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 Sceptic’s Annotated Bible, programmer Daniel G. Taylor created this encyclopaedic visualisation 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 criticise or pick apart the book. Rather, he’s interested in analysing it carefully — and visually — to reveal common threads through the entire story. “This website aspires to be a beautiful and interactive resource for sceptics and believers alike to explore some of the more negative aspects of holy books,” he writes.
Though this is certainly a more sceptical take on the Bible, Taylor also included augmentative demographic data about faith in America. One Gallup poll, for example, found that 46 per cent 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. [Quipsologies]