by Robert B Mead
SECTION A.
brother bob prefers to be called brother bob, and he calls himself that within his book. Because of that, and the fact that his username on this site is "brother bob", I will refer to him that way within this post.
Many years ago, brother bob asked me and other people to read his book. I declined to do so. Seven and a half years later, I bought his book on ebay. I have no idea what possessed me to buy it. But I did.
What I'm going to write is truthful, and I'm going to make it as polite as I can. I'm going to say a lot of harsh things and I don't intend to be a jerk. I'm being truthful, and I hope, helpful.
Writing a thorough review of this book is such a colossal task, that I'm not going to review all of it. The Kirkus review that we've all read says, as a summary, "passionate but deeply flawed". The "deeply flawed" part is an understatement. Perhaps my own summary would be "passionate but deeply, foundationally, and fatally flawed".
Come on MAN, Speak English to ME about GOD isn't a good book. It might actually be the most poorly written book I've ever read.
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SECTION B.
brother bob wrote, in the preface, that he didn't want anybody else to help him with his book. He didn't want his message diluted by other people's opinions. He wrote:
(I can't overlook his errors. More of that later.)Note that you will find numerous grammatical errors because I feared someone else's help would taint the tone of my intended tone of my message. I ask that you overlook my many errors.
brother bob wanted his book's prose style to have a natural flow. I strongly believe he wanted his writing to be like a conversation with the reader. He wanted his text to include the errors he made. You know how, when you're speaking to someone, you make a lot of grammatical mistakes? In other words, you don't speak proper sentences. He wrote:
The number of errors in this book are innumerable. Really. I couldn't possibly count them. There are a vast number of technical errors, incorrect conclusions, scientific errors, fallacies, and historical errors.Finally, this book is written in the language and nuances of everyday man, with our likings at the very core of this book. I have chosen to write in a manner that is abnormal to proper books by using too many exclamation points, queston marks, highlighted and underlined words that will be very common. They are not intended to be screaming or showing any displeasure.
Regarding the technical errors, if you, reader, have read brother bob's posts on this forum, you've seen how many technical mistakes he makes. Of course, I'm referring to spelling mistakes, incorrect number (singular vs plural), grammatical mistakes, punctuation mistakes, and sentences that have no independent clauses.
Keeping these errors in his book was a colossal and fatal mistake. He should have, at a minimum, fixed all of the technical errors. The problem with the technical errors is that brother bob created additional mental work for his reader. The reader must parse what he wrote to try to divine what brother bob meant. It then becomes hard to read, and the reader must stop and reread chunks of text to make sense of them.
Here is some exceptionally poorly written text that brother bob wrote.
He meant: Think about some experiences in your life that were extremely pleasant. Even though people have undergone horrible events in their lives, they still have had occasional yet very pleasant experiences.So forward back to your current experiences that were utopic in nature. Even though a generation of those that have went through broken homes, divorce, drugs and disastrous situations you have glimmers of "perfect" experiences.
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SECTION C.
We now come to the another type of error. A substantial portion of this book consists of statements that should be classified as "not even wrong". See the link below.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
Here's something that I saw. I'm paraphrasing what brother bob wrote. In other words, the following isn't a direct quote.
These sorts of mistakes are much less numerous than his technical errors, but they are common regardless. These errors are also fatal to his book.The gospels were written 60 years after the events they describe. This does not invalidate the truth of the gospels. The book of Genesis was written at least 2000 years after the events it describes, and no one complains about that text being false.
The majority of brother bob's sentences don't have grammatical errors. However, the majority of them are still very greatly flawed. As an example, above, I quoted brother bob, where he said: "Note that you will find numerous grammatical errors because I feared someone else's help would taint the tone of my intended tone of my message." A better way to write that could be: "Note that you will find numerous grammatical errors because I was afraid that someone else's help would taint the intended tone of my message." Simply getting rid of the redundant use of "tone" is an improvement.
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SECTION D.
I very rarely encounter any kind of new concept in non-scriptural religious writing. brother bob has written new things. Stuff that I haven't encountered before.
brother bob says that Genesis 3:14-15 is predicting the birth of Jesus. Here's the scripture in question (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?s ... ersion=NIV):
brother bob says that the serpent is Satan, Satan's offspring is Adam and sin, the woman's offspring is Jesus, and Jesus will defeat Satan. Page 177.14 So the Lord God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this,
"Cursed are you above all livestock
and all wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
and you will eat dust
all the days of your life.
