The bible is a 'holy' book, written around two thousand - two and a half thousand years ago composed of two compilation sections of many books. The first compilation (the Old testament) starts with the creation of Earth and man in a week, ¹and follows the adventures of a bloke called Abraham and his extended family, and then a particularly unpleasant chap called Moses, a freedom-fighting holy terrorist and man of God, and also a man named David, significant only for fathering people and slaying large people with pieces of strata and an elastic band.². Moses was really none too pleasant a chap. Whereas nowadays one might tackle the problem of the Jews being enslaved by the Egyptians in a peaceful way, possibly with a mass industrial walkout, or a boycott of Egyptian beef³ Moses decided that it might be a good idea to gang up with God against them. Moses was a violent racist with friends in high places and a hobby in aquatic engineering. He decided to smite the Egyptians with assorted plagues (frogs, boils, breakfast television presenters⁴) and then finally sending in the Angel of Death to kill the first-born son of every family that hadn't smeared lamb's blood over their doorpost. Not only was this terribly unhygienic, it was also rather cruel. Not only to the lambs and the Egyptian first sons, but also to the greetings cards industry, who now had far less people to cater for.

Moses is noted for one other thing: receiving the ten commandments from God. A cynic might point out that he could have staged the whole incident, and just created the commandments in order to stop the Jews (and subsequently the Christians) having any fun.

After this, Moses then headed off to the promised land. Now, everyone in the Bible seems to want to reach the promised land, despite the fact that it seems to have already been promised to the people already living there ⁵, which places them in the position of divine bailiffs.

The second book tells of the exploits of a character called Jesus, his family, and the foretelling of his birth. Like all sequels, it's a bit disappointing, holding no real prophecy for anything that was likely to happen. Like all fortune tellers, the prophets in the bible are incredibly vague about what is going to happen and even more vague about when. This would suggest either:

• that prognostication is an imprecise science, and that it is difficult to predict events exactly because of the sheer difficulty of the task.
• that in their visions, the prophets and holy men never espied a calendar.
• that in their visions, the prophets shared the consciousness of people wearing blindfolds but listening to either the speaking clock or the radio about something bad happening.
• that they are making the whole thing up, in the hope of being marked out by their community as one blessed by the Gods, thereby avoiding all work involving any heavy lifting, and being worshipped and carried everywhere on a palanquin made of incredibly expensive stuff, and having your every whim served by your personal harem of nubile porn actresses.

Option four is probably the most likely.

Anyway, back to Jesus. Well, Jesus was actually quite a nice bloke, something of a departure from the heathen masses that populated the first book. He had his own falling star⁶, and at his birth was greeted by three wise men/astrologers/kings/princes ⁷from foreign lands, and also a group of shepherds⁸ and their sheep⁹. He was the son of God, although according to the book there is very little paternal resemblance apart from the beard: Jesus wasn't a sadistic, egotistical power-freak of a psychological screw-up with the need to be worshipped 24/7 until the apocalypse. Now, a cynic might say that Mary's (Jesus' mother) virgin birth might have less to do with an act of God, and more to do with having an affair which needed to be hastily covered up. If someone nowadays said that their father was God almighty, than that's exactly what you might think, isn't it?

We here little of Jesus as a child, except for all the usual things that you might assume he'd do being the son of God; although these things obviously wouldn't be mentioned. THE MIRACLE OF THE MENDED MATCHBOX TOY doesn't quite have the same theological significance as some of his other good works.

We next find Jesus doing good works all around Israel. Healing the sick, curing the blind, the usual sort of Messiah stuff that one might expect. He then pops along to Jerusalem, where after a couple of bouts of civil disorder, he was summarily captured and crucified by the Romans, and then rises from the dead a few days later, and promptly buggers off, due to return at some point in the distant future.

Jesus left us lots of good stuff: mainstream Christianity is no bad thing. And neither is Christmas. Unfortunately, he left us a load of stuff we really don't need, such as Christian television channels on cable. American TV evangelists. The Spanish Inquisition¹⁰. Witch burnings. Racism. Barriers to scientific progress throughout the ages. Unquestioning Faith. Fundamentalist governments. The foundation of Hitler-based Nazism. Granted, most of these things were knock-on effects, but surely God would have seen all these terrible things before he sent his son here, and decided not to bother. Unless he was the aforementioned sadistic git, that is.

Jesus was a nice guy. He was just a complete and utter failure.