I received, yet another, prayer email from the folks at Bible Verses. I have been kind enough to send them my rebuttals as I finish them only to not receive any kind of reply. My replies, though argumentative, at least begged for counter arguments to be issued, alas, none came. It is in this vein then that I shall redouble my efforts.

Four emails in a row all about prayer? This hardly seems filled with insightful biblical knowledge. In fact I suspect that the writer of BV (herein known as JJJ) has little education beyond that of her weekly bible study class. It takes little imagination to witness this lonely housewife, after ushering off her children, climbing into a church trailer somewhere in Southern California only to hear the same things over and over again. Her teacher nothing but another lonely housewife who somehow ended up as a teacher of the ‘values’ of Christianity. I can see JJJ sinking into her comfort zone there. No worries. No fears of adulteress husbands. No teachers calling from the children’s school. No disillusionment from the real world. Instead the fools that brainwash her blame the ‘devil’ for everything and ask god forgiveness constantly.

I can see JJJ this morning in that class. She has brought one of my rebuttals with her and worries that I might have said something that could be true.

Sitting on a desk the teacher looks up at JJJ and asks, “JJJ, what in tar-nations is wrong with you today? You hardly did 30 minutes of silent prayer, and I could barely hear you when we did the ‘praise the lord!” game!”

JJJ gently removes the paper from the folds of her sweaty hands, “You know that I write Bible Verses emails? We have millions of people on it! Anyway, a few days ago I started getting these replies from a Doctor and he says…”

JJJ swallows hard and looks around the room and then quickly back to the crumpled paper in her hands, “He says, that god hates us!”

A loud gasp as women do. One even faints dead away.

After helping Martha with a sprinkle of water in her face and making sure she’s not lost her memory, the conversation continues.

“You have this letter with you?” The teacher says as she repositions herself in the front of the class.

“Yes,” a timid nearly in-audible squeak climbs up and out of JJJ.

“Let me HAVE it!”, the teacher screams, her fingers twisting into clutching balls. JJJ pushes the letter out at those hands and Teacher snaps it up, where it disappears into her hands.

Like a beaver, the teacher, turns her back on the class and un crumbles the letter. She reads along. Hunching over in secrecy, occasionally a maniacal laugh busting from her.

Then quickly she shoves it down her throat and swallows hard. After she is sure her digestive system is now in charge of destroying the evidence, she slowly turns back to the class, her eyes a blaze!

“Well,” she beings slowly testing her own ideas, but unsure, because she too has such little understanding of the actual concepts of her own faith, and does not possess the instruments of intellect to argue the now digesting letter, “well, he sure is rude!”

They all laugh. Ha, ha, ha!

As the laughter dies away and as the silence begins to fill the air again, but before that moment where anyone could have ushered a single word in question. Before one single solitary nerve end was fired in those tiny brains, thus requiring them to actually think about the letter, slowly turning to white pulp in stomach acids, the teacher says, “Today I’d like you to turn to Second Timothy Chapter 12…”

Two thousand years of dodging the question again safely performed.

I’ll say it again. If the bible is the history of man, then god hates you. He has done nothing but attempt to destroy you for thousands of years and like ants running from the hose, we have been able to survive and thrive, even with his curses and torments and evil!

But, the truth is probably a lot more simple than this, the bible is false. With the bible being false, all the world is now responsible for its own actions. With the bible being false, god can still love us, god can still help us, god can still care for us, by just letting the world continue moving, by just doing what he has always done…nothing.