15 And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel."
Next, he said that parts of the Old Testament are intended to signify other things and he calls them TYPES. His word TYPES seems to be his term for allegory, metaphor, or archetype. This starts on page 195.
brother bob wrote:
brother bob said:Noah, a faithful servant of God, takes responsibility and obeys God's message to build an Ark as a means of deliverance from a worldwide flood. The Ark is a TYPE of salvation (imminent danger) from peril with one structure to its behemoth mass, a door. The door is a TYPE portraying the message that mankind has only one way for deliverance.
* Adam and Eve being kicked out of Eden is a TYPE showing that sin causes separation from God.
* Abraham is a TYPE of God, and Isaac is a TYPE of mankind, where God has the authority to exercise judgment upon mankind.
* Regarding Lot in Sodom, brother bob says that Lot's family represents a remnant being provided a way of escape, and the angels that were with him represent God providing salvation by providing an escape.
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SECTION E.
Various smaller notes:
1. Page 234. brother bob said that the emperor Constantine established the Gregorian calendar in AD 400. That is not correct.
2. brother bob spent a few years writing this book it seems. Within the book, he says that he has 3 children. The back cover of the book says he has 6 children.
3. brother bob has a chapter on evolution. brother bob doesn't understand evolution at all. He said that evolution is supposed to explain the Big Bang. Evolution isn't intended to explain the Big Bang. Evolution has nothing to do with events in outer space.
brother bob wrote:
Welp, humans didn't evolve from monkeys, but rather, a common ancestor with monkeys. I don't understand the part about the other continent.Why if man evolved from monkeys do we still have monkeys? All I have heard is that they went to a different Continent and thus did not evolve.
Evolution is related specifically to the emergence of species. It's not about how life originated nor how the universe originated.
4. Robert M Price is an atheist and a Biblical scholar. I listen to his podcasts sometimes. He said something that applies to brother bob's interpretation of Biblical text. That is, brother bob treats the Bible as a ventriloquist dummy, making it say anything brother bob wants.
Mr Price and ventriloquist dummies:
https://infidels.org/library/modern/rob ... in-price1/
https://www.patreon.com/posts/is-god-dummy-21227030
5. brother bob has questions for contemplation in a few places in his book. They look reminiscent of questions in a textbook. His questions are mostly nonsensical. Not even wrong comes to mind. Some of his questions have multiple choice answers that aren't mutually exclusive. Here are a few questions that are on page 4. brother bob wrote:
Take a look at question 5. That sort of extremely poor writing is omnipresent in brother bob's book. You can understand it, but it's just so poorly written. It has an enormous amount of room for improvement. You could write this, which would be better: "To help you learn about God, what is the most important thing that you need?" (I'm not addressing brother bob's answer choices for that question here.)5. Which is the greatest aspect needed for you to learn about God?
a. an open mind
b. credible evidence
c. explaining God in understandable terms
d. truthful concepts
6. If God can't fax, text, e-mail or phone you, what is the best way He should communicate His message to you?
a. dreams
b. people
c. written documents
d. all of the above
[I'm omitting #7 here.]
8. Why is a faith in God so challenging to man?
a. not fun
b. they hate being told what to do
c. God should accept us the way we are and not tell us what to do
d. not understanding the workings of God
e. they have a hard time believing in things they can't see, feel or touch
9. Do your friends permit you to change your ideology to believe in God or do they not want you to change and make them look bad?
Question 9 makes no sense. And, that same question shows up much later in the book. Copy and paste job I guess.
6. brother bob wrote his book specifically for men. I don't know how much that matters. Maybe it's irrelevant.
7. Page 164 says Jesus was buried with 100 pounds of spices. I don't think that that is correct.
8. brother bob said that Heaven is a 1500 mile cube. Page 212. I don't know if he meant 1500 cubic miles, or 1500^3 cubic miles. I suspect he meant a cube where one side is 1500 miles, which is 1500^3 or 3,375,000,000 cubic miles. I don't know where he got this information.
