Rating: 
Summary: Complete Twaddle
Review: A book written by primitive man to explain away the events his primitive mind could not make sense of. Religion is for the weak minded. Remember this - you cannot have up without down, front without back, male without female, good with out bad. You would not know joy without ever having experienced pain. I believe a higher power is out there as something cannot be born of nothing. I just believe everyone has it all wrong. Choose your own path, lead a good life while leading your own life, do well by others and you will have made a generous contribution.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't listen to the 1-star reviews
Review: For all you people in stupid-ville out there, get it strraight that the events in the Bible are 100% real. You can check up on Egyptian history, the Queen from Cush came to visit King Solomon who really WAS the son of King David and even today people in Israel know their family descent as 1 of the 12 tribes. Ammonites, Hittites, etc all existed. There really WAS a man names Jesus of Nazereth who was nailed unto a T shaped crossas it was written in the Roman Chronicles. And a man named Saul (Paul) of Tarsus killed hundreds of Christians.
the REASON that the language in the King James Version Bible seems so odd with "begat" "hath" "thou" and stuff like that is because it was written in 1769 by the scholars of KING JAMES. You dumb people out there who think that it talks in a "wierd dialect" because it doesn't sound "english" make me sick enough to puke.
So whether you want to believe it or the events in the Bible are historical fact as the same events are written by other civilizations that the Israelites and the Jewish people interacted with. As any Jew who IS really a Jew as in lineage to Israel and they will tell you which house/tribe they are from. And for those Jews who don't know, shame on you go find out.
For all you Christians out there, give a pig a pearl and it will attack you for it. Understand? Don't take it personally.
Watch out for 2 versions or more of the King James Version that is out. A few are from the corrupted text of Wescott and Hort, the CODEX VATICANUS and CODEX SINAITICUS. How do we know these are corrupt? Well Wescott and Hort who "found" these two had ties to several cults and when the texts are compared to the four gospels, the GOD and way of life does not match up.
Get the King James and not these other "revised" versions. Most of them take out from the Word and other add in. You want the Word directly from it's scriptures without this transliteration stuff, then learn Aramaic and get the original scriptures.
Rating:
Summary: Great Price on the Greatest Book Ever
Review: For this price it is great to have a few Bibles around so you can have it at work, home or anywhere to read.
I have been reading almost everyday for 10 years, and due to the ways of the world and the theories of modern science, the Bible must be read almost daily to keep the truth fresh and alive.
The King James may be in old English, but it is a word for word translation keeping it more accurate than most other translations.
Buy a few to keep around or give to a friend.
If you are new to reading the Bible, you may want to buy a good dictionary as many words are older words (The King James was translated in 1611). You may also want to check out other translations. The NIV (New International Version) is translated sentence by sentance, and the NASV (New American Standard Version) is a newer word for word translation, but not as widely accepted and used as the KJV (King James Version).
Rating:
Summary: Please stop
Review: I just watched the Passion of the Christ for the second time. Both times I watched it were the only times in years that I went down on my knees and asked Jesus to forgive me for letting him down, after what he went through for me. I need to find my way back to Jesus and God -- and if it takes Mel Gibson to make a movie like this -- then so be it. He will have saved another soul -- brought one more person back into the faith. I need a Bible now -- I need to read it and believe again. Satan will not own me anymore. I am giving my will up -- to do God's will.
