Introducing the One Year Skeptic

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.  =)