<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Genesis 1:2 refers to the situation before God’s creative action began. There is no question here of a creatio ex nihilo, a “creation out of nothing.” The earth already existed, but it was a formless void—not a kind of non-existence but something empty and formless, without light and covered by the water of the deep. </em></p>
p. 42-43 – no first cause since always existed
– no first cause since always existed
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Admit even a single well-meant falsehood into such an exalted authority [Scriptures], and there will not be left a single section of those books which, if appearing to anyone to present difficulties … will escape, by the same baneful principle, from being classified as the deliberate tact of an author who was lying. </em></p>
Selected Letters (9:3), p. 63
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Wow! [I thought] for all the people who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, or that every single word of the Bible is true, I mean, they can’t even have read the first two chapters [which appear to contradict each other in several places].</em></p>
Letting Go of God, p. 20
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I trust it may be shown not only that there is no inconsistency between our interpretation of the phenomena of nature and of the Mosaic narrative [in particular, the Great Flood of Noah], but that the results of geological inquiry throw important light on parts of this history, which are otherwise involved in much obscurity … If in this respect, geology should seem to require some little concession from the literal interpreter of Scripture, it may fairly be held to afford ample compensation for this demand, by the large additions it has made to the evidences of natural religion, in a department where revelation was not designed to give information.</em></p>
Geology and Mineralogy Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (1836)
<p><em>[Tyndale, who had translated the New Testament into English, is] a hell-hound in the kennel of the devil … discharging a filthy foam of blasphemies out of his brutish beastly mouth. … I was by good honest men informed that in Bristol there were of the pestilent books some thrown into the streets and left at men’s doors by night, that where they durst not offer their poison to sell, they would of their charity poison men for naught. </em></p>
as quoted by Brian Moynahan in God’s Bestseller, pp. 97, 104
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">One question that came up early in the history of the Western church was: is it proper for a Christian to study books other than the Bible? Once the Bible came along, it cleared the deck; every other piece of writing was now, from a Christian standpoint, irrelevant.</em></p>
How to Read the Bible (27), pp. 475-476
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The Christian community continues to exist because the conclusions of the critical study of the Bible are largely withheld from them.</em></p>
as quoted in Huberman, The Quotable Atheist, p. 78
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I am accused of being simplistic at times with some of the problems that confront us. But I have often wondered: Within the covers of that single book [the Bible] are all the answers to all the problems that face us today, if we’d only look there. </em></p>
address given at The National Religious Broadcasters Convention, January 31, 1993
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">When we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my own part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest every thing that is cruel.</em></p>
Age of Reason (1), p. 667
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">When I think of all the harm the Bible has done, I despair of ever writing anything equal to it.</em></p>
-- — I have no reliable confirmation of this quote, but it is so much in Wilde’s style, that if he did not actually say it, he should have
— I have no reliable confirmation of this quote, but it is so much in Wilde’s style, that if he did not actually say it, he should have
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">As the evening went on we discussed whether there was much help in the Bible for people like us during the present world tumult. He [Whitehead] said there was no longer much of anything in it for him … He had given up the Bible.</em></p>
Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (24), p. 150), recorded by Lucien Price, November 21, 1941
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The very concept of sin comes from the Bible. Christianity offers to solve a problem of its own making! Would you be thankful to a person who cut you with a knife in order to sell you a bandage? </em></p>
attributed to
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Born-again Christians worship the Bible and not God.</em></p>
as quoted in Huberman, The Quotable Atheist, p. 25
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The claim that scriptures are either divinely inspired or are the “Word of God” in any literal sense has been so destructive that I no longer want to be part of that Christianity! I do not understand how anyone can saddle God with the assumptions that are made by the biblical authors, warped as they are both by their lack of knowledge and the tribal and sexist prejudices of that ancient time. Do we honor God when we assume that the primitive consciousness found on the pages of scripture, even when it is attributed to God, is somehow righteous?</em></p>
The Sins of Scripture (2), p. 18
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">A hundred years ago, most of the mythological allusion would have passed unnoticed. Today, however, thanks to the rediscovery through archaeological exploration of so much of Mesopotamian, Canaanite, Hittite, and Egyptian literature, it is possible at long last to recognize that, for all its distinctive qualities, the Old Testament is in fact saturated with the popular lore of the Ancient Near East.</em></p>
Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament, pp. xxv-xxvi
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The process … is, in fact, the opposite of what we have in the Bible: the emergence of early Israel was an outcome of the collapse of the Canaanite culture, not its cause. And most of the Israelites did not come from outside Canaan – they emerged from within it. There was no mass Exodus from Egypt. There was no violent conquest of Canaan. Most of the people who formed early Israel were local people – the same people we see in the highlands throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages. The early Israelites were – irony of ironies – themselves originally Canaanites!</em></p>
and Neil Asher Silberman 1950-, The Bible Unearthed, p. 118
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.</em></p>
as quoted in Huberman, The Quotable Atheist, p. 273
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