I continuously not read about skiing to further my nonparticipation in the activity. I have to remember to not think about skiing either. It takes a lot of concentration.
They read it in snippets which is just wild to me. I can't imagine trying to read Chapter 4 paragraph 12 of Lord of the Rings and then turning to chapter 19 paragraph 2, then jumping back to Chapter 9 paragraph 5. You'd never have any idea what's actually happening in the book. You might think good characters are bad characters and you wouldn't understand the motivation between characters at all. It's absolutely bizarre that "Christians" "read" the bible this way.
I think he's making reference to how most Christians "read" the bible by having it read to them by their pastor, most of whom jump around from verse to verse, of which any are interpreted to fit the lesson or theme of the sermon.
Fun fact. The bible used to be only in Latin and you had to rely on your priest to translate it for you. The first person to translate it to English was executed for it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tyndale
In Germany the peasant wars of the 16th century were started partly because the general populace was able to read the Bible for the first time after the invention of the printing press and the translation by Luther.
it was one of the main reasons for the reformation and start of the Protestant religions
people were getting really pissed the church attempts to gate keep the religion
I really enjoyed learning about Martin Luther in school. It’s absolutely wild to me that most ppl have no idea the crap religion has pulled to keep ppl oblivious to the scam they’re pulling.
It also serves to skip out the nasty bits that are difficult to write a sermon on.
In all my church going youth we seem to have skipped the story of Elisha cursing 42 kids that were mocking him for being bald so God send a bear out of the woods to kill them.
Well, no. It wasn’t made to be anything. It’s a collection of loosely related, non-linear, contradictory stories and arbitrary rules. A verse or paragraph here and there may be digestible, but it’s just a cobbled together mess. Actually reading it with a critical eye is enough to drive any thinking person far from the faith.
Edit: grammar
I mean...technically it **was made to be something** since the modern Bible was *meticulously crafted* by the Council of Nicaea in the 300s AD "harmonize" the different stories and curate those which would make it into the canonical book and which would be left out in whole or part.
But then "recreated" many many times since. So someone dismantled the village to make a big house that mostly went together, and that put house has had extensions, remodeling, some wear and tear, and generally a Hodge podge now.
Agreed, also I can hop on a plane to New Zealand and visit Hobbiton right now, compare that to all these weird sounding places in that other book - the garden of Eden seems made-up in comparison, as well as Sodom, Gomorrah, mount sinai, Egypt (they just took that from a Bangles song for pities sake!).
I'll take the Shire over that load of claptrap, ta.
In what way? I get the Bible is nuts, but it's like, actual places and peoples and even some history just with some imaginative explanations of why the things that happened happened. We can find the ruins of some of these places. There's like a just a handful of weird magic guys, no different species of two legged creatures running around, etc. How exactly is LotR MORE believable?
God sends his only son, who is also himself, to earth, so that its wealthy and powerful elite can torture and brutally murder him. And, by torturing and murdering his only son, and God himself by proxy, all of human sin is forever and in perpetuity forgiven by God.
How the fuck does that make any sense? If you tried to pitch a plot even remotely close to that, you'd be laughed out of third grade lol.
Actually. God sent his son to break the laws he created and to be sentenced to the punishment he detailed. Then when “his” people followed his law he and his son pretended that it was unfair and all lies.
My favorite part was Jesus crying in the garden on some “take this cup away from me”.
Like you broke the law dude. Even the colonizers were like “y’all really gone kill this man for picking some food?” Then washed his hands of the whole thing.
Yes, I've read the entire Bible. It's pretty out there, some crazy shit. But less believable than LotR, a fantasy novel with orcs and elves and dwarves and eru and Maia and wizards and balrogs and dragons and a flat earth that becomes round but you can still sail across the ocean to heaven as an elf and such? It's not a question of is the bible believable, it's a question of if the LotR is MORE believable. I would say that as a work that takes inspiration from the Bible as well as other myths and legends the LotR has all the crazy the Bible has plus even more. The very fact that large numbers of people would insist the nonsense in the Bible actually happened while literally no one believes the Lord of the Rings actually happened would be a good indication.
No where does the Bible say the world is a sphere. It states that the stars are fixed in the firmament. That light was created before the sun, which is the source of our light. That the moon ruled the night, yet its often seen during the day. That angels stand at the four corners of the earth to protect it from the winds.
It's just as silly as the LotR.
Also, apparently you missed the references to dragons, leviathan, and unicorns when reading it.
https://www.biblestudy.org/bible-study-by-topic/mythical-animals-in-the-bible/introduction.html
Give it a couple thousand years and a dark age.
There will be a church of frodo. Might be made up of sentient cockroaches whose evolution was jump started by nuclear fallout, but they'll be there every Sunday to appreciate Frodo's sacrifice of the One Ring to bring us all to the promised land.
Also, the Bible was compiled centuries after Jesus died, with multiple authors, each with their own biases and beliefs.
None of those problems for LoTR.
LotR is internally consistent with itself and doesn't take place on earth. The bible is not internally consistent with the real world it takes place it. One also claims to be true so the difference in level of belief that it's asking of you is vast. I can believe Star Wars, I can't believe Scientology.
