Reading and Critically Reviewing the Bible in 365 days

Link:
This link is to the first post on the blog so you can read though the project from the beginning.

The Blogger:

I am an Atheist, liberal, college student, living in the bible belt. I think I may have taken "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" a bit too far

From the first post:

Rules:
I will be reading the bible and critically reviewing it during a one year period. I will do my best to be a non-biased reviewer. I will generally not be commenting on whether the events in the bible actually happened, but rather on whether the story line is cohesive and makes sense. I have found a website that divides the bible into 365 sections and I will be using this as my guide. I will be using the New International Version as I read and quote from the bible. I will do my best to make one post per day. There will be 365 entries and my final post will be on September 6, 2010.

Motivation:
I am told that reading the bible is a life changing experience that will fully and unequivocally convince me of the existence of God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and maybe unicorns. I am also told, when I quote some seemingly strange passages from the bible, that I am merely taking them out of context, and that I would understand the "true" meaning if only I would read the bible in it's entirety. I also look forward to the day that when someone asks me disdainfully "well, have you actually read the bible?" my reply can be "yes, have you?".

I would encourage everyone to read along, if they are able, to make sure I'm not "reading it wrong" or something of that sort.

The end date will be September 6th, 2010.

There are other people out there doing this too: Link.

Inspired my my shiny new Kindle, I hope to read the whole Protestant Bible in 2010. I will follow the Tyndale One Year Bible plan. I followed this same course of readings in 2007. I did not take notes then; this project is an attempt to remedy that.

I am an atheist raised in a American Protest culture, so I take that view in my reading. As a consequence, my comments will be skeptical but are unlikely to significantly deviate from social and cultural context provided by Protestant America.

My interpretation style will be mostly literal. By that, I mean that I will interpret my readings literally even though I realize that most Christians do not interpret the whole Bible literally. Since each group of Christians uses different criteria for choosing which parts to interpret literally, I cannot hope to make the "right" choices, so instead I will try to apply a uniformly literal interpretation to all passages presented as historical fact.

The Tyndale One Year Bible has 365 readings which go through the whole Bible. Each day's reading includes a passage from the Old Testament, the Psalms, Proverbs, and the New Testament. Within each section, passages are in order. The translation is the New Living Translation

I will comment on each day's reading. In addition, each post will have reference links to that day's reading in the Bible Gateway version of the New Living Translation, links to the Wikipedia articles on the books that day's readings come from and annotation counts from the Skeptic's Annotated Bible (that lasted the three days until I went back to work. Manual counting is time consuming). The annotations in the Skeptic's Annotated Bible mark various acts of violence, absurdities, contradictions, etc. I do not always agree with them, but I think they are still useful to include.

I may occassionally make supplementary posts which provide further discussion of the Bible itself. However, I will avoid posts on current events. Although I may feel tempted to comment, I feel that distracts from the core purpose of this project: to read the Bible and comment upon it.

The name of this blog is a play on the idea of a One Year Bible. I would like to state, for the record, that I am always a skeptic, not just for one year. =)