Rating: 
Summary: Good message but suffers in implementation
Review: I'm not generally a fan of fantasy fiction, but I felt obligated to read this title, it being the popular example of the genre. The story has a good premise that I can't help but think suffers in its implementation. The collaborative writing and editing processes, to say nothing of numerous translations, render the basic message somewhat indistinct. For example, as early as the first chapter, the authors make an attempt to introduce literally everything into the plot, even going so far as to suggest that the beginning of the story is the beginning of the universe. The rest of the book, however, makes no attempt to reconcile these far-reaching plot threads, instead focusing solely on the actions of a (relatively) small group of characters in the Middle East. Even with these strenuous limitations the remainder of the novel suffers from an overabundance of characters, most of whom are crude caricatures and only mentioned in passing. The authors would have done better to limit the scope of the plot, both in time and setting, to better highlight their message. The few characters who are developed suffer from serious inconsistencies as a result of the collaborative writing process.Take, for example, the main character, God. In the first half of the book, which has a very linear and logical format, God is something of a bully. Only a few pages into the first chapter he has condemned the entire human race to a lifetime of suffering by casting their ancestors out of an idyllic paradise. Whenever anyone says or does anything critical of him, God either kills them outright or makes them wish they were dead. He kills women and children, he levels cities, at one point he even wipes out the whole human race with the exception of a single elderly couple, who are forced to engage in years of back-breaking manual labor simply to survive. God's history is never fleshed out; the authors simply leave him in place, unchanging, as a literal deus ex machina to be called into play whenever the plot gets too convoluted. It isn't hard to imagine that God's character in this part of the book was inspired by the Greek ideal of Zeus: an omniscient entity who rains suffering upon mankind from on high whenever he's in a bad mood. At some point the original authors apparently felt they had done their part and the book sat around unfinished for a few centuries until a new group came along to add their contribution. The second portion of the story, the "New Testament", doesn't start off in a promising manner: God, evidently still in his Zeus mode, impregnates a mortal woman who, by his own admission, has done nothing wrong. (The authors even make a point of saying that, although married, she was a virgin prior to this episode.) Predictably, she gives birth to a half-human demigod, who at the age of thirty suddenly decides to start talking to people about his origins. Apparently fatherhood has softened God up somewhat; he's now willing to forgive and forget, no matter what people do, as long as they're willing to tell him how great his son, Jesus, is. The authors make no attempt to explain the about-face, and after a while some Romans show up to kill off the Jesus character, without God's interference. The intervening portions of the book are devoted to a collection of pithy parables with less-than-subtle morals, presented out of order and without context. Here the editors' methodology of slapping together the works of disparate authors, even leaving out whole books to clear up the larger inconsistencies, comes into play. A few main characters wander about, telling everyone how great Jesus was, presumably so that God, who doesn't show up at all in this part of the story, will treat them well. The narrative is stripped of any cronological basis and on the whole becomes fairly tedious. Having fortunately sensed that they were losing their audience, a third group of authors then came along and added a brief summary so fantastic that it makes the rest of the book seem like an accurate history. God makes another appearance, just in time to see the human race he allegedly loved destroyed - except, of course, for those people who told other people about what a nice guy his son was. On the whole, the book could have better presented its moral message by sticking to a well-defined format, be it a cronological narrative or a succession of fables. It's certainly worth a read; just be prepared to be confused by the characters and their motivations.
Rating:
Summary: I'm an atheist
Review: I'm not going to tell anyone to stop believing in god, but personally I've never had any belief in a quite ridiculous idea. I know many of the events in the bible did happen, but not with the godly twist that is put in the bible. If you want the true facts just read a history book. All I want to say is that all the bible-thumpers should stop telling the disbelievers that they're going to burn in hell. That's just idiotic.
Rating:
Summary: You people are ALL crazy
Review: If you want to find God, then look into your own heart. Do you treat others like s**t? Then you are a piece of that substance, whether you read the Bible or not. The reason religion exists is because people are and act like children and they need something or someone to hold their hand and keep them out of trouble which otherwise they gravitate to like moths to a flame. Actually they are worse than children because at least children are honest in their cruelty and malice. The reason the world is in such a mess is because people are stupid. I'm not talking about book learning, bible learning, scientific, psychological, and historical knowledge or anything YOU might think is intelligence. I'm talking about the wisdom of the heart in all its infinite subtlety and ground splitting power. If people would finally start to listen to the voice in their breast then we could all begin to move beyond religion and laws and governments and this infantile pre-civilization which is laughably referred to as the "modern world". I'm not holding my breath.
