those wacky Bible books

[darkoshi]

ladysisyphus wrote a post with tips on how to read the bible.

It mentions that if you decide to tackle it from the beginning to the end, that you're not likely to make it through the end of Exodus. That reminded me of when I started reading the Old Testament back in 2000, and made me wonder how far I got. Based on my notes, I made it through Samuel2.

To keep myself motivated, I took notes on items that seemed interesting, strange, funny or repulsive to me. I don't believe I ever posted these notes before. So they are below, for anyone who might be interested.

By the way, I am agnostic. Not at all Christian. I don't even consider myself spiritual - I believe in the possibility of there being a spiritual side to the world, but I've felt very little of it so far.

Also, I'm vegan (and a feminist) and think it's not very nice to treat animals (or women for that matter) badly. So that is why a lot of my comments focus on those aspects.

I know that there's a lot more to the Bible than the parts I read, and that there are many versions of it, and tons of ways to interpret it, and tons of history behind it so that you can't just take it at its literal word.

Yet the same could be said for a lot of things. The parts of the Bible which I read don't at all describe a religion of love and kindness, so I do wonder sometimes why people who describe their Christian religion as such cling to this book as the undeniably TRUE and incontrovertible "Word of God". I know that having a big long confusing and hard to read ancient text lends an air of mystery to things, and it gives something for religious scholars to study and lend their own interpretations to. But to me, it's all rather meh. I've long since lost my fascination with ancient history and writings.

If you are Christian and/or hold the Bible in high esteem, please don't reply to the items mentioned in the notes, in an attempt to better explain them to me. I'm not likely to respond to any such comments. Even if you can manage to do so in a way that makes me go "Ahhh, that makes better sense", it'll still be rather "meh" to me. I'm not interested in making sense of it. Even if the whole of the Bible could be meaningfully explained to represent love and kindness, it's not going to make me start believing in a god.

My original purpose in reading it was only to have an idea of what it says, to use against other people who like to quote it. Now I don't think it is worth arguing with people who like to quote it. I simply "meh", roll my eyes, and ignore them.

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This first part of my notes has some thoughts from before I started reading the Bible.

Genesis through Joshua (New American Standard Bible)

Some more random thoughts of mine.

Judges through 2Samuel

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Useful websites:
BibleGateway
(lets you search and compare verses from many different versions of the Bible)

BibleHub
(even shows multiple versions of the same verse on a single page)

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Comments

[marahmarie]

I'm, like, so not arguing with you. But.

The parts of the Bible which I read don't at all describe a religion of love and kindness, so I do wonder sometimes why people who describe their Christian religion as such cling to this book as the undeniably TRUE and incontrovertible "Word of God".

Your key is: "The parts of the Bible which I read". You don't say if you ever read the New Testament but Christianity is based on the word of Christ which is all in the New Testament. Additionally, Old Testament prophecy points especially toward its end to a Messiah, which we supposedly got with Jesus in the New Testament. This is what ties the two books together (literally nothing else does).

The Old Testament is a complete horror show so I don't recommend it to anyone who actually wants to like God, or even the idea of God. He's pretty much a monster throughout the entire first book. The only cool thing is that towards the end he finally seems to develop some sort of a conscience about his own behavior and appears to offer Christ as a way to show us he does have a more loving, gentle, and possibly decent side to his personality.

I wrote a post on this topic years ago and lost a friend in Germany over it - and its moral, if you could call it that, was believing is a can't lose bet, which got a lot of people mad at me for my cynicism, but to me that's just my practicality showing through. It literally cannot hurt to hope for something better. And that's all I'm really doing by choosing to believe at all.

Anyway, I haven't looked at your notes yet, but - as I'm always fascinated by this sort of thing - will check them out.

[darkoshi]

I haven't read the New Testament. I have heard that it is much better than the Old one, and as you say that it is a much better reflection of the ideals of Christianity. I'm still not interested enough to read it, though. If I had unlimited time, I would, but I'd also read the holy books of other religions too.

