christ-on-a-stick

One can only imagine (or not, depending on how well they want to sleep at night).

But since you bring it up....

He did seem to have a real thing for anything and everything relating to opposite-sex relations. I guess a little about same-sex relations, too, but his main hard-on :Cheeky: seemed to be for any and all things sexual. I dunno, maybe if the time had been right he coulda just bought a Supercab truck instead. :huh:

Viti

Paul was one of the first thing's to turn me away from Christianity. I just couldn't understand why a loving, compassionate being such as Jesus would choose a hateful asshole to reveal himself to/through.

reddhedd

Jesus?

SwoleMan

Right now, I'm on page 814 of the OT, and damn has it been a boring read so far! Most of the stories told are so primitive that they totally lack any excitement at all. Tobit's book is the only one that hasn't made me want to throw the Bible in the trash can.

phrog

I read the whole enchilada, but I was 15 or 16 then. I was determined to read it thru and was so proud that I made it. Of course it confirmed my Atheism. I had many questions for the Pastor and many came from Paul. He skirted my questions and pointed me to passages he believed I would "Better understand"

It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.
Mark Twain

MzNeko

Don't remember who came up with it, but I think someone on this board made this up...

appauled -- the feeling one gets after reading the New Testament.

:Cheeky:

Persidian

It was long before I officially deconverted, but in Catholic school junior high I was somewhat surprised when we read the book of Luke over a few days.

Weird as it sounds, the Bible seemed cooler after that, although much less real. The parts where Jesus did odd stuff like sending demons into pigs I found bizarre and nonsensical from the POV of a benevolent and omniscient deity. In particular, I liked the story where a woman touches Jesus unseen and gets healed instantly, and Jesus has to start questioning everybody because he apparently couldn't control his cure-touch. "Alright, who touched me? I felt the power-drain, dammit!" to paraphrase. :Cheeky:

Still, it took me years after that to leave. Stupid as it sounds, I wanted to stay on the "good guys" team, just in case.

The Defenestrator

I started reading through it once, but once I got to one of the middle-OT chapters (I think it was Numbers) it got really thick with "the Isrealites attacked this town and killed everyone and raped the women and ate the animals then went to this town and killed everyone and raped the women and ate the animals then went to this town and killed everyone and raped the animals and ate the women" and I was just too disgusted to keep going.

Skepticwiki

I can relate to this, as it mirrors my own experience. It's difficult to worship somebody that you wouldn't like if you met him face to face.

My biggest problem was the Bible itself - trite, boring, banal, racist doesn't cover it all. Despite its supposed high morality, it appears that god consistently favors liars, lunatics and murderers. I'm thinking of King David and the Apostle Paul in particular.

I found myself trying very hard to mimic the behavior of people who found the character of Jesus immensely appealing. The discrepancy between what people believed about Jesus and the Jesus I read in the NT was wide to begin with but got progressively wider over time.

What I found was that evangelical Christians would "study" the bible by developing a set of filters that eliminated most of the bible that didn't conform to what they thought should be the dominant themes. I bet most of them have never heard of Jeptha's daughter even though they must have read the words many times.

I don't know who said it (Tom Paine?) about the Bible to the effect of: "Anyone who is not revolted by the contents of the Bible has not really read it"

jayG60

My mother and father read the Jewish/Christian Bible to all their children as soon as the children were able to "understand" it. We got the cleaned-up version, of course. No incest, genocide, or killing babies, etc. I loved the stories about Noah's Ark, Esther, brave little David killing that awful giant Goliath, and Jesus calling the little children to him and blessing them.... Then I learned to read and snuck out the family bible and started reading the stories for myself. They weren't so much fun then, but I kept on going.

I've read the entire Bible through from Genesis to Revelation at least four times (KJV x3) (RSV X 1) in my life, and memorized countless verses for Sunday School. I still love Ecclesiastes and The Song of Solomon.

The English translations of Homer's mythological writings are generally better reading that the English translations of Biblical mythology.