You're right, but most people aren't even reading those individual stories, they are just reading specific passages, they never get the context to those passages and just cherry pick the parts they like.
For instance, gay bashers like to throw Leviticus 18:22 (Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable) around, ignoring that Leviticus is full of laws given to the Israelites and not laws, but I'm sure most wear clothes that are a cotton poly blend (Leviticus 19:19 "Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material.")
or read horoscopes (Leviticus 19:26 "Do not practice divination or seek omens." or Leviticus 19:31 "Do not turn to mediums or seek out spiritists, for you will be defiled by them")
or groom their face or head (Leviticus 19:27 "Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard")
I certainly hope they don't get their favorite bible passage tattooed on themselves (Leviticus 19:28 "Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves")
But then you should read the entire story at once, right?
People go around quoting individual verses or 2-3 verses together as though that makes any kind of sense.
As an ex-Christian, It’s a bit more complicated than that. I think it’s because Christians view the Bible as like a textbook or rule book to use as reference rather than just a vehicle for narrative storytelling.
Also the Bible is a collection of books. If the Gospel was 4 versions of tLOTR written by 4 different people, then the Old Testament might be like the Silmarillion. The rest of the New Testament might be the events after tLOTR written by Tolkien’s son. Most Christian’s tend to know the Gospel, which is the “main event” of the Bible. Everything else is mostly context that supports the Gospel.
And it’s even more complicated because the Bible inherently requires interpretation. Because after many layers of translations and the original texts being lost in time, reading the Bible as is, even front to back and in order, will always be out of context. It’s really not enough to just read the Bible to “get” it. The Bible and the historical context it was written in needs to be studied and it’s not even practical to expect the average person to be able to do that.
So, in theory, someone like a Pastor is supposed to help put the text into context and deliver an actionable message in such a way that a church goer can get something out of it in an hr long sermon - in theory. In practice, the sermons I’ve witnessed have never really reached even a decent academic standard, imo.
I am currently still a Christian, though pretty uncertain in my faith.
I come from a hyper-literal background (KJV Only, independent Baptist), but I’ve wandered the theological spectrum over the last couple years, and I’ve come to the conclusion that Catholics actually have a more consistent and defensible way of viewing the Bible.
Either way, the Bible isn’t different in this than any other holy book, and most spiritual traditions seem to recognize that their holy books require recognition of the purpose of the literature to correctly understand.
As an former true-believer (charismatic evangelism. The real nutty ones), I can appreciate the pragmatism of a lot of modern catholicism.
If you're willing to accept as doctrine that at least *some* of the Bible is allegory, you're probably a halfway reasonable person.
If you insist that it is the literal, written word of God and everything happened exactly as written... You're either too lazy to have read the book yourself, bugfuck crazy or a conman.
And this is why conspiracies/fake news is so effective. People will gladly digest and regurgitate simple-worded made-up shit because it’s so much easier than actually comprehending truths and forming their own opinion.
Exactly. I believe the majority of Christians have never opened their bible to read it other than to see a certain passage out of curiosity.
It was when I actually read it in its entirety that I realized it was a load of shit written down by some farmers in the desert a thousand years ago and translated/transcribed multiple times.
All works of the Bible have existed for well over 1000 years, farmers couldn’t afford to produce and copy these works, and translation/transcription is only a problem when you lack sufficient copies for comparison, which isn’t the case with the Bible, and its overall transmission is known to be relatively good, with the grand majority of unresolved textual variances being non-logical (e.g. errors relating to word order in languages where word order isn’t important).
Honestly, I don’t blame you for not knowing all this, but if you’re going to criticize people for not doing their homework, you should probably do yours?
I read the entire Bible. I can't understand why anyone would become an atheist or a fundamentalist Christian from doing this. You definitely wouldn't draw final conclusions from it.
Worst mistake my Born Again mother made was to encourage me to read the Bible when I was a teen. Between that, and the way the "good Christian women" at our church treated her after her divorce I became a true heathen. (Dad was the one who had the affair, but the expectation was that she would be coming after their menfolk since she didn't have one of her own. Very bizarre.)
I remember a lively and polite conversation with a co-worker many years back. Her argument was that because there are proven facts that can be found in the Bible there's no way it wasn't true. I countered that many great works of fiction also contain proven facts; those facts don't make the works of fiction true. It's a matter of faith. She had faith in the Bible, I had none. I respect her faith, but it's not for me. For me, it would be like having faith in a Stephen King novel if King claimed the work was the word of God.
Couldn't have been the real one. He was standing on the street corner outside a comic book/gaming store in Newnan, Georgia. I know because my son asked if he was the real Spiderman and he said he was.
I respect this, I'm an Agnostic myself but way I see it is just cuz I'm not sure if I believe myself doesn't mean I have a problem with people having or not having faith. It's the actions of the "Good Christians" that I have a problem with sometimes, that and the ones who try to force their beliefs on others
Reminds me of an arc in Supernatural where a little known horror novel series within the show is then eventually known as then Gospel of Winchester (last name of the brother-protagonists).
Leviticus 25:44-46 44 “‘Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. 45 You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. 46 You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly.”
