God Hates You Hate Him Back: Making Sense of The Bible by C.J. Werleman – Reviewed by Guy Portman
Contains spoilers:
The God of the Old Testament is anything but loving. He is violent, misogynistic and genocidal. His pettiness would give the Greek deities a run for their money. Werleman fastidiously and exuberantly ridicules it all, from the seven-day creation to Adam and Eve, the Ten Commandments and everything in between. Take the parting of the Red Sea for instance. There is no archaeological evidence suggesting it happened, he states, and no record in Egyptian history, even though the Ancient Egyptians were fastidious documenters of events.
As for the New Testament, the details of Jesus’s birth are nothing new, we are told. The Ancient Egyptian god Horus was born on Christmas Day to a virgin. And then there are the miracles, or spurious claims as the author would have us believe. He mocks the wildly differing accounts of the Resurrection, and the crucifixion suffers the same fate. Were the three Marys really present at Christ’s death when no one was allowed in the crucifixion fields due to risk of the crucified being freed? And would Barabbas have been subjected to the same fate as Jesus? Thieves were not crucified under Roman law.
Why is it that Christians believe they will go to Heaven, when Paul himself wrote that only when Jesus returns to earth will the dead be raised? And why is Christianity not named ‘Paulanity’? The Apostle’s role in the disseminating of Jesus’s purported words and actions were more important to the burgeoning religion than anything Christ contributed, it could be argued.
And why doesn’t Jesus heal amputees? The author alleges that of the estimated fifty thousand in America at the time of writing, no new limbs had reappeared, this despite the fact many of the lost limb sufferers were Christians. One will never find a miracle without a coincidence the book claims, convincingly in this agnostic’s opinion.
Werleman’s constant puerile attempts at humour are irreverent and distracting. This reader would have preferred a more subtle approach. It does feel that much of this work consists of easy pickings. After all, how many sound-minded contemporary Christians take The Bible literally …? A fair number, alarmingly.
