More on "The Year of Living Biblically"

Say you're a secular progressive atheist (meaning you live in Cambridge, MA) and you want to attack the Bible by referencing all the crazy rules and anti-gay comments therein.  Well, A.J. Jacobs has done the culling for you.

Where to begin?  How you can't wear clothes of mixed fibers?  How you can't sit in a seat if a woman who is menstruating recently sat there?  How you should only eat fruit from a tree that's at least 5 years old?

There's more.

1 Corinthians 14:34 says women should stay silent in church.

There's a series in Exodus about how you can treat your slaves, i.e. you may beat them as long as they can live one more day afterwards, if you pluck out his eye you must set him free, and if he's a Hebrew he must be freed in six years (but if he refuses to be free you must drill a hole in his ear with an awl.  Actually, just a reference to an awl would have been weird enough.)

Matthew 5:27-28 says that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery.  (Isn't that what the advertising industry is trying to make us do 99% of the time?  How Christian is capitalism after all?  How many businessmen are also avowed Christians?  I wonder how those same Christian CEOs would defend themselves against Matthew 19:21:  "Jesus said to him, 'If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor . . . '" )

And the anti-gay ones:

Leviticus 18:22 says "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination."

Romans 1:27 says "The men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error."

Oh Bible, you silly.