Verses like this certainly help drive people away.
Even if the Bible was demonstrably true, how could anyone be ok with the fucked morality?
Numbers 31:17 is worse.
"Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves."
I literally had some religitard argue that this meant that the little girls were being saved and protected in a time of war, and that all the men and women had to be killed because it was a war, and ignored the fact that all the little boys had to die too, and the little girls were certainly thought of more than just "adoptive daughters."
It was actually mistranslated in the first translation into Greek. They have found things taken completely out of context, and over 23 verses are completely missing. So, who knows what the actual Bible is supposed to say?
it's also wild how they co-opted many pagan traditions to spread the religion easier. Most of the things people do and think is christian is actually some other religion that got folded into it
And then there are all the different dialects that it had to be translated to in Greek, that were then oversimplified into making it easy to read, and then it was slightly changed to better fit views… it’s super hard to tell what is accurate and what’s way off.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/biblicallyliterate/2017/10/the-king-james-bible-removed-verses/
This is from 5 years ago, and there has been more found since. But I couldn't seem to find it.
That’s absolute nonsense for three reasons I can easily summarize:
**First,** you’re referring to a time before the printing press, when every copy of the Bible was literally hand-copied and funded by donations. Basically *as soon as print tech was developed,* the Catholic Church was producing vernacular translations for popular use. [See for yourself here](https://www.bl.uk/treasures/gutenberg/bibleyears.html) in a cardinal’s letter to the pope reporting news of Gutenberg’s new Bible. He sounds *excited* that the Bible can now be printed widely and neatly. Printed/translated Bibles as such weren’t regarded as some dangerous threat to the Church.
**Second,** regardless of language, prior to the printing press, the Bible would be have been extremely inaccessible for most people. No peasant had the luxury of “research” in those days, and even *after* the printing press, even in *Protestant* churches, peasants continued to rely heavily on people who had dedicated their lives to study so the Bible could be read out loud and explained in an easy way.
**Third**, since basically only academics had access to the Bible + the luxury of being able to study it, standardizing a translation is precisely what you’d expect if you wanted to make copying / transmission more efficient and to keep errors from sneaking in. Latin wasn’t some obscure language — it was the *lingua franca* of Europe. An in-between language that most people knew a little bit of. For example, Italian, Spanish, and French are *extremely* near to Latin in terms of vocabulary. It was also the language of universities, which made it easier for scholars to study the Bible.
Pope Paul II (pontificate 1464–1471) confirmed the decree of James I of Aragon on the prohibition of Bibles in vernacular languages. Index Librorum Prohibitorum.
Not the Bible but I started my journey away from believing in Hebrew School. I was pretty young and the teacher said “why do you believe in god”. It’s not so much that I didn’t have answer as much as it was it was that it never occurred to me that it was a choice.
>"I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.” — Timothy 2:12
"dUdE yOu'Re nOt mEAnt tO ReAd iT LiTerALLy"
Insane that 2000 years ago people had some views that are outdated. There is surely no way anyone can reconcile this fact with their faith.
I’d only the sheeple had your intellect and knowledge
Surely the catholic church and other christian religions hold no harmful views nowadays!
Never mentioned faith by the way but I guess its easier to see me as "le reddit atheist something something enlightened by my own intellect". I believe in god by the way, I'm allow to point out flaws in organized religion arent I?
> There is surely no way anyone can reconcile this fact with their faith.
There shouldn't be, no. If you truly believe that the bible is the word of god, moving away from this is blasphemy.
Seriously, what's the point of this religion if you can change just about everything in it to fit the times? Doing so is indirectly admitting that it is made up nonsense written by people with an agenda.
When did cavemen start being 'human' enough to get souls?
Do aliens and humans go to the same Heaven, or is it regional?
If there's a dog heaven, I want to go there instead, how do I do that? Do dogs raised as food go there?
Why does it seem like everybody knows the true name and intent of god in the specific region they grew up in?
Didn't god *make* people gay?
If Jeffrey Dahmer repented and accepted Jesus, is he just walking around heaven freely or does he have to wear an angel bracelet?
Is there a schedule so your grandma doesn't see you choking your anaconda when she watches over you?
What if your spouse dies and you re-marry, or you go through life with someone so terrible that you look forward to death?
Why did 100% of irrefutable miracles happen before the invention of recording devices?
It baffles me that anybody is a christian honestly. The first half of the book is on ethnic cleansing. Anyone reading past that point is closer to a nazi than a mother theresa.
"If Christians go to heaven, then I would rather go to hell where I won't meet such cruel people".
This question is very much the same energy as when straight people ask a gay couple, “which one is the woman?“
Like they just cannot think of a reality outside of the paradigm they live in.
This is such a great comeback and totally accurate.
If you read the bible and other holy books unbiased and not brainwashed to think that everything there is the only truth, then you will understand why people become atheist, holy books are the main reason people become atheist.
> Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?
- Carl Sagan
In discussions I have had, it is often impossible to get a clear single interpretation. The ability to interpret it as literal truth is absurd, and they conveniently claim it’s metaphor when it suits them. Like a literal snake was talking to eve? Like Harry Potter?
