brendanpowellsmith

It's unfortunate that these criticisms of my books come in the form of 1-star reviews on Amazon, serving to scare people away from my books that might otherwise really appreciate them. At the same time, it's kind of understandable given people's lack of knowledge about the content of the Bible (and often their complete obliviousness to that ignorance).

Before I read the Bible for myself, I surely did not have a preconceived notion of Yahweh always being upset or acting vengeful. I approached the Bible with an open mind and very few preconceived notions. But the more of the Bible I read, the more it seemed impossible that anyone would depict Yahweh with anything other than an angry and vengeful disposition. I say that without making any judgment of Yahweh's character, I am strictly making an impartial observation. One could well believe that it is holy and right for Yahweh to be upset and vengeful, or one could believe it's despicable and wrong. But I don't see how someone could actually read the Old Testament and come away with a different impression of Yahweh. In the New Testament Yahweh himself only makes a few cameo appearances, and one might be tempted to think that his character has fundamentally changed (which seems like an odd thing to happen to God, but anyhow), but if you continue all the way through to the book of Revelation, the ol' fire-and-brimstone Yahweh makes a triumphant return and a continuity of character is reestablished.

All this can be quite jarring and can cause serious cognitive dissonance for religious believers who have not actually read the Bible and have formed their idea of a loving and caring God from other sources. But it hardly seems right to blame the messenger for showing an accurate portrayal of the Bible's content. Finding out that I am not religious seems to be an out for a lot of such critics. Rather than confront the stark contrast between their notions of God and how the Bible portrays God, they jump on the fact that I am an atheist, and therefore must be up to nefarious trickery (or that I'm in league with the devil).

Great to hear it! May I use your quote to promote my books?

"Captivates the most grumpy of teenagers" -Jeffery Toots, Religious Studies educator

:)

I've gotten a fair amount of fanboy or fangirl type praise, which is always quite flattering. There is even one woman who got a tattoo on her ankle of my LEGO Moses holding the ten commandments: http://thebricktestament.com/moses_tattoo_02.jpg

Some of the more extreme negative reactions to my work have come in the form of 1-star reviews for my books on Amazon, like this one:

Totally Psycho Version of the Bible

This Bible was written by an atheist with his own agenda at heart. It's basically a "Family Guy" version of the Bible with the volume turned up. Many of the scenes he depicts are so violent or sexual in nature that it's sick to think that this is marketed towards children.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R2UYC75294WTVA/ref=cm_cr_pr_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1626361770&linkCode=&nodeID=&tag=

I had played with LEGO as a kid, and always enjoyed not just that you could build anything through a recombination of parts, but that it was also a way to do storytelling. I wasn't a prodigy builder as a kid or anything, and my LEGO got put away with my other childhood toys when I was about 13.

That's also about the age when I went I started to become a bit introspective and began to be something of a skeptic. As I entered adulthood I consciously wanted to let go of superstitions and "magic thinking" as its called (though I wouldn't have known it then). That process ended up causing me to become an atheist, and at the time, I was the only atheist I knew. This had the effect of making me fascinated by religion, especially Christianity, as everyone else I knew kept right on believing. I went on to study Ancient Christianity and Judaism at Boston University. That's where I first read through the Bible cover to cover, and as I did, I kept thinking to myself "I don't think people actually read this book!" There was so much in there--the vast bulk of it, really--that was stuff it seemed never got talked about in church and never made it into Sunday Schools or storybooks. So from that point on, I had the idea that it would be a good and worthwhile thing for people to have a better knowledge of what makes up The Bible, whether they are themselves religious or not.

I happened to get back into building with LEGO as an adult a couple years out of college. After a cutting my teeth on a few large-scale building projects, the idea occurred to me to combine my two main interests, and to try to recreate a few famous scenes from the Bible. Once I had created a Garden of Eden and little LEGO characters for Adam, Eve, God, and the snake, and was snapping some digital photos to share online, it further dawned on me that LEGO could be exactly the right medium for retelling the content of the Bible in a new and engaging way.

That was quite the response from the Redditors yesterday. I think my Old Testament book was the recipient of about 150 5-star reviews in one day.

People were very focused on that one book, though. My other books (The New Testament, and the new Complete Set) went right on getting 1-star reviews. :)