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It comes back to the old question: How can the Bible be so wise in some places and so barbaric in others? And why should we put any faith in a book that includes such brutality?

A. J. Jacobs

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A. J. Jacobs
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: March 20
Journalist
Writer
New York City
New York
AJ Jacobs
Arnold Steven Jacobs
Jr.
Honey K Balani
Honey K. Balani
A.J. Jacobs
A J Jacobs
Arnold Stephen Jacobs
Jr.
Comes
Barbaric
Others
Brutality
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Bible
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Question
Wise
Faith

More quotes by A. J. Jacobs

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More people die on a per mile basis from drunk walking than from drunk driving.
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I always thought the name of Utah’s major newspaper was some sort of weird misspelling of the word “desert.” But no, Deseret is the “land of the honeybee,” according to the Book of Mormon. I guess I should have figured they would have caught a typo in the masthead after 154 years.
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If my former self and my current self met for coffee, they'd get along OK, but they'd both probably walk out of the Starbucks shaking their heads and saying to themselves, “That guy is kinda delusional.”
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Plus, in one of his e-mails, the guy said he didn't like pancakes. What kind of asshole doesn't like pancakes?
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Behavior shapes beliefs.
A. J. Jacobs
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I've rarely said the word Lord, unless it's followed by of the Rings.
A. J. Jacobs
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Taking the Bible too literally is a mistake. It should be read as a guidebook of wisdom and insight.
A. J. Jacobs
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After a while, if you're committed, you start to believe in the things in which you're praying. It's just cognitive dissonance. You can't live a completely religious life and not start to have it sink in.
A. J. Jacobs
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I'm addicted to self-improvement. The thing is, there's so damn much about myself to improve.
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I don't believe that prayers actually change God's mind - if there is a God - but I liked praying for people in need. It was like moral weightlifting. I tend to be self-obsessed, and it was nice to get out of my brain once in a while.
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I found there were things about religion that I really loved things like the sense of gratefulness that it brings.
A. J. Jacobs
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Behavior shapes emotions.
A. J. Jacobs
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I was very good at sitting. But I just read so much research about how horrible sitting is for you. It's like, it's really bad. It's like Paula-Deen-glazed-bacon-doughnut bad. So I now move around as much as possible.
A. J. Jacobs
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When I went to Israel, it was a little disorienting, because there are so many people who look crazy and were dressed like me. There, I was just one of the apocalyptic crowd.
A. J. Jacobs
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The best we can do, to paraphrase Pollan, is to eat whole foods, mostly plants, and not too much.
A. J. Jacobs
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The Bible talks a lot about thankfulness, and I'm more thankful than I ever was. I try to concentrate on the hundreds of things that go right in a day, instead of the three or four that go wrong.
A. J. Jacobs
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Giulia Melucci has written a wonderfully funny and moving book. It's like Eat, Pray, Love, with recipes.
A. J. Jacobs
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There's a very passionate pro-chewing movement on the Internet called Chewdiasm. They say that we should be chewing 50 to 100 times per mouthful, which is insane. I tried that. It takes like a day and a half to eat a sandwich. But their basic idea is right. If you chew, you'll eat slower and you will get more nutrients.
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I thought religion would eventually wither away and we'd all be worshiping at the altar of science.
A. J. Jacobs
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One of the interesting things to me is that God grows throughout the Old Testament. He evolves, sort of matures, and becomes kinder.
A. J. Jacobs