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Outrageous Tales From the Old Testament?





































Some more genuine church signs from www.churchsigngenerator.com. I particularly like the last one. "A spirit filled church", is a nice touch.

Very Old Testament. Their God is a smiting, fighting God urging his people to take up arms against his enemies. Does anyone have a favourite Old Testament tale involving God's gratuitous smiting, genocide, etc.? What's the most outrageous tale? Personally, I think Abraham and Isaac is hard to beat.

As Alexander Waugh relates in his book God - The Biography.

Randolph Churchill, son of Winston, had been annoying his friends by talking too much. They wagered he could not keep quiet for a week. Churchill, a keen gambler, thought he could win the bet by reading the Bible. But he didn't last long. After a few pages, he was heard to exclaim, "God! God's a shit!"

Talking of which, I have been trying for ages to get hold of a copy of Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament, now out of print it seems. If anyone has any idea how I can get a copy, do let me know. Neither the NSS nor Forbidden Planet actually have it, despite what it says on their websites.
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Comments

Anonymous said…
As a big fan of Neil Gaimen I'm going to have to order that!!

Abebooks have a few copies listed

http://tinyurl.com/374e5o

Cheers

Mike
November 13, 2007 at 4:01 PM
Stephen Law said…
Ah - great. Just ordered it. Thanks Mike.
November 13, 2007 at 4:12 PM
James James said…
I particularly like the first one:
"Tsunami - Aids - War
Do you hear me now!
- God"

I don't get the logic (because it doesn't work): We make the world a worse place by doing things bad according to the Bible, so God makes the world worse in retaliation!

"Outrageous Tales From the Old Testament" looks great. I just ordered myself a copy from Amazon. I found the ISBN number (0861660544) from Google and then it was quite easy to find copies.
November 13, 2007 at 4:26 PM
Unknown said…
Hugo,

I think He's trying to make the point that, being omnipotent, He's not going to be outdone by a bunch of upstart mortals. Any 'evil' we can do He can do better! Does this also solve the problem of evil?
November 13, 2007 at 5:28 PM
Paul C said…
Can I recommend Jay Pinkerton's Back of the Bible? It's quite a ride.
November 13, 2007 at 5:36 PM
jeremy said…
I can do no better than to recommend the Skeptic's Annotated Bible (www.skepticsannotatedbible.com). It has a page-by-page humorous annotation of the King James version of the bible, or you can simply search by category: absurdity, intolerance, cruelty and violence, contradictions, etc., etc.

It really is loads of fun! Enjoy!
November 13, 2007 at 8:28 PM
jeremy said…
Hmm - that link doesn't seem to be working... try this version of the Skeptic's Annotated Bible
November 13, 2007 at 9:09 PM
Anonymous said…
As someone who actually reads Hebrew and has published exegetical articles on the Hebrew Scriptures, I would just like to say that I find that Christian fundamentalists and secular fundamentalists read the bible in the same way. How do they read it? Entirely without sophistication, unable to appreciate irony, humor, metaphor, or purposeful moral ambiguity. They leave everything they may have ever learned about literature behind them. If people read Shakespeare the way Skeptic's Annotated Bible reads scripture, they would say "Cassius was an imbecile - he thought that Caesar was some kind of huge monster-giant as big as Godzilla" after all, he did say that Caesar "doth bestride the world like a Colossus"!
November 18, 2007 at 6:31 PM
Stephen Law said…
Hi Guess who - that's an interesting comment so will put into main posting for discussion, if that's ok...(say if not)
November 20, 2007 at 9:48 AM
Anonymous said…
Customize your own custom church sign messages @ www.SignGenerator.org.
November 28, 2007 at 1:46 PM
Stephen Law said…
btw don't make the mistake of thinking these aren't genuine signs. They do come from churchsigngenerator.ocm, but from their library og genuine signs.
September 4, 2008 at 12:10 PM
Mike Hunt said…
http://www.thebricktestament.com/

could be a substitute?
January 14, 2012 at 9:26 PM
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