I got into a conversation with a Christian recently and he told me not to bother reading the Bible. He just wanted me to read the four Gospels. He told me that was all I needed to know in order to understand Jesus and be saved. I recommended to him that he should read the entire Bible cover-to-cover… if he could stomach it.
This is another example of Christians hating their own holy book. Back in the day, unless you were a religious leader, you weren’t even allowed to read the Bible because the fear was that people would be turned off to Christianity after reading it. The religious leaders would claim that without special knowledge the average Joe wouldn’t understand it properly.
Now, every Christian has at least one Bible. They sleep with it under their pillows, quote random passages, and talk about how awesome it is, however few of them have actually taken the time to read the whole thing cover-to-cover. The ones that do often have a religious leader next to them telling them what each passage “really” means because it couldn’t possibly mean what it actually says. That would be crazy talk.
The Bible is a long and tediously boring series of books full of tribalism, hate, tyranny, and genocide. It is full of obvious contradictions, plot holes, ridiculous stories, and made up histories. Anyone can justify anything with Bible as their guide. The best book to convince believers to reject religion has always been the Bible.
This is why religious believers don’t really want people to read the Bible and why they don’t read it themselves. They want to believe but they are afraid that reading would mean not believing. So instead they go around pretending to read the Bible. They listen to what their religious leaders tell them the book says and then they get a verse or two that they can show others as a way to prove that they read it even when they didn’t.
Anything that they read that is obviously ridiculous or cruel, they play verbal gymnastics with and try to claim that is must mean something completely different. When God orders Moses to rape and murder, he really meant love and marry. If all else fails, they yell, “context,” which is odd because they usually don’t know the context.
I want a Christian to read their whole Bible cover-to-cover and then tell me that they think it was not only well written, but the best writing they have ever read. Surely God must be the greatest writer ever, right? I’m better that most Christians will be bored to tears and then when the action starts, they’ll be horrified to tears. One thing is for sure, they should make sure they have a box of tissues handy before they start.
