No matter what your beliefs, it's hard to deny that the era in which the Bible takes place was a more, uh, brutal
time, filled with plagues, salt pillars, and excessive murders—plus
plenty of conflicting moral diktats from the man himself. Now, one
designer has built a handy map to help us navigate the text.
Using data from the Skeptic's Annotated Bible, programmer Daniel G. Taylor
created this encyclopedic visualization of 463 of the Bible's major
contradictions. Here's how to read it: Each vertical blue line
represents a different chapter, ordered chronologically. The red arcs
trace each represent a question about a specific person or concept.
These range from incredibly mundane ("Is it OK to use perfume?") to the
monumental ("Is God the creator of evil?"). Clicking on one of the red
lines takes you to a list of every relevant quote from both Old and New
Testaments.
Taylor's
point isn't to criticize or pick apart the book. Rather, he's interested
in analyzing it carefully—and visually—to reveal common threads through
the entire story. "This website aspires to be a beautiful and
interactive resource for skeptics and believers alike to explore some of
the more negative aspects of holy books," he writes.
Though this
is certainly a more skeptical take on the Bible, Taylor also included
augmentative demographic data about faith in America. One Gallup poll,
for example, found that forty-six percent of Americans not only believe
in God, but also believe in the creationist view that God created humans
in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years. So,
yes, Americans are still plenty faithful. [Quipsologies]
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