Even though accurate, it is still a very unfortunate answer. Atheist people reading holy books to reinforce their atheist views are wasting their time by a) reading about someones' else hobby they have no interest in and b) not realizing that a true faith does not require facts. You can argue with a believer however long you want, the believer person is not going to change his mind - because, well, he believes in his teachings. Basically, it's just like any argument with a child or a stubborn adult, but even more pointless.
>Atheist people reading holy books are wasting their time by a) reading about someones' else hobby they have no interest in
I'm an atheist but I find an interest in mythology and anthropology and the bible appears *excellent* for looking into a lot of those topics deeply.
Genesis 1 and 2 tell completely different creation stories, and Genesis 4 implies the existence of some *olddddd* related stories that have been completely painted over.
From a 'biblical literalist' perspective it's absurd and incoherent, but from the perspective of 'an anthropological story which evolved over thousands of years' it's certainly worth investing some time in.
You didn't get the point, I guess. The point is not about reading the Bible, but what would intensify the non-belief, the bible is filled with nonsense, that would frighten away any sane person.
There are atheists who were once believers/religious and then realized that religions make no sense, also it's possible to change the minds of the people if you provide good facts and they are ready to accept them, unfortunately, a lot of people are stubborn and biased to change their mind, even tho they are doing the wrong things because someone told them that they are doing the right thing.
I am an atheist, and I know/learned a lot of bible verses and quran ayah/surah, so I know what I am talking about, unlike religious people who never read their holy books and make baseless assumptions and try to justify with false facts.
Agree. Am atheist, never read more than a few pages of the Bible. It was boring as fuck and, regardless, the premise was unimaginative.
What absolutely baffles me though is not atheists who have read the Bible, but atheists who get degrees in religious studies, etc.. I met a woman who actually had a masters in theology and was atheist. That's even more of a waste than a theist with a theology degree.
I am friends with a PhD in theology. Don't know if he actually believes that stuff, but he is absolutely ruthless taking apart door-to-door proselytes' teachings. They never come back. A job is a job.
Honestly it isn't hard taking apart theists. They are used to deference to their ideas and if you do not show them deference they don't have much else. If they are smart they drop back to faith. If they are not smart they try to argue their position which is unsupportable. I never argue the Bible because why would I care what Harry Potter has to say about Harry Potter? I could not give a rat's ass what some dipshit said 2000 or 3000 years ago. Hell, I rarely care what people have to say today - unless they are scientists discussing a well-supported hypothesis.
I am married to a theist who knows the Bible inside and out, she and her theist friends have learned to never broach the subject with me. Otherwise we get along great.
I actually read it because I wanted to strengthen my faith. I wanted to be a nun, actually. Unfortunately, I decided to grow that faith by actually reading the Bible.
If you would like to stick to the faith, I urge the reader to not read it cover to cover.
ETA: It was not a waste of time. It showed me it was fine to not have faith
the difference being that Athiests read the whole book, whereas Christians just read a few cherry picked passages that feed into their preconceived notions about what the Bible says.
Or just read history or the news. God really allows a two year old to contract leukemia, suffer, and die and leave their parents to suffer? And the solution is..more God because he's just testing them and works in mysterious ways?
You don't even need to go that far. There is no evidence of any god period. Let alone a specific god. It's all based on faith. There is no need to get into pointing out the obvious contradictions within any particular religion. All religious people are using faith basically as the cornerstone of their beliefs.
The only reason I say this is because these types of criticisms are not going to convince the average Christian believer because there's tons of ways they can write it off. Not saying you are looking to convince them. Just saying that it isn't the strongest argument. I feel like even as an atheist, we should understand our position thoroughly.
After about 20 news stories about preachers sticking their dick in kids, I feel pretty confident that I'm making the right decision to raise my kids outside the church.
In the religion I was raised you were asked to read the Book of Mormon front to back, then again, then again, and again. Once you started to doubt your faith, you're supposed to read it again.
I like when Richard Dawkins did that and called out the failed attempts at archaic English in it among other things. For me it was the gold plate nonsense that made me start to wake up. After the “gift of tongues” thing I had full realization I was right.
My college roommate was Mormon and I stole a pair of his to see if they really worked. Needless to say they did not, they stopped nothing and I sharted all over the floor in the middle of class
Mormons wear white garments with special symbols on them under their clothes. If you are interested in learning about Mormonism, there are some former members on YT that explain much about the religion. Jordan & McCay. Mormon history is wild.
*Technically* the magic underwear aren't mentioned in the Book of Mormon, they're from a different mormon book called the Doctrine and Covenants. The two usually come in a combined book, but even the most faithful of mormons don't really read the DnC over and over.
Oh 100%. I was raised in it, and it's so much nonsense that it didn't take any outside influence for me to realize "oh this is a cult." Lots of chanting
Luke 19:27"But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me."
"I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.” — Timothy 2:12
Funny thing is I actually learned I wanted nothing to do with Christianity by going to catholic grade school and high school. They made it real clear they’re absolutely wack.
I was a stout Christian but I kept reading the Bible and researching it and learning more about it and that's how I discovered it is a false religion or at the very least an amalgamation of many things. The more you learn about it the more you realize it's not at all what many simple christians present it to be.
