today's pet peeve:

[deird1]

I really hate people calling the Bible "the world's greatest instruction manual".


The Bible is many things – instruction manual it ain't. If you must compare it to a modern publishing genre to make a quasi-theological point, a better option would be "travel journal". (Which, yes, would be metaphorical. But not nearly so metaphorical as trying to claim that the Book of Joshua is a list of instructions for we the reader to follow.)

Comments

[next_to_normal]

If the Bible is an instruction manual, it'd be one of the ones that come with IKEA furniture - i.e. what you need to know is in there somewhere, but it's full of ambiguous symbols whose meaning you have to decipher first, and you'll probably have to take it apart and put it back together again a few times before you get it right. But if you're really diligent and keep at it, eventually you might build something that won't collapse the first time you put weight on it.