A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian.

You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.

If I have to filibuster on the Senate floor, I'll even read the King James Bible until the wall is funded.

To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries

A triumph of consciousness-raising has been the homosexual hijacking of the word 'gay.'

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.