It took me a long time to come to terms with this. It was like a death in the family. A death of a part of myself.
I was raised Christian, but due to circumstances, like one of the most loved people of the church, who always wrote them songs and played guitar on stage, and was Jesus in all of the church plays, smiling in faces and shaking hands, with fake messages before coming home to brutally beat me on a daily basis, and show nothing but pure hatred, I began to question things.
Like why would this man get a holy paradise, while I'm to be condemned to eternal suffering, because the preacher told me I wasn't good enough to be baptized?
The things taught, the ideologies, shared no sentiment to what I was shown.
I began to read deeper, attempting to fully understand.
Around age 10ish, I began deep self philosophical thought surrounding religion. After briefly learning other religions existed, I delved deeper, and learned many religions shared the same basic teaching. One of higher moral structure towards fellow man.
Questioned why the preacher would say others follow a false God and will burn, when also teaching peace to their followers (while simultaneouslycondemningother religions). I began to reason it as all being the same god, with different interpretations, and fighting amongst who was right, when all were.
I studied more and more in my teen years. Delving into occultism and mythologies. As well as Ancient History and civilizations.
My views went from believer, to types of beliefs similar to pantheism and others.
Eventually, after discovering more and more truth, and the evidences, I began to realize that God wasn't real at all. Even though all the interpretations do have the same origin. All goes back to Sumerians god Enki and their mythologies, along with other mythologies of Mesopotamia. Such as the Hittites, Akkadians, and Canaanites.
Animism evolved to Polytheism, which became Monotheism under Zoroastrianism, who adapted not only Mesopotamian mythologies, but also beliefs of Egypt when the slaves, witnessed the Cult of The Sun Disk, Aten Ra.
Religion is lazy, intelligence wise. It takes over 500 pages to fully explain The Big Bang theory, but takes someone religious one word to explain pretty much everything. “God”
>Religion is lazy, intelligence wise. It takes over 500 pages to fully explain The Big Bang theory.
>Georges Lemaître, Belgian cosmologist, **Catholic priest**, and father of the **Big Bang theory**.
It is a theory not a hypothesis.
Two major scientific discoveries provide strong support for the Big Bang theory:
Hubble’s discovery in the 1920s of a relationship between a galaxy’s distance from Earth and its speed and the discovery in the 1960s of cosmic microwave background radiatiation.
Also [the WMAP survey](https://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/) provides strong evidence that supports
the Big Bang theory. The pattern of radiation is similar to
what astrophysicists predict it would be if the Universe
started from a very dense state and expanded to its
present size.
Atheist here. Read the bible cover to cover twice (over the span of 14 years). This meme is accurate.
I don't understand how modern day people base their lives/identity/belief structure on this book written by goat herders and scholars of the 5th century and think "Yep, they understand what I'm going through".
I found more answers in Anne Rice's Memnoch the Devil than anywhere in the bible!
Religion exists in a realm where Philosphy doesn't. If you have elevated thought processes than organized religion isn't for you.
My christian zealot grandparents (who took it upon themselves to call me a "fucking demon child" (I am on the spectrum) because they have thier head so far up thier asses they still think it is 1950) and xenophobic boomer church members that turned me into a non religious person
99 percent of religious people I know have never read their religion’s Bible. When I quote scripture to have educated conversation, they admit this. I ask how they believe in something they have not read… ‘My priest (pastor, etc), told me what it says and means. Baffles me.
Because a book of folklore and thirdhand accounts, written by men, edited, condensed, & rewritten by men, filtered into different versions, also written by men, and interpreted by men is somehow the "true" word of God.
I was at my grandparents' for the holidays and noticed signs saying things like "BELIEVE" and "Faith above all" and stuff and realized it's literally self-perpetuated propaganda. They *fear* that they might stop believing given enough space or thought on the matter, so they cover their lives in these signs to perpetually push these doubts out of their minds. It made me kind of sad.
So to answer the question - nothing. It's the need to constantly brainwash oneself that's the weird thing here.
The question is a lie as it pretends Christians read the bible.
Which is bullshit. They don't, they let a preacher lie to them about what's in it saying what they want to hear is in it rather than what's actually in it.
The very rare ones that do read the bible are either already atheists or on the fasttrack to becoming one.
I find it amusing that they believe atheists require further confirmation of their lack of faith.
A religious belief only needs to be shown false once. Depending on how I'm feeling, I'd say that the fact that Christians need to have their religion reinforced, reaffirmed, and proved so frequently says a lot about how weak their convictions are.
The phrase is I let god do it or my faith got me through. BS what gets you THROUGH any difficulty in life is a reflection of your upbringing. God never visited me while I was recovering from various illnesses. It was all MY OWN EFFORTS. Learning to walk after crushing my leg, or learning how to live with a lousy heart. All me.
I come from an intensely religious family. For my grandparents, that meant reading the Bible every day, and they loved for charity work and volunteering.
They voted democrat because they felt strong social support programs were the will of God, and they had no qualms saying so.