All you atheists and wise secularists are of an order of magnitude even sillier than the true believers. At lease the devout have something of vast comfort to cling to. You have nothing, and are nothing but a reaction to them. Your attitudes are sophomoric, disrespectful and self destructive. I wish I could believe. I can see that it is such a comfort. But I've seen too much. I must stand in the cold wind and the burning fire and live with paradox, uncertainty, and infinite longing for strange beauty and paradise lost. My only comfort is that this brief strut upon the stage will be soon over, as the years pass like a ghost.
I do not believe that the bible is the word of God. It is full of a lot of wise and interesting things which is why I am going to buy it and read it finally, from cover to cover. I grew up with Christianity and it is a part of my heritage and I want to know more about it and that beautiful man called Jesus. But even as a young boy I could see that churches were full of hypocrites and small minded fools. Organized religion is merely a social device and a way to `try' to keep all the morons from hurting each other. If I sound like I think I am superior, well I suppose I do. Because I know Love and God is Love- as they say. If you want to know God, it's easy. God is everywhere; indeed God is everything- from the love of a mother for her child to the soap scum ringing your bathtub. Just smile at people and be good to them, be kind to animals, (like maybe, stop eating them?) take a walk in the forest (the mind of God) and FEEL the trees, smell the air, find some beautiful music to move you and you're half way there! The other half, well, that's the real mystery...
That's my perspective on the Bible. Many will disagree vehemently. Some may see things similarly. At any rate I thank God that I live in the greatest country on the face of the planet and can freely express it. USA! USA! US...
Rating:
Summary: I can't agree more
Review: King James authorized this translation because an accurate translation was necessary in order that people could expose themselves to the lessons contained within and to form their own opinions on theological matters (as well as to keep the political opposition occupied for as long as possible). In those days, bibles in English were just becoming affordable and people scrambled to form their own opinions on theological and moral issues. Now, it seems that many Christians have become so complacent about their faith that it is not uncommon to hear them grossly misquote their own creator. If indeed you believe that there is one God and that the Bible is divinely inspired, then how could you resist the temptation to read what He has (caused to be) written? With much of the original Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew texts lost, this is the last English language Bible to benefit from all of the original works. Fifty top translators worked for six years to bring it about using methods that still stand as monuments to proper translating today. Read it. It's fun, interesting, and if you have never read it before, you will learn things about the Christian faith that your priest, preacher, pastor, or minister has never told you.
Rating:
Summary: Don't buy it here
Review: Please use the King james bible But you can get this exact copy at walmart for 1.00 something...no shipping. I think it is silly not to just buy this at walmart but hey as long as you are reading God's word I guess it doesn't really matter where you buy it!
GOD BLESS
Rating:
Summary: All in the Mind
Review: The Bible is a farrago of self-referring, primitive, superstitious, goat-herder stories - wilfully mistaken for something meaningful. It is kitsch, schmaltz, the crass and the coarse - cloaked in imitation profundity.
This book, and the cult built upon it, employ grandiloquence and elevated language, lofty stories, faux-gravitas, and spurious profundity merely as a device - to help followers generate repetitive warm mind-loops of self-comfort and brain-pleasuring thought-spirals. Religious belief is self-worship. It is humankind's most narcissistic enterprise.
This book of stories depicts fantasy figures called `Jesus' and `God' - invented by humans many centuries ago. It is purely and solely the drives of human culture and the products of neurological phenomena and obsessive thought-coils that have produced such a work. `God' is the product of neurological quirk, fused with ego-driven cultural obsession. The Bible and its cult-virus are an inane cultural framework for self-stimulating the brain and self-pleasuring on the resulting endorphins.
Babies fixate on the all-powerful, all-providing, all-knowing parent figure. This can become mentally fixed and set. The result is rigid, fixated God-belief in adulthood. This spreads like a virus through society, becoming fused into culture. Humankind projects all positive feelings onto an imagined cultural object, this gives it `God'. It projects (disowns) all bad feelings onto another cultural fabrication to produce `Satan'.
