“God is going to deal with it,” a neighbor of the pastor told a local reporter. But then, if God has been taking care of things, why did God allow a child to be sexually attacked by a Christian preacher?

The Palatka Christian attack was not an isolated incident.

The pastor of the 2/42 Community Church in Livingston County, Michigan admitted that he had been watching people through a secret camera he put in the church’s bathroom, and trafficking in child pornography. He pleaded guilty to fifteen criminal charges, including tampering with evidence, child sexually abusive activity, using a computer to commit a crime, possession of child sexually abusive material, and surveilling an unclothed person.

A few days earlier, a youth pastor at a church in Sunnyside, Washington was arrested and charged three counts of third-degree child rape and a single count of communicating with a minor for immoral purposes, after he was caught sending an electronic message to a 15 year-old, telling the minor to prepare to have sex with him.

A couple of days after that, the pastor of the Baldwin Baptist Mission Church, in Baldwin, Louisiana was caught by police in Texas while trying to escape responsibility for raping the child of one of the church’s members. “We trust God to bring healing and restoration,” said the pastor of a nearby Baptist church in reaction to the arrest. What isn’t clear is whether members of the area’s churches feel that they can trust their god to protect them from predatory preachers.

You get the picture. There’s a question that few Christian church leaders are asking, much less providing an honest answer for: Why are so many Christian preachers sexually assaulting children?

To make matters worse, when Brett Barker was confronted about his use of the pamphlets, from Capitol Ministries, to push religious ideology into state government, he found that he wasn’t able to respond to his colleagues’ complaints. That’s because Brett Barker didn’t bother to read the religious publication himself before he tried to shove it down everybody else’s throats.

It’s an all-too-common characteristic of toxic Christianity that those Christian believers who most fervently insist upon the need of all people to obey the Bible are the least likely to have actually read the Bible themselves.

Breaking through this bizarre dynamic is one of the goals of a new book from author F.G. Fitzer with the provocative title The Demonic Bible. Fitzer wrote The Demonic Bible because he wants more people to actually read the Christian Bible, rather than assuming that they know what’s in the ancient book.

“Writing The Demonic Bible was a great way for me to read the Christian Bible in a focused way, paying close attention to what it says, and what it doesn’t say,” Fitzer explains.

One of the misconceptions that The Demonic Bible exposes is the idea that the Christian Bible establishes a model of marriage that can only be between one man and one woman. In fact, throughout the Book of Genesis, followers of God routinely are married to more than one person. Abraham had an open marriage, for example, having two wives himself and repeatedly encouraging his first wife, Sarah to get married to local rulers whenever the couple traveled through foreign lands.

“There’s a lot of sex in the Christian Bible,” commented Fitzer. “It’s kind of weird to see so many Christian Nationalists pushing to have copies of the Bible in public elementary school classrooms, because the text is practically pornographic. Christian activists say that they are worried about grooming, but the Christian Bible itself is a groomers’ handbook.”

Would Representative Brett Barker agree with this assessment? He might, if he actually read the Bible, instead of just trying to use the Bible as a political weapon.

Would Barker consider handing out copies of The Demonic Bible to his colleagues in the Iowa State Legislature? It’s hard to say, but it’s clear that the publishers of the Political Leaders Weekly Bible Study newsletter wouldn’t be on board with such a plan.

The issue that Barker handed out warned that, “The schemes of the devil, we will see, are spiritual in nature but are manifest on earth through his pawns – non-believers.”

How soon will Brett Barker introduce anti-demon legislation to protect the vulnerable people of Iowa… perhaps a bill to censor The Demonic Bible?

In spite of the clear hints toward a homosexual lifestyle of Jesus, most American Christians today reject homosexuality, depicting it as a terrible sin. They use the Bible’s rare passages about sex to patch together a thin excuse of hatred toward anything other than a male-dominated heterosexuality.

At the same time, they want to seize the power of government to force their bigoted religion at children across the United States, compelling teachers to post the Ten Commandments and teach from the Bible in public schools.

What if, in response, teachers taught passages from the Bible in which there are signs of homosexual love affairs? What if public school teachers displayed the following poster, depicting Jesus and Judas as the “hottest gay lovers in the Bible”?

You know what would happen. Christian Nationalists don’t actually want the Christian Bible to be taught honestly. They aren’t willing to consider the true breadth of Christian ideology. Their toxic Christianity will only allow for speech and education about a narrow, right wing extremist version of Christian beliefs.

Why do Christians want to punish sorcerers by throwing them into a lake of fire, when its own prophet Jesus is described in the bible as practicing magic?

Why would anyone want to join a religion that seeks to burn people for having sex and independent minds?

The Christian bible is the world’s most influential source of violence, cruelty, and hatred of freedom.