To him that smote Egypt in their firstborn: for his mercy endureth for ever. Psalms 136:10
So far, I have been able to find 439 passages in the Bible that seem (to me, at least) to be good. Here is a plot of the number of good things in each book of the Bible.
There are a few things that stand out in the chart.
(In each of these graphs, the values for the books can be found by hovering over the lines or points. And in the first plot, a link is provided to the "Good Stuff" list for each book.)
But since the books of the Bible vary greatly in length (from 2,527 verses in the Psalms to only 13 verses in 2 John), we might want to adjust our metric accordingly. The following graph does this by plotting the number of good things per 100 verses in each book.
This plot shows that Ecclesiastes is the best book in the Bible - if judged by the number of good things per 100 verses.
And Proverbs and Romans move down the list when adjusting for the number of verses in each book (942 and 553, respectively).
The New Testament epistle of James moves up to second place, since it has 13 good things in only 108 verses (12.0 good things per 100 verses).
But what about all the bad stuff in these books? Shouldn't we take the amount of bad stuff into consideration?
We can do that by subtracting the bad from the good stuff, where the total number of bad things is the sum of the cruelty, intolerance, injustice, women, and family values. And since the passages that I have put into these categories are always bad (if they are good, I put them in the good stuff), the net good can be found by subtracting the good from the bad.
The result is the below graph.
From this plot we see that there are only two books in the Bible that have more good stuff than bad: Ecclesiastes and James. Six books are neither good nor bad (net good = 0), while the other 58 have more bad than good.
Four books are especially bad - with a net bad value of more than 200 (Jeremiah, Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and Ezekiel).
What would happen if we adjusted the net good metric for the number of verses in each book?
The result is the net good per 100 verses, which is shown in the graph below.
As in the previous graph, only Ecclesiastes and James have positive values. With the relatively small book of Zephaniah having a net good of -26 from only 53 verses (49.1 net bad things per 100 verses).
Another way of looking at the good stuff is to plot the number of good things in each book verses the number of verses in the book.
Such a graph is shown below.
The plot shows four clear high outliers: Ecclesiastes, James, Proverbs, and Romans.
