[AUTHOR'S NOTE: this seemed like an important article several years ago when I originally wrote it for Examiner.com, yet it seems even more relevant today. It is a review of sorts of a book I found very enlightening. Modern atheists tend to argue that the Bible is useless fiction, a conglomeration of stories assembled by illiterate farmers and shepherds, while many of their Christian contemporaries will argue that the Bible is the pure, unadulterated word of God. Naturally, I'm a little uncomfortable with both of those extremes. My opinion on the Bible is this: I worship the God that the Bible endeavors to describe to mankind, and I value the Bible. But the carpenter does not worship his hammer. He uses the hammer to make beautiful things. Therefore, I don't worship the Bible. I use the Bible as a tool that helps me worship the God I want to better understand.] Encouraging my Christian friends to think It's time to don the fire-proof asbestos suit. We've danced around the subject long enough. Is the Bible fact or fiction? The whole premise of writing as the Atlanta Creationism Examiner is to examine the question of whether or not we were actually created. This writer has played favorites for too long, ignoring the objections of my atheist and humanist friends and their criticisms of my preferred, sacred source of information, the Christian Bible. What about the fact there are two contradictory versions of the creation account in Genesis, they ask? Doing what anyone else would do when asked a question to which they didn't know the answer: I astutely chose to … [Read more...]