Let’s say you are a person normally educated in any of the nominally Christian nations, but completely ignorant of the Christian religion and the Bible. This is just a thought experiment. Now let’s say that without any prior knowledge or bias, you now read the Bible cover to cover as you would any other book. What would you think of that? Would you believe this is a work of historical fiction or historical fact? Based on your average knowledge of how the world works, could you conclude that many of the events in it were absurd enough to be hysterical fiction? I think that is what I would conclude.

The Bible, as evidence for God, is just historical fiction and complete nonsense for the following reasons:

# The main actors and main events have no independent historical documentation or archaeological verification.

# The Bible is full of logical contradictions or contradictory statements.

# All ‘someone said’ Biblical quotes are highly suspect as there is no record of who was actually writing these sayings or conversations in real time (on the spot).

# If you were to eliminate all duplications in the Old and New Testaments, you would reduce the volume of the Bible by hundreds of pages. Can you imagine any published novel or non-fiction tome that has duplicate passages like those in the Bible? I bet you can’t.

# The Bible is full of not-so-improbable, but scientifically-impossible events (ie all those so-called Biblical ‘miracles’) like: A talking snake; fruit with magical properties; human lifespans that are several hundred years long; Eve created from a human rib; Jesus walking on the water; turn water into wine; the multiplication of loaves and fishes out of nothing; unicorns; use pure magic to make the Sun and Moon stand still in the sky; pure noise tearing down the walls of Jericho; Jonah’s adventures inside the ‘whale’ – a real fairy tale whale; a virgin birth; and a resurrection to top it off. But then again, we don’t want facts or truth to get in the way of a good Bible tale now, do we?

# There is no rhyme or reason why some parts were left out and then included, or included and then left out.

# The Old Testament absolutely fails as a morality document.

Biblical truths:

# When it comes to the Bible, the left hand certainly didn’t know what the right hand was doing. You get multiple variations on multi-theological themes. So when it comes to the Bible, you can simply ‘prove’ or support theologically or even ‘disprove’ any claim you want to make or disprove. But since theists are pontificating about a work of fiction in general, I don’t always know what the main point is when doing so.

# So, just like we know what Rhett and Scarlett said and also those other conversational couples like Romeo and Juliet; Hansel and Gretel; Siegfried and Brunhilda; Siegmunde and Sieglinde; Tristan and Isolde; [Shakespeare’s] Antony and Cleopatra; Calaf and Turandot; Of course, we can transplant those fictitious wiggles and compare them with those Biblical conversations between couples like Adam and Eve; Jose and Maria; Abraham and Sarah, etc. That’s all because human authors wrote pure fiction or historical fiction and put those words and those conversations into the mouths of their characters.

# I find it amazing that true believers spend hours and hours debating Biblical historical events that probably have no real historical reality. Theists go on and on about these Biblical events as if they were carved in stone. They are not. As an accurate historical text, as literal evidence for God, the Bible has as much credibility as “Gone with the Wind,” “The Cain Mutiny,” “Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn,” or “The Last of the Mohicans.” True believers are presenting all of this biblical material as if it is verified historical fact, and that is not the case, so they are being more than a little dishonest with their reading audience!

# Were there true believers or theists there to verify any of those Biblical tales? Has any historian verified any of those Biblical tales? Is there any archaeological evidence of these events? There is nothing wrong with debating theoretical philosophical points as presented in a work of historical fiction (i.e., the Bible), as long as theists realize or acknowledge the likelihood that the Bible is a work of historical fiction and then present their views as such. I’m sure average readers could present and debate the author’s philosophy in works like “Gone with the Wind,” “The Caine Mutiny,” “Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn,” or “The Last of the Mohicans,” so why don’t theists debate the philosophical points raised in the Bible instead of insisting that the Bible is a historically accurate document which it clearly cannot be?

In conclusion here, this is why belief in God, belief in Jesus, belief in the Bible and Biblical texts are a matter of pure “faith” not a matter of “evidence” because there is no real “evidence” let alone real proof.