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The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to the Bible

Publisher: • 2007 • 262 pages
The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible

Special Conservative Book Club hardcover edition — not available in stores!

For secular fundamentalists, religion in general, and the Bible in particular, are not just wrong-headed but actually dangerous. That’s because religion and the Bible stand in the way of everything they value most in life — primarily unlimited sex, of course, but also the power to reshape society into a kind of secular utopia free from traditional ethical restraint. For an influential group of academic, government, and media elites, the Bible, far from being the cornerstone of Western civilization, is actually the source of most of the evil in the world today: a veritable cornucopia of superstition, obscurantism, and “bad taste.”

Village-atheist assaults on the Bible are now commonplace in public schools, universities, the media, and even some elite seminaries. Acid-tongued pundit Christopher Hitchens and other widely celebrated writers warn the world about the growing menace of religious convictions. The Jesus Seminar and documentaries such as The Bible Unearthed claim to demonstrate that little or nothing the Bible says happened really happened anyway. Even pop culture has gotten into the act, with the TV drama The West Wing and the popular magicians Penn and Teller featuring much-ballyhooed “debunkings” of the truth of the Bible, purporting to show that the book that millions revere as holy is not just filled with silly fables masquerading as history, but with incitements to violence and immorality.

But now, in “The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to the Bible,” Robert J. Hutchinson sets the record straight. Hutchinson, the winner of eight journalism awards from the Associated Church Press and other organizations, sifts through archaeological and historical evidence to prove that the Bible — both the Old and the New Testaments — is on solid ground as history. He also explodes some of the most common myths about Biblical content and teaching, and shows why the secularist assault on all religions as being equally likely to move people to commit evil deeds is drastically wrongheaded. Hutchinson even includes copious quotes from the Founding Fathers and great thinkers throughout history (including quite a few no one would ever expect, such as Christopher Hitchens himself) extolling the manifold virtues of deep familiarity with the contents of the Bible.

Engaging and comprehensive, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible establishes a strong line of defense for conservatives looking for ammunition against the secularist anti-Christian onslaught.

The straight truth about Holy Writ:

  • How the sudden eruption of Islamic terrorism worldwide has given secular fundamentalists the excuse they’ve long needed to insist that all religious belief — from Osama bin Laden to Mother Teresa — amounts to essentially the same thing, and is all equally evil
  • Why at least some of the current controversy between liberal and conservative scholars over “who wrote the Bible” is unnecessary — because the conservatives don’t regard the Bible the way the liberals think they regard it
  • The real center of the conflict between creationists and proponents of evolution: it really isn’t about evolution at all
  • “Be fruitful and multiply” vs. the overpopulation scare: how fears about overpopulating the world are hysterical, unfounded, and politically motivated
  • Eight ways in which Old Testament ethical codes represent a moral improvement upon the pagan codes they’re supposed to be copied from
  • Why you have to have a real ax to grind against the Bible to think that the Old Testament takes a benign view of slavery
  • How, even before Christianity was legalized, and at considerable risk to their own lives, Christian leaders spoke out forcefully and courageously against the barbarisms of the pagan Empire, including slavery, the gladiatorial games, and abortion and infanticide
  • The large-scale attempt by secular fundamentalists everywhere to drive religious persons of all persuasions out of the public sphere altogether
  • How critics of the Bible all too often mistake descriptions of actual human conduct for God’s will
  • Modern Biblical scholarship: not as original, or as shocking or damaging to religious faith, as modern skeptics would have people believe
  • How Biblical religion was not the enemy of science but rather the intellectual matrix that made it possible in the first place
  • The egalitarian ethos of the Christian movement: its openness to people of all social and economic classes, its positive evaluation of women, its strong social concern and interest in the poor and sick
  • How there were few voices in the ancient world that discerned any distinction between what was legal (in the sense that it was decreed by the state) and what was moral or right — aside from the biblical prophets
  • Refuted: the decades-old effort by liberal scholars to debunk those passages in the Bible that have traditionally been seen as unambiguous condemnation of homosexuality
  • How, contrary to what anti-religious zealots such as Sam Harris assert, throughout history far more lives have been snuffed out by faith-hating fanatics than by religious believers — and that “rational” atheism, not the Bible or religious belief, that is the greatest danger to world peace
  • Proven false: the assumption of liberal theologians that the earliest Christian tradition would speak of Jesus as a simple human teacher, with only later writings exalting him as divine
  • Proof that the Gospels aren’t the tissues of church-created fable that many scholars would like you to believe they are: the Gospel writers made use of a collection of Jesus’ sayings as well as eyewitness reports of his life in compiling the Gospels
  • Discrepancies and “inconsistencies” in the four canonical Gospels: far from being an argument against their authenticity, they’re actually arguments for their genuine testimony
  • How, if parts of biblical law seem harsh to us, we are only able to recognize that harshness because we live in a society that has been shaped by 2,000 years of reflection upon, and experience with, the principles of justice and mercy found in that very same law

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