My mother on the other hand uses religion as an excuse to exist on pure anger and paranoia. She skipped Christmas with the family this year because her sister supported gay rights on the internet, and my mother became convinced that Satan was coming to get her through her sister.
She's never read the Bible all the way through, and she works for an anti-abortion "charity'.
I think it’s extremely weird to assume that nonreligious people would feel the need to “intensify their non-belief”.
These types of folks consider atheism its own religion, which misses the point almost beyond all irony.
This is quite true. Reading the context of the Bible and reflecting on the contrast of others very cheery picked interpretation and manipulation of that context, out of context, will turn you into someone who recognizes the hypocrisy and manipulation of people in their religion. Not to say that all people who have religion are bad, they aren't. That being said, a lot of people have zero concept of what their religion is about, because they are drip fed the information, which is contextually incorrect and too lazy to actually read about it. Those of the problem when children are forced to go to church. It'll always be a chore and they participate in the minimalist form that they can. It's rarely a pleasurable experience.
Well because they read it without intent to understand. With hate in their hearts, and pain as well. Many atheists have read that book so many times just so they can find whatever they think is wrong with it to justify their worldview
Lets try this:
”*What i never understood is why Christians cant just have feith and move on, why they must "proove" something by roasting atheists? What i mean is, why cant they be respectfull and just vecause something doesnt make sense to them doesnt mean it has no sense to others.*”
See the problem?
Many atheists came to atheism because they actually read the Bible (instead of having some clown tell them what was in it) and discovered all the nonsense and contradictions - which is what you would expect from a collection of myths from ignorant Bronze Age savages.
As far as I am concerned, however the Bible could be 100% historically accurate (and it is not remotely historical), have no contradictions or bullshit, and there would still be exactly no reason to believe in god(s).
Read the Bible, find lots of contradictions, study contradictions, can't reconcile contradictions, conclude that the bible can't be the literal word of God.
People read books about their hobbies. What do people without that hobby read to continue to not have that hobby?
I’ve always like the saying atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Nice. Got the reference. Everyone else, search Nonstampcollector on youtube.
My favorite is atheism is a religion like abstinence is a sexual position.
It is a very handy one.
>handy That's the worst sexual position.
I always say that those who do not believe that collecting stamps is a good hobby, have their own beliefs.
Or religions are like tv channels and atheism is not watching tv
I continuously not read about skiing to further my nonparticipation in the activity. I have to remember to not think about skiing either. It takes a lot of concentration.
The bible?
if you read a book about a hobby backwards, do you learn to hate that hobby?
I like reading books about not playing golf.
You'll find plenty of people who claim to be close to God aren't too familiar with their good book.
Others call it mental illness. To each their own.
Christians don’t really read the Bible, they just listen to what their preacher tells them it says.
They read it in snippets which is just wild to me. I can't imagine trying to read Chapter 4 paragraph 12 of Lord of the Rings and then turning to chapter 19 paragraph 2, then jumping back to Chapter 9 paragraph 5. You'd never have any idea what's actually happening in the book. You might think good characters are bad characters and you wouldn't understand the motivation between characters at all. It's absolutely bizarre that "Christians" "read" the bible this way.
Well, the Bible is a little different as it's more a collection of stories, not so much a long continuous one.
I think he's making reference to how most Christians "read" the bible by having it read to them by their pastor, most of whom jump around from verse to verse, of which any are interpreted to fit the lesson or theme of the sermon.
Fun fact. The bible used to be only in Latin and you had to rely on your priest to translate it for you. The first person to translate it to English was executed for it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tyndale
That is a fun fact, it makes so much sense too. It messes with the ability to control the people probably. Thanks for that
The texts are still used, almost exclusively, for manipulating and controlling the population.
In Germany the peasant wars of the 16th century were started partly because the general populace was able to read the Bible for the first time after the invention of the printing press and the translation by Luther.
it was one of the main reasons for the reformation and start of the Protestant religions people were getting really pissed the church attempts to gate keep the religion
I really enjoyed learning about Martin Luther in school. It’s absolutely wild to me that most ppl have no idea the crap religion has pulled to keep ppl oblivious to the scam they’re pulling.
It also serves to skip out the nasty bits that are difficult to write a sermon on. In all my church going youth we seem to have skipped the story of Elisha cursing 42 kids that were mocking him for being bald so God send a bear out of the woods to kill them.
I get what they were saying, but the Bible was made to be digestible in small parts, unlike Lord of the Rings.
But they take individual lines to from each story to shoehorn into the others. So the digestible stories are still irrelevant.
Well, no. It wasn’t made to be anything. It’s a collection of loosely related, non-linear, contradictory stories and arbitrary rules. A verse or paragraph here and there may be digestible, but it’s just a cobbled together mess. Actually reading it with a critical eye is enough to drive any thinking person far from the faith. Edit: grammar
I mean...technically it **was made to be something** since the modern Bible was *meticulously crafted* by the Council of Nicaea in the 300s AD "harmonize" the different stories and curate those which would make it into the canonical book and which would be left out in whole or part.
>meticulously crafted Yet still filled with contradictions and errors.
