Why doesn’t the bible give better advice and information?

Why doesn't the Bible give better information and advice? Many people reading this might think, "What do you mean? The Bible is perfect." This post is not directed to people of this sort, because nothing I could say would matter to them. To everyone else the Bible is lacking in many ways, including its failure to condemn slavery, its failure to speak out on behalf of women's rights, and hundreds of other contradictions and inaccuracies. For instance, the Bible calculates pi incorrectly, based on this passage from 1 Kings

7:23 And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.

Nope. Sorry, but pi is not exactly 3. If an omniscient being had actually written the Bible, a circular structure's circumference would not have been described as exactly three times its diameter. Everything written above is context for introducing Adam Lee's most recent post at Daylight Atheism at Big Think. To a hypothetical outsider (a Martian anthropologist, for example) the Bible is a very strange candidate for the alleged "greatest book in the world" based on its many stories starring a warmongering god and by the absence of advice based on accurate science, math and empathy. Adam offers many examples of the types of advice that one should have found in the Bible had it been authored by a perfect god, including the following:
"I freed you from captivity in Egypt because I hate slavery. Do not hold your fellow human beings in bondage or buy and sell them as if they were property."
and
"Mars and Venus are worlds of their own, worlds like the Earth is, and all of them travel in a great circuit around the sun. The moon is a smaller world that travels in a circuit around the Earth."
Check out Adam's article for many more examples.

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More on the Catholic bishops and the HHS rule

The Catholic bishops' caterwauling over the proposed HHS rule on employees’ benefits is just more of the same type of anti-Obama shark hunting on the Mississippi that the bishops engaged in even before Obama was sworn as President. The issue then was the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) and it was "religious freedom" and "freedom of conscience" then too. All the same far right wing quasi-Catholics, pundits like George Weigel, decried the Obama administration then as now. Too bad there wasn't even any such bill before the Congress at the time. Congress wasn't even in session but, we Catholics heard it from the pulpits and pews and bishops all across the nation about the evils of Obama. Thousands, maybe millions, of anti-FOCA postcards were sent to Washington. I sent one but, modified the text because I thought the bill would unconstitutionally usurp some states’ rights to regulate abortion under Roe v. Wade. Then, I found out there was no bill. Imagine my surprise as an Obama supporter. Now, the Catholic bishops and their piling-on sycophants decry a "mandate" where no such thing exists at all. There is a proposed rule, which isn't even in effect, that says that if an employer offers health insurance as a benefit to its employees, the insurance must cover contraceptive services. Strictly religious institutions are exempt from the proposed rule. No mandate, law, rule or regulation exists now or will exist that absolutely requires any Catholic employer to do anything against its conscience. [More . . . ]

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On not making people pay for things they morally oppose

Bill Moyers applauds the Presidents position on mandating birth control coverage:

The president did something agile and wise the other day. And something quite important to the health of our politics. He reached up and snuffed out what some folks wanted to make into a cosmic battle between good and evil. No, said the president, we're not going to turn the argument over contraception into Armageddon, this is an honest difference between Americans, and I'll not see it escalated into a holy war. So instead of the government requiring Catholic hospitals and other faith-based institutions to provide employees with health coverage involving contraceptives, the insurance companies will offer that coverage, and offer it free.
At Huffpo (same link as above), a writer named Michael Dodd, perturbed that many conservative politicians oppose even this compromise, turns their argument (why should citizens be made to pay for things that they morally oppose) on its head:
Okay, people, those of you who think it is all about "why should we pay for anything?" Why should churches NOT pay taxes? Why do I have to support THEM by paying taxes so that the roads to their buildings are built and the snow plowed? Why do I have to support churches who use the money they save by not paying taxes to pay advertisin­g firms to produce anti-equal­ity ads to suppress equal rights for tax-paying citizens who happen to be LGBT? Why should my taxes make it possible for them to use the money saved to pay salaries to lawyers to shield pedophiles­?

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Atheists and sociopaths

Why do so many people equate atheists with sociopaths? Perhaps it's because the Bible tells them so:

[R]ight there in the Bible they lump together atheists and patricidal sociopaths. And when it comes to non-believers God does not mess around:

So shall ye perish, because ye would not be obedient unto the voice of the Lord your God. —Deuteronomy 8:20

But not all atheists are all bad, right?

The fool hath said in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, they have done abominable works. There is none that doeth good. —Psalms 14:1

The above passage is from Funmentionables, where Michael Morris takes issue with this conflation of atheists with sociopaths, injecting his usual dose of logic and humor.

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