Even atheists acknowledge that the book that's most responsible for creating Western civilization

is the Bible.

Until very recently, that was considered quite an achievement.

After all, it was Western civilization that created societies rooted in individual liberty,

rooted in democracy, that affirmed the quality of all people,

and which gave the world the notion of universal human rights.

Of course, these unique moral ideals took centuries to be realized,

and the ideals were often violated.

But only the West formulated these ideals, let alone achieve them,

and then spread them around the world.

In the last half century, however, many of the recipients of these gifts,

especially the well-educated, no longer regarded Western civilization

as morally superior to any other.

And as reverence for Western civilization fell,

so did reverence for the source of that civilization.

The Bible has not only been neglected, but reviled,

as a foolish fairy tale at best, and as an immoral work, at worst.

This view springs not from intellectual rigor, but from intellectual laziness.

People throw out all sorts of objections to the Bible

as if there were no rational and moral responses to those objections.

But the fact is there are rational and moral responses to all those objections.

I give many of them in my book, The Rational Bible,

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