Fundie God Dictation Bible

It occurs to me that if the Bible was really dictated by an angry, dictatorial God as fundies believe (or appear to believe, or claim to believe), we’d expect to see a lot of things that don’t seem to appear in the text. A truly infallible, comprehensive manifesto for human living, direct from God’s own mouth would surely reflect God’s priorities, but there are some pretty big discrepancies between the contents of this manifesto and what fundies take from it, which they have to fill in with a substantial amount of interpretation, even while denying that they’re doing it. At the very least, you’d think He’d have made sure to be absolutely explicit about what He wanted you to do.

So what would the Bible look like if it had really been dictated word for word by a micromanaging God who shared the strange obsessions of various kinds of fundamentalist? Some passages would have to be struck out, some new bits would have to be inserted, and various other bits would need to be rewritten. So for anyone who pays attention to apocalyptic prophecies and suchlike, the Fundie God Dictation (FGD) version of the Bible would look a bit like this from Matthew 24:

For no one knows the day or the hour – not the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. But to be honest, He’s really bad at keeping secrets, and He’ll probably blab to any half-arsed self-proclaimed prophet he happens to bump into. I’ve told Him that the whole idea’s to keep people guessing, so they can’t exploit that last-minute repentance loophole He put in, but He just won’t shut up. Between you and me, I think He might be getting a bit soft in His old age. It’s just as well His memory’s going as well, so He keeps giving out the wrong date – there’s only so much space in heaven, and we need to keep the riffraff out.

Of course, it’s very easy to have a go at the way fundamentalists say that the Bible’s a complete, infallible set of direct, divinely dictated instructions, even while holding beliefs which require some serious interpretation and downplaying of inconvenient passages, and even outright invention. But what really interests me is the way all shades of belief adhere to what they think the text means, rather than what it actually says, and the often massive difference between the two.