The Bible is exactly like life. Think about it for a minute. It was written by a bunch of people in different times, places, cultures and situations. It’s authors wrote about the things they valued.

Think about it like this: imagine you and your closest friends decided to sit down and write and entire encyclopedia. First of all, which friends would you want to have help you? Second, how would you decide which information to include? It is an encyclopedia, after all, you need to include as much as possible. Third, once you had decided what to include, what format would you choose for each item?

Some subjects would be best conveyed with strict factual definitions of what a thing is, how it is used, its properties, etc. But all of the things that are the MOST IMPORTANT in life simply cannot be boiled down in that way and still convey something of their true importance. This is why people revert to telling stories in the form of scriptures and holy texts. These things may or may not have happened; that is actually secondary to the fact that stories communicate human values much more effectively than explanations.

So the Bible could be thought of as an encyclopedia of human values, so what, right? A lot of people will say that it is full of stupid and inconsistent values. First God is like, all nice and shit, and then he turns on people and blows up their cities and kills their puppies and stuff. And like nobody seems to agree about anything, where it came from or how to interpret it…

I hear this sort of criticism leveled against the Bible all the time. And frankly I think it’s idiotic and childish. Why? Because the Bible is exactly like life. Life is messy. Life is inconsistent. Life is brutal and sad and beautiful and confusing. Life is made up of a bunch of people trying to get together and share with each other some kind of human values and getting confused and scared and emotionally wounded with each other when the forms they use to express value don’t quite add up.

This is ALL the Bible is. And, fortunately, this is exactly what makes it also TRUE. Because it is not trying to hide or ignore any of the sloppy and bad crap about life. I mean, Jesus gets *killed* in it for just trying to teach people to master themselves and love one another. How much more realistic do people fucking need?

When people say the Bible is stupid and inconsistent, what they are in essence saying is: “I can’t accept reality for what it is. I need everything to be perfectly explainable and consistent in all ways at all times, or else I will have an emotional reaction against it.” Get over it! Life doesn’t work like that, so why should a compendium of human knowledge and value work like that? It would be foolish and useless if it catered to those kinds of petulant demands.

The greatest Truth, then, the Bible contains is that it mirrors life. Nothing more. It shows us who we are by showing us how we are. And by accepting the Truth of who we really are, we come closer to something that might be called “God” by people who aren’t scared of embracing the beauty of life in all its chaos and confusion.