In a segment from this week’s Religion & Ethics news program on PBS, a new graduate of Drew University School of Theology, Madison, N.J., made the comment, “People say young people don't read the Bible nowadays; I don't agree with that. I think they read it, and they read it critically, and they have a lot of questions, and if these questions are not going to even be addressed or remotely addressed, then they are going to have issues.”

On the same half-hour show was another segment about how “religious progressives,” including hundreds of evangelical leaders, marched on Capitol Hill this past Tuesday to lobby for legislation to help the poor, including raising the minimum wage. One evangelical reverend told the crowd, “Poverty is God's special interest."

Over the past few years of doing this website, I’ve had friends say to me in one way or another, “Why do you quote your pastor so much? Why don’t you just say what you think?”

When I quit my job as a trade magazine journalist here in Manhattan three years ago, my idea was to use my skills to get out the truth about what the Bible really says to try and counteract all the misinformation and lies that dominates public and private discourse in America today.

God’s special interest has always been His Word, and while I’m obviously no expert on the Bible, I am a veteran communicator of facts as a professional print journalist since 1986.

Big newspapers I’ve worked for in the past include The Cincinnati Enquirer, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio), The Detroit News and The Lexington Herald-Leader (Lexington, Ky.).

My first job out of journalism school (The Ohio State University, 1987) was as a Bureau Chief for the Elmira Star-Gazette in Elmira, N.Y., known as the first Gannett newspaper.

Not long ago, a preacher from Tennessee who’s associated with my church, David Dowell, commented in a study he gave over the internet, “I don’t know of any other school in the country that is teaching the Bible correctly outside of Grace School of the Bible.”

My pastor, Richard Jordan of Shorewood Bible Church, Rolling Meadows, Ill. (www.graceimpact.org) , is the president and founder of Grace School of the Bible, a mail-correspondence based school with thousands of graduates worldwide. Jordan has both regular TV and radio broadcasts in cities across the country, as well as in other parts of the world.

Most importantly, he has been a daily student of the Bible for 40-plus years. Jordan will tell you that by age 18 he’d already read the Bible from cover-to-cover at least nine times and had read the New Testament through at least 80-90 times.

In an old study I have on tape, he recalls, “I’d been saved for about four to five years when I made a life decision. I remember it well. I was just a young man. I sat down one day and determined, ‘You know, it’ll take a whole lifetime to master this Book and I’ll still not do it. And if I’m going to understand the Bible, I’m not going to have time to be a student of all these other things.’ I loved history, philosophy, literature—all these things I was studying in school, but I made a choice. I said, ‘I’m going to be a student of one book and that’s the Book.’ ”

By comparison, on this same Religion & Ethics program from this week was a news brief about how the Rev. Rick Warren, author of the mega-bestseller, “The Purpose-Driven Life,” had just accepted a friendly invitation from brutal dictator Kim Jong-il to preach in North Korea this summer. He justified his decision to work with the communist country’s ultra-repressive regime by saying, "I know they're going to use me, so I'm going to use them."