Would it be one that needs a warning label to protect children and adolescents from the depravity of its content, and to warn adults of its irreconcilable absurdities?
Look closely: if you were god and you decided to reveal yourself, your rules and ideas and your wishes to mankind for all the ages in one grand, inimitable and perfect medium, a book to be the guiding light, the single ultimate source, the one literary moral, ethical, spiritual beacon that humanity could always trust and look to and could never pervert, mis-translate, mis-interpret or edit...
...would it be, of all possible choices, the Bible?
If it would be, you haven't read the thing. If you've read it and studied it and you actually think that's the best Almighty God can do, you're either blissfully self-deluded, a Catholic nun, a tinhorn evangelist or - scariest of all - an academic theologian. If you think that the Bible is unique in its wisdom and astonishing in its profundity, you haven't read very many books, have you? (The collected works of just one 16th Century English writer -- William Shakespeare -- rival the Old Testament in more ways than you realize. Also, by sheer volume, not to mention a sharper wisdom, the Buddhist canon --all the teachings of Buddha and his close contemporaries -- stack up to several dozen bibles.) I could go on and on, kids.
Okay, enough my-holy-book-can-beat-up-your-holy-book...
Following is the warning label that, if you were God, I bet you'd want stuck to every Bible cover...knowing what was in it:
WARNING: YOU MUST BE 18 YEARS OF AGE TO PURCHASE. YOU MUST BE ABLE TO DISCERN REALITY FROM FANTASY TO READ.
This book contains references to -- and often graphic descriptions of -- the following acts and concepts: polygamy, adultery, seduction, fornication, masturbation, prostitution, pedophilia, ritual male genital mutilation, castration, violent abortion, homosexuality, bestiality, rape, gang rape, incest, teen pregnancy; cannibalism; murder, mass murder, genocide; war, total war; Satanism, demonic possession, ghosts, witchcraft, ritual symbolic vampirism/cannibalism, torture, crucifixion, disembowelment, suicide; ritual human and animal sacrifice; reanimated corpses; slavery; nudity, lasciviousness, pornography, drunkeness, voyeurism, blasphemy, bribery, corruption, disease and pestilence, insanity, shit eating, piss drinking, existential abandonment, hopelessness, helplessness, armageddon, eternal ferocious hell, a talking donkey,
a talking snake, and kids-making-fun-of-a-bald-guy-who-then-cursed-them-in-the-name-of-the-lord-and-got-his-revenge-when-two-bears-appeared-and-tore-apart-the-42- children. Amen... Or maybe the warning label should simply quote the following, from one of America's greatest early writers and thinkers:
Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.-- from The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine, American Founding Father
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