How about the Bible, that complex, huge book that has directed Christians and Jews for centuries?

I was going to say the Bible had inspired Christians and Jews for centuries, but there are some Christians and Jews who possibly will never be inspired, even by the Bible.

So, when a man with strong views on the Bible came to town recently, I decided to sit down with him. His name is C. Dennis McKinsey, and he is an atheist. He thinks the Bible is full of contradictions, mistakes, lies and deceit. He wants others to understand that he is not anti-Bible - he just wants to expose things that are wrong, he says.

A father of three, McKinsey writes to radio stations and newspapers to get his main points across. In his view, the Bible doesn't make sense, and it is rife with screwed-up thinking and bias against women and homosexuals.

He has written a book called "An Encyclopedia of Biblical Errancy" (Prometheus Books, $51), which has sold about 2,000 copies since 1995. He is a bold advocate who will not retreat from his premise that the Bible is wrong, especially in its assertion that Jesus Christ is the incarnation of God.

He was in the Twin Cities recently to speak to the annual banquet of Minnesota Atheists, a group of about 200 people who have engaged the mostly Christian culture in the Twin Cities for a couple of decades.

If you asked to talk with McKinsey, the session could go on for days, perhaps weeks. When he sits down at a table with me, he begins to speak earnestly, and he does not stop until I halt him abruptly.

"Why are you doing this?" I ask him. "You say you want to reach fundamentalist Christians, but do you actually believe you will change anyone's mind?"

"You can reach some of them," McKinsey says through clenched teeth.

But does he reach them in the dozens of debates he has done across the United States?

"I do it because it needs to be done - real, real bad."

McKinsey's companion and driver, Twin Cities atheist Steven Petersen, saves the day. "As atheists, our real purpose," Petersen said, "is to civilize religion. There is a lack of critical thinking. We aren't anti-religion."

That fits with my understanding of atheist organizations - they just want a fair shake. Some atheists have been hurt by religion. Others have been raised by parents who are critical-reasoners, who taught their children to think things through before they jump on someone's stage and start singing the praises of a deity.

Atheists are simply part of the religious scene. And their best work is in the analysis of religion, good and bad. Notice that McKinsey is not very concerned about mainline religion, which watches its clergy and professionals quite closely. He is more concerned with fundamentalist Christians who often will quote the Bible but usually under a particular bias that renders it useless to anyone outside the faith.

McKinsey is also full of cliches:

"Some aspects of Christianity are dangerous," he says, or "Man has progressed in spite of the Bible, not because of it," or "You cannot support homosexuality and believe the Bible" or "The Bible is its own worst enemy."

In real life, McKinsey is a vocational counselor at a high school outside Columbus, Ohio. He has a wife and three children. But clearly the errors in the Bible are what drive his life. He had no training in religious matters as a child. But when he studied philosophy in college, the juices began to flow. Then a friend gave him a copy of "Good News for Modern Man," a loosely translated Bible designed for easy reading. McKinsey was hooked. He read the Good Book from beginning to end and found it full of inconsistencies.

"The Bible has more holes in it than a back-door screen," McKinsey says.

His main endeavor is writing a monthly newsletter called Biblical Errancy, which he sends to hundreds of people. They respond with letters, and McKinsey then has a chance to blast them by pointing out the biblical errors.

I ask McKinsey what he regards as the two greatest errors in the Bible. He answers without hesitation: "That the Bible is inerrant and that Jesus is the incarnation of God."

Clark D. Morphew