Thursday, May 10, 2012

The Most Hated Book of All Time

There are some people who will take every opportunity they can find to criticize the Bible. On one of the Amazon.com forums, someone asked the question “What is the most overrated novel of all time?” Among the divers answers, someone wrote, “The Bible.” Someone else wrote, “As a NOVEL, the Bible is actually quite good. It’s just a shame that people waste time reading it as nonfiction.”

It should come as no surprise that people hate the Bible, and Jesus, and us; Jesus told us it would be so. But why is it people hate it so much? With most books, if the topic came up, someone might say, “I didn’t really care for that book.” Even with the Koran, even though some Muslims think we’re out to burn their holy book, people who don’t see it as a holy book mostly ignore it. They don’t go on a forum that is discussing another topic to talk about how much they dislike it as a book. The same is true of the Book of Mormon. There’s plenty of people who have taken the time to state what is wrong with it, but they don’t take the same level of effort to criticize it to anyone who will listen. The Bible is without question the most hated book in the Universe. Let me ask again, why do people hate the Bible so much?

One reason is they don’t like what it says. The fact is, I don’t think any of us really like what it says. Even the most devout Christian can find plenty of things he wishes weren’t in the Bible. Sure, we love that it tells us how to get to heaven, but there are things that are hard for us to accept. Why must our loved ones who have not accepted Christ, for example, go to hell? We don’t like that they do, but the Bible tells us it is a fact.

A second reason people hate the Bible is because it is true. Think of the dystopian books and movies out there. Often, the hero struggles and barely makes it out alive. Along the way, many other people suffer and die. And yet, as long as the story is well written, people don’t hate the book or movie. We don’t like what is happening to the characters, but we don’t hate the book. What makes the Bible different is that people aren’t able to prove the Bible to be fiction. In fact, based on the evidence, it is possible to show that the Bible is more accurate than any non-fiction book ever written. We expect to find mistakes in historical accounts. Historians work from several different sources to account for this. There is always the possibility that someone recorded something incorrectly, because he misunderstood what someone said, he accidently wrote the wrong name, or he was trying to make the rule of his country look better. Not so with the Bible. While there is plenty in the Bible left to be verified, archeologists and historians keep finding more and more evidence that things happened just like the Bible says they did and they’ve never found an instance where the Bible was inaccurate.

A third reason is that people don’t like other people to be happier than they are. People hear Christians talk about the Bible and how thrilled they are with it. Not everyone is so thrilled with it, so they don’t like hearing about it. But Christians aren’t going to shut up about it because they really are thrilled with the Bible. People who don’t like seeing this have no other way to quiet these people, so they resort to name calling tactics. They can’t discredit the Bible, so they make fun of it and call it fiction.

The fact that the Bible is hated so much more than any other book is hated is one more reason for us to see that it isn’t just an ordinary book. Strong emotions surround the Bible. It is not a book that can be ignored.