The Bible According to Mark Twain | Joseph B. Mccullough

The Bible According to Mark Twain | Joseph B. Mccullough | The truth hurts

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The Bible Accordin...

	The Bible According to Mark Twain Joseph B. Mccullough Touchstone, 1996 - 416 pages average customer review:based on 13 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Behind the humor of these pieces, readers will see Twain's serious thoughts on the relationship between God and Man, biblical inconsistencies, Darwinism, science, and the impact of technology on religious beliefs. "A fascinating panoply of wit, satire, farce, fantasy, lyricism, heresy, the sardonic, and the controversial."--Patricia Hassler, Booklist.

Mark Twain's Take on Bible Stories

In this book Mark Twain aims his satire at favorite stories from the Old Testament. He worked on these essays for most of his life but was afraid their irreverent nature would damage his career, therefore, he just kept re-writing and re-editing them. Most of them were not published until after his death and for some this is their introduction.

Adam and Eve, in their diaries, present bittersweet divergent stories of their dysfunctional relationship. Their accounts could be prototypes from a marriage counsellor's office, or short versions of "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus."

Captain Stormfield has a dream about ending up in Heaven when he thought he was going to the other place. "He was deeply religious, by nature and by the training of his mother, and a fluent swearer by the training of his father." In this original and inventive story, we learn all those things about heaven that were left out of the Bible - but would be included in an imaginary book, "How to experience Heaven in six weeks on $10 a day."

An "Etiquette in the Afterlife" excerpt: "Do not try to show off. St. Peter dislikes it. The simpler you are dressed, the better it will please him. Above all things, avoid overdressing. A pair of spurs and a fig-leaf is plenty...leave your dog outside. Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay outside and the dog would go in."

In the masterpiece, "Letters From The Earth," Satan has been temporarily expelled from heaven and is wandering around the universe. On a lark, he decides to visit earth, an outlying little spot in an outlying galaxy that God had once played around with for a few days. Satan is astounded at what he finds, and writes home:

"This is a strange place, an extraordinary place, and interesting. There is nothing resembling it at home. The people are all insane, the other animals are all insane, the Earth is insane. Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the 'noblest work of God'...if I may put another strain on you - he thinks he is the Creator's pet. He believes the Creator's proud of him; sits up nights to admire him; yes, and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to Him, and thinks He listens. Isn't it a quaint idea? Fills his prayers with crude and bald and florid flatteries of Him, and thinks He sits and purrs over these extravagancies and enjoys them. He prays for help, and favor, and protection, every day; and does it with hopefulness and confidence, too, although no prayer of his has ever been answered...he thinks he's going to heaven! He has salaried teachers who tell him that. They also tell him there is a hell, of everlasting fire, and that he will go there if he doesn't keep the Commandments."

Of course, Noah makes an entertaining appearance, and through it all, Mark Twain has an opportunity to expound about those things in the Old Testament that do not quite make sense to him.

The authors offer scholarly histories about these essays for those who are interested. When they finally let loose with the words of Mark Twain, the reader feels a breath of fresh air. This is a fine collection of satires on religion by perhaps America's premier homespun author; a very definite five stars, and well worth your time.

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The truth hurts

Its facinating how religious fanatics blindly believe every fairytale putforth in a fiction book written by early man with one hell of an imagination. Even when Mark Twain has ripped their world apart with deductive reasoning they will still hold on to their primitive beliefs with a vengence. Enuf of the soap box, I luv how this author gets deep into some of the Bibles fallicies and reveals it in a straight forward and sometimes comical manner. The story in paticular of God sending Moses to ravage the Midinaites slaughtering innocent men women and children even the livestock and houses and selling the young girls into prostitution has touched me deeply. Would I personally believe in a murderous vengefull God, Not unless I was brainwashed from early childhood and cud seriously overlook these atrocities and blindly believe everything I was force fed.
I wud reccomend this book to every one sitting on a fence wondering and thinking about things that dont make sense. I cant get off that soap box.

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Where credit's due!

Let's give credit where credit's due. Mark Twain would give it to Robert Green Ingersoll, America's great agnostic. Read Colonel Bob's many lectures and you'll see what I mean.

Not as great as the other works

I am a fan of Mark Twain and have read all of his major works: Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Connecticut Yankee, Prince and the Pauper, etc... and so I was excited to discover this book at my local library. After reading it I realized why it is not as well-known as the other works; it is not as entertaining, endearing, humorous, or heart-wrenching. In short, this book is a collection of several writings. These include Twain's writings on the Bible, and commentaries written by others on Twain's writings on the Bible. The former is not one continuous work, but actually several different works written to parallel different parts of the Bible, primarily the Old Testament. The most notable of these is the story that mocks Genesis. Told from both Adam's and Eve's point of view, it retells the Genesis story and the life of the first humans with a touch of wit, dry humor, sarcasm, and ribaldness. Though funny at times, and probably at the edge of decency when they were first published, the humor and points made in these stories are nothing significant in today's world. All in all an alright edition to the canon on Twain.

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More textbook, then "light reading"

This "compilation" is more for a STUDENT of MT, then for someone casually reading his finer, posthumously-published works. If you are in a college literature class, then this is probably a textbook in it. If not, it's probably TOO "academic" to be digested in one sitting.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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