...we are entitled to make almost any reasonable assumption, but should resist making conclusions until evidence requires that we do so.

There is not the slightest question but that the God of the Old Testament is a jealous, vengeful God, inflicting not only on the sinful pagans but even on his Chosen People fire, lighting, hideous plagues and diseases, brimstone, and other curses.

I'm all for sex. Seven nights a week. Days, too.

To those who wish to punish others -- or at least to see them punished, if the avengers are too cowardly to take matters in to their own hands -- the belief in a fiery, hideous hell appears to be a great source of comfort.

One social evil for which the New Testament is clearly in part responsible is anti-Semitism.

Consider the wave of revulsion that floods the average person when he or she hears of the practice of human sacrifice by the Aztecs and other so-called primitive peoples. How savage and barbaric such practices seem. But when a Christian or Jew comes across human sacrifice in the Bible (see Jephthah's immolation of his daughter in Judges 11:30-40), is he or she repulsed?

There is scarcely a page of the Bible on which an open mind does not perceive a contradiction, an unlikely story, an obvious error, an historical impossibility of one sort or another.