This Paperback Book item from Touchstone was reviewed on 28-Jul-2008. Search ISBN:0684824396 offer from Abebooks or used books from Alibris. The Bible According to Mark Twain Reference Book. Classifications : General History & Criticism United States World Literature Literature & Fiction Subjects Books Collections & Readers United States World Literature Literature & Fiction Subjects Books General Essays L . Click the following link to view the cover of The Bible According to Mark Twain. Related topics: General. History & Criticism. United States. World Literature. Subjects. Books. United States. World Literature. Subjects. Books. requestid: e91632d6-b49d-46c7-8cd3-5055aadc545a
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1) Paperback Book The Bible According to Mark Twain by Touchstone. Let´s give credit where credit´s due. Mark Twain would give it to Robert Green Ingersoll, America´s great agnostic. Read Colonel Bob´s many lectures and you´ll see what I mean.¤ 2) Paperback Book The Bible According to Mark Twain by Touchstone. This "compilation" is more for a STUDENT of MT, then for someone casually reading his finer, posthumously-published works. If you are in a college literature class, then this is probably a textbook in it. If not, it´s probably TOO "academic" to be digested in one sitting.¤ 3) Paperback Book The Bible According to Mark Twain by Touchstone. Its facinating how religious fanatics blindly believe every fairytale putforth in a fiction book written by early man with one hell of an imagination. Even when Mark Twain has ripped their world apart with deductive reasoning they will still hold on to their primitive beliefs with a vengence. Enuf of the soap box, I luv how this author gets deep into some of the Bibles fallicies and reveals it in a straight forward and sometimes comical manner. The story in paticular of God sending Moses to ravage the Midinaites slaughtering innocent men women and children even the livestock and houses and selling the young girls into prostitution has touched me deeply. Would I personally believe in a murderous vengefull God, Not unless I was brainwashed from early childhood and cud seriously overlook these atrocities and blindly believe everything I was force fed.
I wud reccomend this book to every one sitting on a fence wondering and thinking about things that dont make sense. I cant get off that soap box.¤ 4) Paperback Book The Bible According to Mark Twain by Touchstone.
In this book Mark Twain aims his satire at favorite stories from the Old Testament. He worked on these essays for most of his life but was afraid their irreverent nature would damage his career, therefore, he just kept re-writing and re-editing them. Most of them were not published until after his death and for some this is their introduction.
Adam and Eve, in their diaries, present bittersweet divergent stories of their dysfunctional relationship. Their accounts could be prototypes from a marriage counsellor´s office, or short versions of "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus."
Captain Stormfield has a dream about ending up in Heaven when he thought he was going to the other place. "He was deeply religious, by nature and by the training of his mother, and a fluent swearer by the training of his father." In this original and inventive story, we learn all those things about heaven that were left out of the Bible - but would be included in an imaginary book, "How to experience Heaven in six weeks on $10 a day."
An "Etiquette in the Afterlife" excerpt: "Do not try to show off. St. Peter dislikes it. The simpler you are dressed, the better it will please him. Above all things, avoid overdressing. A pair of spurs and a fig-leaf is plenty...leave your dog outside. Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay outside and the dog would go in."
In the masterpiece, "Letters From The Earth," Satan has been temporarily expelled from heaven and is wandering around the universe. On a lark, he decides to visit earth, an outlying little spot in an outlying galaxy that God had once played around with for a few days. Satan is astounded at what he finds, and writes home:
"This is a strange place, an extraordinary place, and interesting. There is nothing resembling it at home. The people are all insane, the other animals are all insane, the Earth is insane. Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the ´noblest work of God´...if I may put another strain on you - he thinks he is the Creator´s pet. He believes the Creator´s proud of him; sits up nights to admire him; yes, and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to Him, and thinks He listens. Isn´t it a quaint idea? Fills his prayers with crude and bald and florid flatteries of Him, and thinks He sits and purrs over these extravagancies and enjoys them. He prays for help, and favor, and protection, every day; and does it with hopefulness and confidence, too, although no prayer of his has ever been answered...he thinks he´s going to heaven! He has salaried teachers who tell him that. They also tell him there is a hell, of everlasting fire, and that he will go there if he doesn´t keep the Commandments."
Of course, Noah makes an entertaining appearance, and through it all, Mark Twain has an opportunity to expound about those things in the Old Testament that do not quite make sense to him.
The authors offer scholarly histories about these essays for those who are interested. When they finally let loose with the words of Mark Twain, the reader feels a breath of fresh air. This is a fine collection of satires on religion by perhaps America´s premier homespun author; a very definite five stars, and well worth your time.¤ 5) Paperback Book The Bible According to Mark Twain by Touchstone. "The Bible According to Mark Twain" is one of those serendipitous finds that is as delightful as is it unexpected. Twain shows himself to be a serious thinker about biblical issues, especially as they pertain to the saintly rogues and roguish saints who populated his world. The works in this volume expand on biblical themes, and are as human as they are irreverent. There is no sacrilege or blasphemy intended in Twain´s musings -- simply the toil of a man trying to come to terms with the sometimes illogical world inhabited by religious people.
Twain muses on the story of Noah´s ark by wondering about the germs that must have been stowed aboard along with Noah and his family. What kind of a God would ensure that such dangerous organisms would survive the "destruction" of life on earth, allowing them to renew their deadly work afterward? Twain´s Captain Stormfield, recently deceased and on his way to heaven, shows the author grappling with the recently-discovered enormity of the universe, and with a heaven segregated (not by race and religion as one Earth) by planet and geographical region. "Letters from Earth," authored by Satan before his banishment to eternal fire, makes rather pointed comments about earthlings´ desire for a heaven that is both bereft of earthly pleasures (notably sex) and filled with activity that earthlings normally shun (singing, church services, rubbing shoulders with Jews, blacks and heathens).
Few if any of the completed and incomplete works in this volume were published in Twain´s lifetime. Yet the writings show him to be a religious man, in the sense of one who wrestles with the great eternal questions. Twain could not have been satisfied with the pious niceties he likely received from the religious worthies of his day. His questions continue to challenge us to enlarge our conceptions of the deity. Not for him was a deity who looked too much like the rascals and fools he encountered on a day´s perambulation. Many of his questions (for instance about the historicity of the Bible) were very perceptive and continue to challenge us to this day.
"The Bible According to Mark Twain" may not rock your religious world, but it will set you to thinking about the way that in every age, "God" acts and thinks suspiciously like ourselves!¤ Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 25-Aug-2008, 06848243969780684824390, 440-590-510-960-560-491-8 
The Bible According to Mark Twain, Book, Image © Touchstone
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