and the whole world is charged with the glory of God."
Thomas Merton

"The Bible is alive, it speaks to me; it has feet, it runs after me; it has hands, it lays hold on me."
Martin Luther

"Most people are bothered by those passages in Scripture which they cannot understand; but as for me, I always noticed that the passages in Scripture which trouble me most are the ones that I understand all too well."
Mark Twain

"The Bible is like a telescope. If a man looks through his telescope then he sees the worlds beyond, but if he looks at his telescope he does not see anything but that. The Bible is a thing to be looked through, to see that which is beyond."
Phillips Brooks

"The Scriptures were not given to increase our knowledge, but to change our lives."
Dwight L. Moody

"The Holy Scriptures tell us what we could never learn any other way: they tell us what we are, who we are, how we got here, why we are here, and what we are required to do while we remain here."
A. W. Tozer

"Back to the Bible, or back to the jungle."
Luis Palau

"Men do not reject the Bible because it contradicts itself, but because it contradicts them."
E. Paul Hovey

"As we go to a cradle only to find the baby, so we go to the Scriptures only to find Christ."
Martin Luther

I can't end without pointing out (as many others have) that one does not expend great amounts of time and energy attacking something they see as trivial or no viable threat. They attack it because something in them sees or senses the power that person or thing yields. If the Bible were silly and ignorable, they would simply ignore it. And the fact that they can't, shows it has a power toward them, or over them, which they simply can't let rest.

In His Service, Pastor Jeff