From the Preface:

Most people today ignore the Bible. And I don’t blame them. I mean, it is mostly used as a book of rules for the convinced and a justifier for political anger and denials, especially against LGBTs. And strangely, the Bible’s advocates seem to reject Jesus’ main point: that there is a living supernatural force who accepts us just as we are, with all our excesses and hang-ups, and wants to help us find the most amazing life we can imagine.

If you have been turned off by self-righteous religion, with its sexual abuse by priests, its boring, demanding rules, its medieval God who torments those who make mistakes, and its justifications for anger, wars, racism, sexism, and ignoring the poor, I hope you will read on. This book is a summation of seventy years of discovering that the Bible has a lot more to say than I was being told. As a teenager I began to realize that in church a lot of the good stuff was being left out, and in its place I was hearing the limited religious message that I was not good enough, and never would be, and that God was angry with me. But I knew that was not true of Jesus. I remember saying to myself, out loud, “I’m not going to let them shut me out. Jesus is too important.”

Roger Dewey, “The Bible They Never Told Me About”