Now he wants to write a book to help people who were in the same predicament he was in.  He wants to use the four corners of the Bible, nothing more, to show why the Bible is indefensible.  He doesn't want to go to science or textual criticism or anything like that, because once you go beyond the Bible they will stop listening to anything.  He believes it is possible to construct arguments using nothing but the Bible that will disprove the Bible.

Honestly, I haven't even read all of the Bible.  I don't know if that is possible or not.  I do know that there are a lot of books out there on the Bible.  Hundreds of thousands of them.  Has something like this been done?

I know about Ken's Guide to the Bible.  That's the closest I know of.  We've talked about Dennis McKinsey's Biblical Errancy.  He doesn't think that will do the job.  There's that 101 Myths of the Bible. It's close, but it doesn't really do what he wants it to do.  It goes into a lot of mythology and he's afraid that they'll just ignore anything about mythology.  Sam Harris's stuff is way too combative.  The Skeptic's Annotated Bible does a good job of cataloging some of the contradictions and absurdities.  I know you can go back as far as the earliest Roman critics, and the great Julian the Apostate, for pretty good criticisms of Christianity.  Thomas Paine was pretty good in the Age of Reason.

But what he wants to do is something along the line of a handbook that would summarize the contradictions and goofy quotes from the Bible with Chapter and Verse so the Christian could read them him/rself.  He thinks arguments can be designed that will draw thinking people away from faith in these fables.  I have no idea whether what he proposes can be done or not, but he understands how these guys think, having spent many wasted hours in their churches and Sunday schools.

Are there any recommendations for other books?  I'd hate to see this guy just try to reinvent the wheel.  If there's not, I'll probably be helping him try to put this together, as long as he doesn't backslide or something.  Of course, "helping" is probably a huge exaggeration.  I have little to add, and I'm so damned lazy I can barely keep up with posts on the Internet and Usenet.  Still, I'm asking for recommendations of anything like this.

There's a part of me that wants to recommend that he not waste any more of his life on this, but just accept that they've just screwed him out of precious hours of his life and go on.

Thandarr