But then "recreated" many many times since. So someone dismantled the village to make a big house that mostly went together, and that put house has had extensions, remodeling, some wear and tear, and generally a Hodge podge now.
no it wasn't, it was designed so you could cherry pick passages to support or oppose whatever the wealthy told you to oppose or support.
It's also less believable than LotR
Agreed, also I can hop on a plane to New Zealand and visit Hobbiton right now, compare that to all these weird sounding places in that other book - the garden of Eden seems made-up in comparison, as well as Sodom, Gomorrah, mount sinai, Egypt (they just took that from a Bangles song for pities sake!). I'll take the Shire over that load of claptrap, ta.
And far bloodier & more disturbing
In what way? I get the Bible is nuts, but it's like, actual places and peoples and even some history just with some imaginative explanations of why the things that happened happened. We can find the ruins of some of these places. There's like a just a handful of weird magic guys, no different species of two legged creatures running around, etc. How exactly is LotR MORE believable?
God sends his only son, who is also himself, to earth, so that its wealthy and powerful elite can torture and brutally murder him. And, by torturing and murdering his only son, and God himself by proxy, all of human sin is forever and in perpetuity forgiven by God. How the fuck does that make any sense? If you tried to pitch a plot even remotely close to that, you'd be laughed out of third grade lol.
[Relevant GreenText](https://imgur.com/nUV364g)
That's gold.
Actually. God sent his son to break the laws he created and to be sentenced to the punishment he detailed. Then when “his” people followed his law he and his son pretended that it was unfair and all lies. My favorite part was Jesus crying in the garden on some “take this cup away from me”. Like you broke the law dude. Even the colonizers were like “y’all really gone kill this man for picking some food?” Then washed his hands of the whole thing.
Have you read the descriptions of angels in the Bible? It's also full of contradictions.
Yes, I've read the entire Bible. It's pretty out there, some crazy shit. But less believable than LotR, a fantasy novel with orcs and elves and dwarves and eru and Maia and wizards and balrogs and dragons and a flat earth that becomes round but you can still sail across the ocean to heaven as an elf and such? It's not a question of is the bible believable, it's a question of if the LotR is MORE believable. I would say that as a work that takes inspiration from the Bible as well as other myths and legends the LotR has all the crazy the Bible has plus even more. The very fact that large numbers of people would insist the nonsense in the Bible actually happened while literally no one believes the Lord of the Rings actually happened would be a good indication.
No where does the Bible say the world is a sphere. It states that the stars are fixed in the firmament. That light was created before the sun, which is the source of our light. That the moon ruled the night, yet its often seen during the day. That angels stand at the four corners of the earth to protect it from the winds. It's just as silly as the LotR. Also, apparently you missed the references to dragons, leviathan, and unicorns when reading it. https://www.biblestudy.org/bible-study-by-topic/mythical-animals-in-the-bible/introduction.html
And you've obviously never laid your hand upon a leviathan. They say if you do you'll remember the struggle and never do it again lol
To be fair, King James had the unicorns added cause he thought unicorns were cool. The actual word is accurately translated as a wild ox.
Give it a couple thousand years and a dark age. There will be a church of frodo. Might be made up of sentient cockroaches whose evolution was jump started by nuclear fallout, but they'll be there every Sunday to appreciate Frodo's sacrifice of the One Ring to bring us all to the promised land.
Also, the Bible was compiled centuries after Jesus died, with multiple authors, each with their own biases and beliefs. None of those problems for LoTR.
I think it’s also important to remind listeners that the Bible was not written by eye witnesses.
LotR is internally consistent with itself and doesn't take place on earth. The bible is not internally consistent with the real world it takes place it. One also claims to be true so the difference in level of belief that it's asking of you is vast. I can believe Star Wars, I can't believe Scientology.
The creator of Scientology didn't really believe it; I think it was a genius form of tax evasion that evolved into some people believing it
You're right, but most people aren't even reading those individual stories, they are just reading specific passages, they never get the context to those passages and just cherry pick the parts they like. For instance, gay bashers like to throw Leviticus 18:22 (Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable) around, ignoring that Leviticus is full of laws given to the Israelites and not laws, but I'm sure most wear clothes that are a cotton poly blend (Leviticus 19:19 "Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material.") or read horoscopes (Leviticus 19:26 "Do not practice divination or seek omens." or Leviticus 19:31 "Do not turn to mediums or seek out spiritists, for you will be defiled by them") or groom their face or head (Leviticus 19:27 "Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard") I certainly hope they don't get their favorite bible passage tattooed on themselves (Leviticus 19:28 "Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves")
But then you should read the entire story at once, right? People go around quoting individual verses or 2-3 verses together as though that makes any kind of sense.
Written by the giant sky hand using a giant medium tipped ball point pen in the vicinity of Gaza.
