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I've seen alot of posts on here about how most christians do not read the bible and don't truly understand what the bible says. This made me think back to my christian days. Of course i read the good/cherry picked parts of the bible but when i tried to read the whole bible it got confusing/boring/contradictory so i just stuck to the good parts.

I tried to think why i wasn't more interested in reading the whole bible and the truth it was supposed to hold.

I think myself like most people who say they are christian fall under the same dilemma. We didn't really understand the bible or what it said all we knew was that we were scared to death at church when the preacher started preaching about hell and we sure didn't want to go there no matter what. So we went up to the altar to get our "Fire Insurance" policy. We didn't know if it was right or not but we wanted the fire insurance policy just in case.

Once we obtained this fire insurance policy then we feel like we are safe. We want to try to do the right thing but if we don't then at least we know we have protection from hell.

After we get the fire insurance most of us look at the christian life and don't really like all the rules but we pretend we do like them and pretend we don't like to do sinful stuff like fornication, drink beer or cuss when in fact i think they were more pleasurable to do when trying to live a righteous life.

Being a christian is wearing a mask. You are fake and not being true. You have to put on a show like you are a righteous person and can't be true authentic self.

I believe most christians really don't care what all the bible says besides the cherry picked part. They feel like they are members of an exclusive country club and look at others outside the country club with a combination of sympathy from true believers and disdain from most

abyers1970 7 Feb 3
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5 comments

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1

Well said. There is very much a club like mentality to religion. Most Christians probably don't know the main differences between all of the Christian religions or between Christianity and Judaism. They just like to wear fancy clothes to church (which um, Jesus would never do) and keep tabs on who didn't show up.

Don't forget they love to gossip and talk bad about what others have done after Church

1

Believe in something that you don't investigate about...for me is just ignorance

3

When I was a teen, I read the sections about x begat y and so on. Because I knew they begatting it on.

That's funny

1

it was very revealing to me to hear the Bible interpreted from other povs, and to recognize that--for instance-- the NT is basically a record of the destruction of a theocracy, and that pagans (Roman Centurion) and atheists (good samaritan) seem to get the highest praise. This started me on a kind of a journey to understand why all the apparent contradictions, which i eventually discovered are intentional, and meant to impart a certain wisdom of their own

3

I was raised Catholic. During most of that time I was discouraged from reading the Bible from both the priest and my parents. I was supposed to take the priest's word on what the Bible said. Even at a young age, that did not fly.

I changed faiths and became a Baptist (my best friend was a Baptist). That's when I read the Bible front to back. I realized at that time that the Catholic priest didn't want us to read it because it made no sense. It was very shortly after this realization that I became agnostic, then atheist.

I have read many articles about atheists knowing the Bible better than Christians. Since most only know the juicy parts (and those are subject to interpretation), I would believe that.

Thanks to Gutenberg, the Bible was made available to lay people, many of whom joined in the Protestant Reformation. The clergy has always been fearful that the laity would, through reading, form their own opinions on a given matter. During the final years of my personal journey of losing faith, I earnestly began to read the Bible for the first time since my youth, and that's all it took to turn me into a nonbeliever!

I had to chuckle at your comments. The Bible is the Word of God. But don't read it! (Or you might lose your faith.)

How about that bit about Lot's wife being turned into a pillar of salt, or people being hundreds of years old? The bible is like Greek myth except that we acknowledge those as myths that are allegoric. The bible is taken way too literally by some.

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