God Hates You, Hate Him Back: Making Sense of the Bible by CJ Werleman

I downloaded this book mostly on the merits of the title; it sounded like it ought to be pretty damn funny. I was also interested in the author’s idea of using the Bible as evidence against its own God. The purpose of the book was to show, using the actual text of the Holy Bible, that God is rather a horrible person to be worshipping. The author’s strategy was to go through each book of the Bible, summarizing the general ideas and discussing particularly horrifying scriptures.

Unfortunately, this book was not nearly as entertaining as the title would suggest. The author started out by throwing in a lot of jokes, some of which were even funny, but many of which were just sort of lame. As he gets into the middle of the book, he kind of forgets to make any jokes or commentary and just summarizes each book of the Bible. Which gets pretty boring. I might not have even bothered finishing the book if it weren’t for the fact that I wanted to review it.

I think the author did a good job of picking out the specific scriptures that most Christians either aren’t aware of or deliberately choose to ignore. He makes a number of good points about them. However, sometimes I think his arguments could’ve been more persuasive if they had been better written. While I agreed with nearly everything he was saying, I don’t think his writing could convince anyone who started out even the least bit critical of his viewpoint. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it for anyone religious, since most of his jokes are very deliberately offensive and his writing isn’t especially persuasive. It would be handy for pissing people off, but not necessarily for making them think twice about their beliefs.

Overall, I probably wouldn’t recommend this book. Some of the content is good, but it’s not all that enjoyable to read. Maybe the best parts of the book are the quotations at the start of each chapter. One that particularly cracked me up was this: “Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you’re going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love.” – Butch Hancock. Anyhow, to get back on topic, I’m quite certain that you could find this information from much more interesting and well-written sources. I’d give it 2 stars.