Andrew Bernardin - The Naked Bible: An Irreverent Exposure of Bible Verses, Versions, and Meanings that Preachers Dishonestly Ignore

Copyright 2010, 2011 by Andrew Bernardin

Cover design by Andrew Bernardin

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. Reviewers may quote short excerpts.

For the copyright information of the Bibles quoted, see Appendix A.
Printed in the United States of America

First Printing: January 2010

ISBN 9781449520717

by Barking Ink Books

(www.andrewbernardin.com/barking-ink-books)

~~~~~

An Irreverent Exposure
of Bible Verses, Versions, and Meanings
that Preachers Dishonestly Ignore

Andrew Bernardin

Barking Ink Books

~~~~~

with thanks to Wendy
my wife,
my partner for life,
my best friend

~~~~~

- Seven Days of Undress

Preface: Please Note

Introduction Infidelity to the Absurd

Day One -Biblical Voodoo

1. The Case of the Burnt Marshmallow

2. The Spiritual Significance of Foreskin

3. The Lords Almighty Buttocks

4. Tongues Speaking in Nonsense

5. The Astrological Qualities of God

6. Stimulus and Divine Response

7. The Haunted Bible

8. The Slave Girl with ESP

9. A More Logical Lords Prayer

Day Two -The Supernatural Silverback

10. The Lord Was a Polytheist

11. Gods Anger Index

12. Those Bloody Family Values

13. Confidently Trembling for Heavens Sake

14. Bumper Sticker Wisdom

15. The Myth of the Loving God

16. The Supernatural Hit Man

17. A Game of Cat and Mouse with the Pharaoh

18. Is the Great Kahuna a Big Baboon?

Day Three -Spiritual Battlephilia

19. Ninja Slaves at Your Service

20. Jehoshaphat and the Dead Tuxedos

21. Barbershop Accident or Act of Torture?

22. Those Harlots at the Car Wash

23. The Lord says, Go, Fight, Win!

24. CSI Holy Land: Who Killed Herod?

25. A Four-Star God

26. Jezebel Becomes Kibbles n Bits

27. The Metrosexual War General

Day Four -The Ultra-Conservative Curmudgeon

28. Penis Pedigree, A Huge Issue

29. David and the Handicapped Parking Zone

30. My Body, My Wife

31. Gods Love of Plunder

32. The Diabolic Gynecologist

33. The Wall Street Gospel

34. Jesus Was an Adopted Child

35. Dusting Goliaths Shaft for Fingerprints

36. Biblical Soap: High Drama or Low?

37. How Much for that Infant in the Window?

38. The Warped Belief Spectrum

39. Gods View of Broads

Day Five -A Doddering, Obsolete Grandfather

40. Why Bibles Hide the Carnage

41. Rachel Crowned Miss Universe

42. Gods Report Card

43. Your Ass Down a Well

44. One Heck of a Flood

45. Gods Eleventh Commandment

46. The Cure for Lunacy

47. The LORD Gets Precise, and Gets it Wrong

48. Taking Leave of Exodus

49. The LORD Said, Let There Be Ignorance!

Day Six A Perfectly Muddled Message

50. Send Me an Anchor

51. How Judas Got Paid

52. No Typewriters in Heaven

53. Why God Needs a Throne

54. Holy Heifers?

55. Hagar Sees God, Without LSD

56. Visions of a Fearful God

57. Questions about the Lords Spirit

58. The Stork and the Assassin

59. The Winnowing of Gods Words

60. A Buffet of Bible Translations

61. The Fuzzy Words of God, Case #332

62. Be Fruitful and Abstain from Sex

63. King David on the Psychiatrists Couch

Day Seven The Kinder, Gentler Wrath of Jesus

64. The Ghost of Jesus Past

65. The Good News of Eternal Punishment

66. How to Discipline Renegade Angels

67. Jesus Disappointed by Election Results

68. Unsolved Mysteries: Whos Your Master?

69. Was Jesus a Low-Talker?

70. In the Manger: Three Winos and An Elephant

71. Biblical Pearls and Blind Pigs

72. The Cult of Christianity

73. Christs War on Teeth

74. Jesus and the Grateful Dead

Appendix A The Bibles

Appendix B The Author

Appendix C The Good Book?

The Sexist Book

The Sadistic Book

The Superstitious Book

The Ethnocentric Book

The Inhumane Book

The Psychotic Book

The Fascist Book

The Backwards Values Book

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- Preface

1. All Bible verses are quoted verbatim and highlighted by using italics. The verses preceeded by this symbol however, are NOT verbatim. Found following the chapters and listed in Appendix C, these verses are from Andrews New Irreverent Version (ANIV). They are my own, personal, creative rendering of verses found in the New International Version. Within them, the text in italics is my informal wording of the word of God. In the normal font you will find editorializing that is fully the word of Andrew. Additional commenting on the verse is marked by the symbol, >> , rather than the standard paragraph break. For formatting purposes.

Again, the quoted verses within each chapter are all strictly verbatim, as bizarre as some may seem, unless preceeded by a not symbol. If you doubt the Bible verse in question really says X or Y, I invite you to consult the source.

2. The Bible verses from Andrews New Irreverent Version () are randomly presented. If I did not mix things up, there would be passage after passage about battles, or taboo foods, or the number of sons a tribe proudly counted. And that would be boring.

3. No verse is used twice. All seeming redundancy is in the Bible itself.

4. Throughout this book I frequently use God with a superscript exclamation point appended to it for the purpose of highlighting the fact I am referring to the supposedly singular supernatural entity of the Bible. No, not any old god, but God!. That god. Consider God! to be the all-powerful, all-knowing and totally groovy, invisible leader of people mentioned in what is called the Holy Book. Yet there are different versions of this deity, and there are definitely other gods worshipped by other people around the world, so I am not going to perpetuate the assumption that there is one god that we all agree is the one god.

This might seem like a quibble, and the unusual presentation of the word may come across as a tad distracting and tedious. But consider this analogy: A co-worker informs you of important developments for your company. He keeps referring to the primary protagonist as Bob. The first time he uses this name you respond, His name is Jim. But the co-worker continues with the mistake. Every time he says Bob, you correct him, You mean Jim.

Is the distinction between God and God!likewise worth making? Yes it is. And so I will make it.

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- Introduction

While any group of believers can be considered infidels by all the other groups, or n groups, atheists are outsiders to n+1 groups. We are everyones favorite infidel. To the like-minded god-free I say, Hear me: You are not alone. Yes, we have round-hole minds in a world of square-peg beliefs. But that difference and its associated push to conform is simply the hill we must ascend. (It is also a mixing of metaphors.) If it helps, recall and repeat the sage affirmation intoned by Saturday Night Lives Stuart Smiley a.k.a. Al Franken: Im good enough, Im smart enough, and, doggone it, if believers think Im immoral sea scum, they are daft, delirious, and demented.