Atheist Son Writes… 5 reasons why your reasoning fails

Dear mum,

I’m really not sure who you are trying to convince on the relevance of the bible with the five arguments you made. Your ‘evidence’ so far leads me to think this is the first time you have ever given this subject any serious thought. Certainly, you must realise that if the bible is as amazing as you say it would be easy to find rock-solid evidence to defend it against godless heathens like myself. And yet, are the arguments below the best you have?!

1. It was sourced from multiple authors hundreds of years apart;yes it is the oldest book in the world;

The Bible the oldest book in the world? Not by a long shot. If the age of a book is the criterion, you are following the wrong religion. Just to give a few specific examples of the many ancient religious texts that predate the bible:

• The I Ching is probably the oldest book in the world and can safely be assigned to the 13th century, BCE.
• The Papyrus Ebers is the oldest medical text in the world, dated to the middle 16th century BCE
• The Epic of Gilgamesh is dated to the Third Dynasty of Ur or between 2100 and 2000 BCE
• The Precepts of Ptah-hotep has been dated to the Sixth Dynasty of Egypt or between 2300 BCE and 2150 BCE.

By contrast none of the books of the New Testament, so central to Christian dogma, can be dated earlier than 50 CE and some may have been written 150 CE or later.

2. It has been preserved because those who wrote it , were told by God that its records were to lead to the Saviour of the world. Handed down from Abraham to the apostles …

Countless myths and stories have been handed down the ages and the bibles stories are really no different to the myths of other religions that survive to this day. I find it very peculiar that you think this would even matter.

3. Unlike other books is its origin, its unity, structure and subject matter, all argue for a supernatural authorship. Having no editor or Publishing House overseeing it…
4. Another evidence that it is a supernatural book is because of the unity it displays…

Did you not even look at the diagram of contradictions in the bible I sent you in my last email? If not I suggest you examine it again and then tell me just how ‘supernatural’ the bible looks. Also, despite wilful denial by Christians, you cannot ignore the fact that the bible has been edited, reworded and repackaged may times throughout history to suit contemporary social and political norms.

5. Unlike other books is its truthfulness about its main characters, even to the point of being unfavourable.

Since we only have the authors description of biblical characters we have absolutely no way to determine the truthfulness, or not, of their descriptions! In the few cases we do have independent evidence it seems the bible was not truthful, a few examples of which I already pointed out in my previous email. But yet again, why should this even matter since the same can be said of many, much older, religious books.

In my next email, I’d like to address a few other comments you made

I continue to wait patiently for this. Alternatively, if you wish to concede that all rational evidence can ever prove is that the bible was written by men (not women) using contemporary knowledge and moral norms, then I suggest we on to the morality of the bible vs modern morality.

Love, reason and understanding,

Sam x