Salon recently decided to remove a post from their website which claimed that the Bible cannot have come from God because it was so “badly written.” The post originally appeared at the website of psychologist and writer Valerie Tarico, where it can still be found.
The author began her post by stating that millions of evangelicals hold a dictation theory of inspiration and says that they believe each phrase to be so perfect that it needs linguistic analysis to understand its meaning. Then she remarks, “If that were the case, one would have to conclude that God is a terrible writer. Many passages in the Bible would get kicked back by any competent editor or writing professor, kicked back with a lot of red ink. Mixed messages, repetition, bad fact checking, awkward constructions, inconsistent voice, weak character development, boring tangents, contradictions, passages where nobody can tell what the...