To believe this book as the word of `God' is merely to fail to recognise its solely human sources: emotional, neurological, cognitive, cultural, sociological. Man's habitual self-deception and obsessive-compulsive thought patterns generate the facile drivel that is religious belief.
Why lie to yourself about this turgid work when there is no rational, logical, scientific, philosophical, evidential or intuitive basis for belief in this `God'? `God' is a fabrication of the human mind and exists solely and exclusively within the realm of cultural fantasy and people's imagination. `God' did not create man. Man created `God'. Man sustains this fabrication for selfish purpose and self-regard.
Someone called `Jesus' might or might not have existed but - manifestly - he was not the `Son of God'. As such, this book's core claim of `the Christ' is bogus and spurious. Humans wish to make sense of suffering. For some, `Jesus Christ' on the Cross is a culturally potent man-made symbol of altruistic sacrifice and of suffering.
Constructs of sinful, fallen man etc illustrate that Christianity is merely a fabricated construct employed by humankind/people to:
- understand their own suffering
- come to terms with their own suffering
- justify suffering by the person(s) experiencing it
- justify suffering by the person(s) inflicting it
The Bible and Christianity came about because humankind:
is driven to establish an upwardly directed relationship; has a need to create a socially accepted concept-mechanism as a device of personal self-comfort and emotional analgesia; needs to make sense of the world; has a psyche which desires to be immortal; has a tribal identity which it must aggressively feel and assert; has a tribal identity and enjoys being one of the crowd; possesses fears - both understandable and irrational; lacks sophistication in its early peoples about the world and the universe; needs to create and embrace some means for social cohesion and shared views; has a tendency to folly; feels an instinctive wish to relate to a flawless, all-powerful, all-benevolent father figure; is disabled by guilt and shame - the feeling that humans deserve to be pursued and punished by an all-powerful father figure; is fooled by the appeal of stories, myths, legends, mystery and the supernatural; is fooled by the power of fantasy and the appeal of magic; wilfully combines hope with self-deception; suffers the emotional bewilderment of bereavement and invents a `Heaven' to compensate; has a capacity to be driven by a vague, amorphous, unfocused, nebulous part of the mind and tell itself that some "god's" love or presence is found, felt and experienced there; is obsessively driven to build mental, physical and institutional edifices; has a love of bombast, ritual, hierarchy, solemn and precise ceremony - and repeated behaviours and physical movements; desires, in some way, to feel subservient, subjugated and punished or desires to be punitive; has a desire to relinquish responsibility for individual life; has a drive to control others and excuse behaviour; suffers quirks of neurological make-up; is a product of evolution - so such belief is a device for strengthening survival drives (optimism) in the face of difficulties encountered; is a product of evolution - so such belief is a device for strengthening survival chances by facilitating social cohesion; is sometimes hampered by a pattern-seeking brain and a symbol embracing mind; has a societal need to establish a means to spread guidance and strictures about how people, tribes, groups, citizens etc should behave towards each other; is driven to turn to something when physically or emotionally lost; is a lazy and sloppy thinker; can lapse into over rigid behavioural and thought patterns; and - longs to feel a belonging to something greater and beyond - and so invents such a realm.
Most of all, humans created `God' because of pride and self-importance - anthropocentric egotism about mankind's place in the universe.
If all of humankind were extinguished, `the Christ' and `God' would cease to be, since the mind of people is their sole locus of existence. Man creates ALL 'gods' out of egotism, vanity, insecurity, folly and the desire to manipulate.
Chances are that people who dislike this review will promptly generate ever more fierce and tight circles of fervent belief thought-loops in order to dismiss it.
On 7th day, man created God in his own image. Break out of the self-comfort mind-loops. Read something else other than Bible-swill. Abandon the God-mush brain-state endorphin spirals.
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