YOLB: Month 6

1. Jacobs fond the red heifer to be potentially dangerous because he believes it would be the catalyst to a self fulfilling prophecy know as the end times. He fears that if the red heifer is found or genetically engineered or bred, then some of the ultra-religious Jews will see it as permission to "come home" to Jerusalem and build the Third Temple on top of the Dome of the Rock. This could cause massive wars between nations which do have nuclear weaponry and bring upon us the end times.
His hangup with the apocalyptic texts is that he does not believe the Bible actually predicts how the end will come. He thinks it is jumping the gun to predict what happens in the apocalypse. He notes that some take these texts ultra-literally and others believe none of it should be taken literally because it was written for a specific time period. He uses a quote saying that taking the Apocalyptic texts literally would be missing the point, like taking Aesop's fables to be literal truth.

2. He references this verse when comparing himself to the Israelite Hypocrites. He is still praying and praising God, but (at the time) his heart had sort of fallen out of the spirit of things. He was merely going through the motions of religious life without being truly religious. He had begun to question the times he had felt close to God in body and soul and was therefore not being devout, just putting up a front.

3. Jacobs compares the Bible to Wikipedia because it is a collaborative piece of work, edited by many rather than the single authors for each book some seem to believe in. I do agree with this take on the bible and would probably take it a step further. It was indeed edited and composed by men, not divine prophetic authors, and that gives the "word of God" an air of mortality, subject to mistakes. However, I would take it a step further and say that there is more room for error because not only is the bible like Wikipedia, a collaborative work of men, it is a Wiki page translated through numerous religions and dialects and taken out of the context of it's time.