Faid

Oh and dave, bear in mind that you also speak with a lot of people who, in spite of refusing to believe the absurdity that the bible is an inerrant historical text, still have a very high respect for it as an inspired work.

The person that schooled you in the debate is one of them, iirc.

Amazing, ain't it?

Paul2

Yes, I've read the bible. Doing so is what led to my eventual deconversion. The story about Job is what really started me thinking. Why was God such a dick to this poor man? Just to win a bet with the devil? My pastors answers, "It's ok, God gives and God takes away" and "It's ok because Job and his family all went to heaven" only made me less enthusiastic about christianity.

deadman_932

I've read the bible, the quran, the vedas & Upanishads, the popol vuh and Avesta and, and..and ..AND hundreds of other works concerning similar topics. This is called "informed perspective" Dave. This is what you lack, given what I know of your views.

Magdlyn

I read it, start to finish about 6 yrs ago. I have continued to reread it in parts, when I am curious about certain aspects. It's contradictory, absurd and full of cruelty. It is also informative, especially the actual history that leaks thru in between all the legends and myth. It is fun to weigh it against other literature and archeological finds of the times.

It's clearly a story of men's relationship to their understanding of the divine. It's a mess. It's all about politics and war. And it's a sad tale of the fucked up patriarchy as well.

There is an evolution of thought shown, in both the Jewish part and the Christian parts. It's inconsistent. It's amazing people venerate it as the "word of god," b/c it so clearly is not!

Faid

"great" explanations?

Such as "People got their orders directly from Gawd those days, and since Gawd said it was ok to obliterate an entire people, women, children and newborn babies, down to the last one, well, it must've been right because Gawd said it"?

But anyway, no need to derail this thread. So dave, seems that lots of us have read the bible. Any points you'd like to make?

Roland

Same here, although I was Sunday School superintendent for awhile as well. Plus, I was a member of Campus Crusade for Christ in college, did the whole door-to-door bit and everything. :blush:

Now I look back and think wtf, especially since I consider myself responsible for turing my brother into a right wing fundamentalist Christian. Try living with that! LOL

As to the Bible, I've read the New Testament many times and the OT from cover to cover once I think. But I've attended hundreds if not thousands of sermons in my day.

ModernHeretic

I'd say I've read 64 out of 66 books in their entirety, so I have a pretty good idea of what the Bible says. In fact, I know the Bible far better that most Christians I've ever met. Better than some Bible teachers, in fact. Of course, I'm not a Bible scholar, but I'm not ignorant either, and I don't think most of the people here are. We're not unbelievers because we haven't read the Bible, we're unbelievers because we have.

Believe it or not, I actually went to a Christian college, and took courses in Bible, the Pentateuch, Judaism, and Christian Theology. In addition, I've actually learned a bit about the Bible since I've been on these boards, by hanging around the BC & H forum.

The reason people say things like "it's a Bronze Age myth ... it's full of errors ... it's totally implausible ..." ... etc. etc is precisely because we have read the Bible, and we've read other Bronze Age (or maybe Iron Age) myths from the Ancient Near East, and we see striking similarities. The stories in the Bible don't seem particularly different from the stories of other ancient Near Eastern cultures. I even have a book on my book shelf at home called "Old Testament Parallels" which points some of these things out. The book can be found here by the way:

http://www.amazon.com/Testament-Para.../dp/0809137313


As for being totally implausible, what exactly makes you think that virgin births, miracles, resurrections from the dead, etc., are plausible? Simply because they were written down by superstitious people thousands of years ago in a book you've been told was inspired by the Creator of the Universe? Suuuuure, that's plausible, and if you believe that, I'll tell you another one.

As for errors, they're not hard to find either. The best place to point out the errors in the Bible is the Gospels, since the stories in these books are supposed to refer to the life and teachings of the same Jewish teacher. So, let me ask you, if there are no errors in the Bible, what were the last words that Jesus said before he died on the cross? Were they:

a) God, God, why have you forsaken me? (Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?)
b) Father, into your hands I commend my spirit, or
c) It is finished.
d) All of the above.


In case you didn't know, the correct answer is d) all of the above. a) is found in the gospels of Mark and Matthew, b) is found in Luke, and c) is found in the Gospel of John.

So, perhaps rather than asking us whether we've read the book, you might bother to go back and read the book yourself. Again.

Joe Bloe

Which brings up the important question:

Dave, have you read any religious, philosophical, historical, etc texts other than the Bible? And have you read them in the same way you read the Bible?

Like you, my reading of the Bible (when I hadn't read much else, and read that differently than how I read the Bible) strengthened by born-again evangelical form of Christianity. In fact, like you, having to deal with the cognitive dissonance kicked up by all those "difficult" passages, and finding ways to convince myself I could pretend the Bible didn't really always mean what it said or say what it meant, served to strengthen the hold that form of Christianity had on my mind. After all, for one excuse I appealed to, how could such an ancient text still have relevance to today's world? Then I read Plato, and found that the Bible is far from unique in that, and indeed, as I had to admit, Plato was more accessible and more relevant to the modern world than was the Bible.

I also began reading the Bible the way I read any other text: critically engaging it with an open and thinking mind. After all, if I looked at the Bible in a different manner than I looked at anything else and it appears different from anything else, how could I tell whether the difference was really in the Bible itself instead of in how I was looking at it? If I look out one window while wearing sunglasses and without sunglasses for all the other windows, how can I know if it really is darker outside that window than the other windows? It is only by looking out the windows in the same way that I could find out whether the view out one window really is darker (perhaps because of the shade of a tree) than the other windows. I realized that it was only by reading and studying all texts with the same techniques that I could accurately conclude whether there really is anything special about the Bible. It failed the test.

Apsu

First post :wave:

I grew up reading the Bible a lot, but never the whole way from start to finish. About 4 years ago I started reading 4 chapters a week with my kids, starting from the beginning and skipping nothing. We have three different versions to use to help us understand and criticize as we go along, plus a concordance for those tougher parts. We're in the Proverbs atm.

gurugeorge

Yeah, that's the thing, as soon as you've read a whole bunch of sacred texts from different cultures, it puts the Bible into perspective. Every sacred text has its good points and bad points, but mostly they're bad.

I'm actually that rare fish, a rationalist mystic (i.e. a rationalist who happens to have had mystical experiences), so I can see, glitterring here and there in all the sacred texts of the world, flashes of (what I would consider to be) genuine understanding of this essentially mysterious Great Big Thing we find ourselves part of. But it's all so mixed up with partisan theology, ideology, politics, and just plain crazy ranting, that it is in fact much better for any sane human being to simply read "the Book of Nature".

To any follower of a traditional religion, I'd say: go climb a mountain, sail the broad ocean, lie on the ground at night with the brilliant sky above you, and you will get a far more profound sense of the numinous than any book could ever give you. In that hushed holiness you will easily understand that all attempts to adumbrate THIS in words have been, at the end of the day, trash. Then bring that sense into everyday life, see that same holiness in your fellows, treat them as sleeping gods, dreaming they are dogs, and you'll have the right thing. Then you can enjoy whatever real depth your religion has, and its traditional trappings, without mistaking all sorts of irrelevant stuff for the truth.

"God" is for directly experiencing, not for chattering about.