José Saramago, a Portuguese writer and Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1998, has just launched another book with a biblical backdrop. In the book Cain, Saramago once again questions and doubts God’s justice and portrays the Creator as, in his point of view, “cruel, jealous and unbearable.”

In an interview with the Portuguese magazine Visão, José Saramago, describes the Bible as “a manual of bad manners” in which you can find all sorts of atrocities and with his intellectual rhetoric, questions the veracity of the Scriptures, objecting strongly that the concepts written in the Bible are true records of the Word of God. “Regarding the holy book, I usually say: read the Bible and lose faith,” Saramago said during the interview.

In 1991, the writer had already caused controversy with his book The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, which suggests a romantic relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, in what seems a desperate attempt to approach the divine, by humanising the figure of Christ, since the other way around would be unlikely.

A “hardhearted atheist” as he describes himself and communist by ideology, Saramago’s arguments in his obsession with “exposing” God are lost amid his accusations of the Catholic Church—referring to acts such as the Inquisition, the Crusades, the dungeons and everything that is part of an oppressive past in which the institution exerted clear social and political power over Christian society—and a kind of unrest that the god that inhabited his imaginations was not found to be rejected in the Bible.

To say that an atheist can develop a judgment in relation to God may seem contradictory, but Saramago’s own debate on the subject is conflicting and confusing. He combines concepts and definitions about the Bible, Christianity and the Catholic Church as if they were all the same thing. He says that the Bible is “manipulative”, as if people were dominated by depravity and unable to form their own opinions when reading the Scriptures. He claims and values freedom, which he says is denied and oppressed by God, but moralises communism, which is one of the most repressive forms of government in the political world. Seated on the throne of his acclaimed and renowned intellect, and based on the prestige attained by his literary acknowledgements, he considers himself worthy to “impose” his beliefs as absolute truth and judge those who don’t agree with him as ignorant.

But, what is more confusing, contradictory and interesting about his speech is the energy Saramago uses to criticise, discuss and challenge something that he believes doesn’t exist. Saramago doesn’t understand or accept the mysteries and spiritual messages of the Bible because he can only read it and interpret it in an academic and literary way and doesn’t see the relevance of a book that has lasted for centuries and continues to be authentic until today.

The Bible itself points out, literally, the way Saramago should read it and accept it without trying to find a rational explanation for the existence of its mysteries, when it states: “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever” (Deuteronomy 29:29).

Saramago’s discussions lead us to believe that, perhaps from his own despair, he proves to be desperately searching for God. But his intellectual arrogance only allows him to accept an explainable God that fits in his limited box of human understanding, and not depend on what seems uncomfortable and uncertain from a rational point of view. But the God in whom Saramago doesn’t believe “chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise” (1 Corinthians 1:27).