There I was, reading my new copy of “Tactics,” when I noticed a serious problem. This copy had an error. Right there on page 195, a large chunk of text was completely missing. With over a dozen words being fragmented or lost, I began to worry. Then on page 206, several more errors were visible, leaving me with only one conclusion. Greg Koukl’s “Tactics” is an unreliable document! If there are this many errors that I found on a single reading, how many more are there that we are unaware of? How am I supposed to believe that any of this is the true unaltered word of the author?
What Other Errors?
These errors have opened up Pandora’s Box. Now that we know of at least one or two missing pieces, what other artifacts have we yet to find? It throws the reliability of the book out the window. Never mind that we have thousands of copies of this book to compare it to. Never mind that we have even more copies of an older edition to compare it to. Who cares that countless still living people have read it and could piece together the missing words. So what if other contemporary authors have directly quoted this material, allowing us to piece together the core ideas. This book has flawed human being written all over it. I only get my education from perfect manuscripts.
Textual Differences
I was fortunate enough to dig up an older version of “Tactics” when I noticed something sinister. There are entire sections not found in the original text. The “Long Ending of Tactics” as I call it, can only be found in these new editions of the book made years after the original. Clearly these new chapters like “Inside Out” or “Mini-Tactics” were late additions in an attempt to fit the original into a modern narrative. We need to throw out all of that as church legend.
Unreliable Copycat Book
While reading through the chapters, I began to feel a sense of déjà vu. This book is suspiciously similar to another book, “A Manual for Creating Atheists,” by Peter Boghossian. The same concepts of asking thoughtful questions to get people to understand faith and change their religious views, are found in both. Given that Boghossian’s book came out in 2013, Koukl was clearly taking something popular in the culture, ripping it off, and putting his name and a Christian spin on it. Koukl tries to sneak around this by appealing to an old TV Show called “Columbo.” Obviously Koukl knew that people would notice the plagiarism, so he, or whoever wrote this book, inserted the references to Columbo as a way of preempting these accusations.
Immoral Stories
If we are totally honest though, the book being a big hoax is actually a good thing. The fairy tales found within the pages are so horrible that they may traumatize small children. The man talks to real life witches and teaches us how to be Wiccan. He gives us explicit instructions on how to destroy people’s homes and take their roofs off. Don’t even get me started on the part about steamrollers. This book is evil. Sure, maybe it also contains some wisdom and good ways to interact with people. But the fact that it includes these other false teachings and violent calls to action without explicitly condemning them, clearly means the author meant to support these actions.
Just in case you read this far and are confused, this was 100% me having fun writing a satirical piece. Hopefully I didn’t need to put /s or mark it as satire, but just in case…
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