Critiquing the Bible

I recently reviewed a book, A Secret of the Universe by Stephen L. Gibson, which made me curious about the Bible.

I'm not a Christian, and I've never actually read the Bible, but I do know about the stories of the Bible. You know, like Noah's ark, Adam and Eve, Moses' 10 Commandments, etc. And I enjoy those stories, it's just that I've never read the Bible to see what the Bible actually says.

I've known for a while that the Bible contradicts itself many times. What else can you expect from a book which was written by dozens of different people and translated from dozens of different languages? Something was bound to get lost in translation somewhere.

I meant to read the Bible for myself one day, so I could read the stories, and the contradictions, for myself (better to argue theology when you know about the other's points), but I wasn't interested enough to do it.

Stephen L. Gibson's novel A Secret of the Universe has made me so interested that I have now started reading a chapter of the Bible a day, starting from the book of Genesis.

Already I've found something which many Christians conveniently ignore;

If Adam and Eve were the first people, and they gave birth to Cain, Abel, and Seth, then who was it that Cain took as a wife? Where did she come from? And why was he so afraid that other men might judge him for killing his brother? Where did those other men come from?

It's just the first in a long long list of questionable statements in the Bible. This is why, though I enjoy the Bible stories, I would never really believe them. I take them the way I would take any other fantasy story.

Even with fictional books, readers question certain things that don't make sense in the story, why should we do any less with the Bible? Especially with the Bible, in fact. If it doesn't make sense, I'll pick at it. It's fun! =P

But it's really interesting too, you know.