Even Thomas Jefferson Understood the Christian Bible was Bullshit
He edited the barbaric holy book, removing the resurrection, angels, and any "corruptions of reason.” It’s 82 pages long.
The problem with the Christian Holy Bible is its ambiguity. Its openness to interpretation causes untold horrors to persist long past reason should allow and fuels revolutions that have liberated races, genders, sexualities, and creeds from religious oppression, regardless of its truthfulness. The book has been used by the oppressed and the oppressors, often at the same time and in direct conflict with each other, selectively citing passages their adversaries ignored, and these dueling doctrines and contradictory creeds expose the very problem with the text.
The Bible has no unifying theme. The Christian deity declares murder a sin just pages away from commanding His followers to execute men, women, and children to satisfy His insatiable bloodlust. If you don't unconditionally love Him, He will happily sentence you to eternal punishment. The book's wickedly inconsistent morality is then left up to the feelings and opinions of humans of a specific time and place, and that's a dangerous amount of leeway to give any religion's devotees.
“In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”
— Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Horatio Spofford, March 18, 1814
Why have the liberated never reformed the Bible and removed the regressive passages that subjugated their existence? Why keep them? Why not create something new and better? Would editing the Bible be a sort of capitulation to the idea that the book was never the inspired word of God but the collected myths of men who didn't know any better? Who cares if it's another book written and edited by man if it's better? Isn’t that better than ignoring God’s barbaric behavior and vengeful tendencies?
Thomas Jefferson certainly thought the book needed revision, saying in an 1820 letter that he found many of the Bible's passages filled with "so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture." The Bible, unreformed, will be used to take away the very rights it initially helped liberate, and that's a threat even Jefferson tried to mitigate 200 years ago.
“But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?”
— John Adams, in a letter to F.A. Van der Kamp, December, 27, 1816
At nearly every point in American history where we have attempted to grow the scope of civil rights to include more of us, to fulfill the Founder's promise of creating a more perfect union, it has been the Christian god most eagerly standing in Liberty's way. Bible believers have used their mythological figure to stand against abolition, contraception, women's suffrage, desegregation, the Civil Rights Act, the US Disability Act, marriage equality, trans rights, the First Amendment, banning child marriage, and so much more, often co-opting the US government to enact their theology as law.
In the lead-up to the Civil War, Republican Cassius Marcellus Clay noted in his 1886 autobiography that "The present generation can know nothing of the terror which the slave-power inspired." It was so fierce that "a professed minister of the Christian religion in South Carolina" said it was better for him "to murder his own mother, and lose his soul in hell" than denounce slavery. That minister must have truly understood God's will.
“Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced an inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.”
— Thomas Jefferson, in “Notes on the State of Virginia”
Slaveowners handed out edited versions of the Bible to their slaves, reinforcing the passages about obeying masters while removing the ones discussing liberation and freedom. Were these people God's good Christians? Were they bad ones? Or were they Patriotic Americans? If evil people can edit the Bible for evil things, why can't good people edit it for good? Why not try?
Throughout our history, religious Americans have fought to limit liberty and to expand it. The Ku Klux Klan drew on its deep ties to Protestantism to funnel Americans into their hateful ranks of white supremacy that would then become the fuel that would keep the fire of segregation burning in our country until Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. took to the pulpit to show white Americans a dictionary and taught them the meaning of the world equal.
One of our generation's greatest civil rights victories, achieving LGBTQ+ equality against a Middle Eastern definition of marriage, is already being threatened by religious extremists who want all Americans to bend the knee to their deity's foreign bigotry. Today in America, books are being banned, children are fleeing their homes, and pregnant women are in danger of dying all to appease one religious book's god, even though the Bible wasn't written for Americans or by Americans.
The Christian holy book is filled with numerous justifications for slavery, child marriage, child rape, infanticide, bigotry, genocide, and murder. It says nothing of equality, liberty, democracy, or the right to self-determination, nor does it contain even a morsel or mention of the importance of personal independence in a secular society.
“The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.”
—James Madison, in a letter objecting to the use of government land for churches, 1803
Hell, even Jefferson had enough sense to desecrate the Bible in hopes of protecting future Americans from its horrors, carving it up with a knife to create a naturalistic version of a Jesus who performs no miracles and dies at the end. It contains no resurrection, no angels, and none of the "corruptions of reason" Jefferson despised.
His version is a far better starting point for centering any idea of a single American morality than The Holy Bible, and nothing is stopping us from creating a new, Americanized philosophy that better aligns with the enlightenment ideals of liberty, the right to self-determination, and one's pursuit of happiness. Jefferson did it, and it was deemed moral enough to hand out to incoming Congressional members for the first half of the 20th century.
"And the day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."
— Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823
The Christian Bible presents a unique threat to our country's values. It is not an inherently moral book, containing countless vile virtues that would get it banned in Republican states if the eager Anti-Americans actually read it. It doesn't support any philosophy of liberty and freedom, but it is always primed to aid fascist and oppressive ones.
We cannot expect our country's enlightenment-era Founding to peacefully co-exist with an ancient ideology fundamentally incompatible with the American Constitution and in direct conflict with the Bill of Rights—Christianity's First Commandment is an insult to our First Amendment, and it has no place being posted in schools, courtrooms, or police stations.
There is no better story to inspire Americans to strive for a better democracy than our own if we look in the right places, and it's long past time we begin to sincerely believe in these values first and foremost because they are under attack. It’s time we stop bowing to the whims of gods, and begin to live the values that have set people free, not imprisoned them.
There is a better story to tell that should help us get us there. There has to be.
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half of 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.
— Thomas Paine, the Age of Reason, Part 1, 1794