9. Years ago, I asked brother bob if God could tell me how to build a faster than light spaceship.
post153961.html#p153961
brother bob said that I would find the answers to all of my questions in his book. I have seen nothing in this book that would tell me how to build such a thing.
This was, of course, expected. The closest thing that I can find to having my questions answered is that brother bob says that all knowledge comes from the Holy Spirit. That makes me think that he meant that I could possibly get my information from the Holy Spirit. I'm not sure how else to interpret brother bob's statement to me that all of my questions would be answered.
10. brother bob explains the Holy Trinity by making an English mistake. The Holy Trinity is three beings that are literally the same, singular being. This is, of course, illogical, but I'm not addressing that.
brother bob says that the concept of three things equalling one is totally normal by using metaphor. He says we know of a single sports team of six people being one team. A married couple is two people that, as the Bible says, is "one flesh". This is a mistake because a group of people might be a single group, but they are still separate people. The Holy Trinity is literally three beings that are a single being, which is of course nonsensical.
11. In chapter 6, brother bob poses this question to the reader.
On its face, this is a silly choice since those two things are strongly related. Given a lot of credible evidence leads to the truth, afterall.Do men want to be told truth, or be given a preponderance of credible evidence?
12. Regarding the Koran, brother bob says that Arabic didn't exist until AD 700. That date is after when the Koran was supposed to have been written. I don't feel like looking into this. It is indeed true, however, that the ancient Arabic of the Koran is significantly different from modern Arabic.
13. brother bob finds deep hidden meaning in parts of the Bible where a literal reading would never give you such a meaning.
14. brother bob hates the Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman passionately. Like, he venomously hates Bart Ehrman.
15. brother bob says the gospels are more accurate due to being written long after the events rather than contemporaneously with those events. Page 227, item 5. He wrote:
After transcribing brother bob's text just now, I realized what brother bob meant. He meant that if the text was written long after the events, then the only way that the text could be written correctly is if God helped write the text. At least, that's what I think that he meant."Penning" the Gospels some elongated period after Jesus' departure from earth made their message all the more spectacular than "penning" it immediately. When writing something so close to the events proximity it would be easier to accuse the message of being man made by depending solely on their memory. However, "penning" such a message so long after the events would "cloud" their recollection, and yet they are so cohesively delivered messages it shows God must have been essential to producing such a final edition.
16. I don't agree, at all, with brother bob's interpretation of Hell. It seems like he's trying to twist the English text and the meanings of the original Greek text to fit his own desire to say that Hell isn't a horrible place. And in other places in his book, he does indeed say that, for some people, the afterlife is eternal suffering.
17. brother bob says that the talking snake in the book of Genesis is Satan. Genesis doesn't actually say it's Satan. Yes, I know that a lot of people, in addition to brother bob, think that the talking snake is indeed Satan.
18. Page 185 makes a declaration about the Bible being written by 40 people with no access to other parts of the book. brother bob thinks that this is significant. It's hard to explain his thoughts here. It seems like brother bob thinks something like this: God released the contents of the Bible a little at a time. He did so by having authors write a chunk of text a little at a time over a period of 1600 years, and what those people wrote was destined to be in the Bible.
Apparently, brother bob never thought that perhaps the books written by various people weren't intended to be in the Bible. Rather, the people who put the Bible together looked at old books, and they picked and chose what to put in the Bible. They chose stuff that seemed to go together, at least a little bit.
19. brother bob has divined deep meaning in some parts of the Bible in fairly clever ways. I don't agree with any of them, but I thought he was clever regardless.
20. Page 292: brother bob says that rich people are unlikely to go to heaven. Page 295: brother bob uses a metaphor of gaining vast wealth as going to heaven.
21. Whenever someone says, "hey, speak English to me!", they're connoting that you're difficult to understand. They want you to use simpler words. That's in the title of brother bob's book. His vast multitude of mistakes greatly hinder understandability, which is the opposite of the sentiment connoted by the "speak English to me" part.
22. brother bob thinks that the majority of humanity doesn't own shoes. Page 293. I don't believe that that is correct.
23. Either the book wasn't proofread at all, or just chunks of it weren't. Page 275 has a chunk of text that is so bad that it was probably done due to bad cutting and pasting and wasn't proofread.
Recommendation: I don't recommend reading this book.