It just seems odd to me that some Christians believe their God is loving and kind, but they also claim to believe the OT is the literal Word of God too (without probably ever having read most of it).

[marahmarie]

It scares me to think any memorably bad/cruel/distasteful/rules-obsessed part of the Old Testament is the literal Word of God. But you can judge people's ignorance quite easily by using exactly that yardstick. Many believers have not read it, or read enough of it, to form an educated opinion; preachers cherry-pick what they think parishioners should hear; devotionals focus on pleasanter-sounding passages and quotes, and everyone walks around thinking (believing) that because the New Testament and Christ sound pretty good that the entire book (Old and New) is a reflection of goodness that highlights a completely good God throughout. Nothing could be further from the truth! God is a capricious soul who got bored one day and decided to create friends in his own likeness (us) and then gave us hell (sometimes literally) for not following a script he never bothered to share with us while giving us the power to defy the script at will. This is explained away by many students of the Bible as a test of worthiness: if we were just good enough of course we would follow the script without it being given to us, we'd do so naturally, and the fact that we don't simply shows we are defiant (we have the good in us but don't choose to search within ourselves to find it and won't lay our own egos aside long enough to consider it - to consider not eating the apple, if you will) so we're in need of yet unworthy of our God.

I believe God evolves. Like us, he thought he was good but slowly learned that in many eyes he was wasn't - but again, like us, he can evolve to learn from and correct those mistakes. I think he's currently in a fallow period between giving us Jesus and actually making any corrections. Sometimes I also think God might simply be AI we create and project into the past that leads us into the future (right now) via the Bible. Or that we project ideas into the past - into the Israelites - that lead us to learn of the God we have now through the books they were so "inspired" to write. Other times I think the Hebrews had really good weed or acid - or their equivalents - and just did what people do when they get high and are trippin'. Except somehow it all got codified into a book and a very explicit set of laws that the Jewish side of the sect has to follow. Following that thought, sometimes I think the Greeks had even better drugs and bam!, that's how we got Jesus.

And that's why I say believing can't hurt anything, because nothing else I believe can be proved (yet) to be any more or less true than simply believing in God, which, if nothing else, gives me a lot less possibilities to consider and less to worry about (the AI possibility particularly freaks me out, as does the possibility of projection). Which is also why I can't understand why people will get so mad about my beliefs. They don't even know what half of them are. I just told you more than I've told just about anybody.

religious beliefs

[(Anonymous)]

Plenty of kind, decent, caring people have no religious beliefs, and they act out of the goodness of their hearts. Conversely, plenty of people who profess to be religious, even those who worship regularly, show no particular interest in the world beyond themselves. -John Danforth, priest, ambassador, senator (b. 1936)

What we think, or what we know, or what we believe, is in the end, of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we do. -John Ruskin, author, art critic, and social reformer (1819-1900)

[artkouros.livejournal.com]

I tried that and got through Deuteronomy before I stopped. But I didn't stop for a lack of interest but a lack of time. I found it fascinating. If you go to my page and click on the tag for "the adventures of holly bibble" it links to all my entries.

I used the ESV and the KJV since they are both word for word translations, and I used Strong's Concordance with the KJV on biblestudytools.com because of the awesome search tools.

Did you know there's no word for wife in the OT? When you read "so and so took a wife", in the old Hebrew it says "so and so took a woman". Or that "marriage" only appears once, and then only as the "conjugal duty" - and in the context of a man taking a second woman?

I finally finished the whole thing by going the Audible route. When I heard something especially interesting I'd run to biblestudytools.com to look it up and see what they were really saying.

[darkoshi]

You seem to have been struck by many of the same things I was, for the parts I read.

The version which I read was one I found available in free digital download form. I put it on a Palm PDA and read it that way at work, during lunch-time.

There was another version I must have come across, for which I had a note that it sounded like it was written for kindergartners.