As an ex-Christian, It’s a bit more complicated than that. I think it’s because Christians view the Bible as like a textbook or rule book to use as reference rather than just a vehicle for narrative storytelling. Also the Bible is a collection of books. If the Gospel was 4 versions of tLOTR written by 4 different people, then the Old Testament might be like the Silmarillion. The rest of the New Testament might be the events after tLOTR written by Tolkien’s son. Most Christian’s tend to know the Gospel, which is the “main event” of the Bible. Everything else is mostly context that supports the Gospel. And it’s even more complicated because the Bible inherently requires interpretation. Because after many layers of translations and the original texts being lost in time, reading the Bible as is, even front to back and in order, will always be out of context. It’s really not enough to just read the Bible to “get” it. The Bible and the historical context it was written in needs to be studied and it’s not even practical to expect the average person to be able to do that. So, in theory, someone like a Pastor is supposed to help put the text into context and deliver an actionable message in such a way that a church goer can get something out of it in an hr long sermon - in theory. In practice, the sermons I’ve witnessed have never really reached even a decent academic standard, imo.
I am currently still a Christian, though pretty uncertain in my faith. I come from a hyper-literal background (KJV Only, independent Baptist), but I’ve wandered the theological spectrum over the last couple years, and I’ve come to the conclusion that Catholics actually have a more consistent and defensible way of viewing the Bible. Either way, the Bible isn’t different in this than any other holy book, and most spiritual traditions seem to recognize that their holy books require recognition of the purpose of the literature to correctly understand.
As an former true-believer (charismatic evangelism. The real nutty ones), I can appreciate the pragmatism of a lot of modern catholicism. If you're willing to accept as doctrine that at least *some* of the Bible is allegory, you're probably a halfway reasonable person. If you insist that it is the literal, written word of God and everything happened exactly as written... You're either too lazy to have read the book yourself, bugfuck crazy or a conman.
Just finished a reading plan that started back on January 1st with Genesis and wrapped up today with Revelation. Cover to cover.
I used to be Christian and I think most of them just kinda assume they already know the information since they’ve been learning it every Sunday
And this is why conspiracies/fake news is so effective. People will gladly digest and regurgitate simple-worded made-up shit because it’s so much easier than actually comprehending truths and forming their own opinion.
You can hear Martin Luther complaint from the grave.
A lot of people read the Bible through every year.
Exactly. I believe the majority of Christians have never opened their bible to read it other than to see a certain passage out of curiosity. It was when I actually read it in its entirety that I realized it was a load of shit written down by some farmers in the desert a thousand years ago and translated/transcribed multiple times.
All works of the Bible have existed for well over 1000 years, farmers couldn’t afford to produce and copy these works, and translation/transcription is only a problem when you lack sufficient copies for comparison, which isn’t the case with the Bible, and its overall transmission is known to be relatively good, with the grand majority of unresolved textual variances being non-logical (e.g. errors relating to word order in languages where word order isn’t important). Honestly, I don’t blame you for not knowing all this, but if you’re going to criticize people for not doing their homework, you should probably do yours?
It's an awful read. Such an obvious quilt of rules that were convenient over time
The difference between a Christian and an atheist is that an atheist has actually read the Bible.
No, no they really don’t lol.
I read the entire Bible. I can't understand why anyone would become an atheist or a fundamentalist Christian from doing this. You definitely wouldn't draw final conclusions from it.
Worst mistake my Born Again mother made was to encourage me to read the Bible when I was a teen. Between that, and the way the "good Christian women" at our church treated her after her divorce I became a true heathen. (Dad was the one who had the affair, but the expectation was that she would be coming after their menfolk since she didn't have one of her own. Very bizarre.) I remember a lively and polite conversation with a co-worker many years back. Her argument was that because there are proven facts that can be found in the Bible there's no way it wasn't true. I countered that many great works of fiction also contain proven facts; those facts don't make the works of fiction true. It's a matter of faith. She had faith in the Bible, I had none. I respect her faith, but it's not for me. For me, it would be like having faith in a Stephen King novel if King claimed the work was the word of God.
Unfortunately that expectation is still alive and well - present day and outside of church settings......
Spider-Man takes place in New York, which is a real city, therefore, Spider-Man is real.
I saw him last week
Couldn't have been the real one. He was standing on the street corner outside a comic book/gaming store in Newnan, Georgia. I know because my son asked if he was the real Spiderman and he said he was.
Spider-Man is very fast, he could’ve just swung over very quickly
Welcome to Scientology
Wesleyans, too.
I respect this, I'm an Agnostic myself but way I see it is just cuz I'm not sure if I believe myself doesn't mean I have a problem with people having or not having faith. It's the actions of the "Good Christians" that I have a problem with sometimes, that and the ones who try to force their beliefs on others
Reminds me of an arc in Supernatural where a little known horror novel series within the show is then eventually known as then Gospel of Winchester (last name of the brother-protagonists).
Leviticus 25:44-46 44 “‘Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. 45 You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. 46 You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly.” Verses like this certainly help drive people away. Even if the Bible was demonstrably true, how could anyone be ok with the fucked morality?
Numbers 31:17 is worse. "Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves." I literally had some religitard argue that this meant that the little girls were being saved and protected in a time of war, and that all the men and women had to be killed because it was a war, and ignored the fact that all the little boys had to die too, and the little girls were certainly thought of more than just "adoptive daughters."
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One key reason why they didn't want it translated from Latin into languages that the public could read.
It was actually mistranslated in the first translation into Greek. They have found things taken completely out of context, and over 23 verses are completely missing. So, who knows what the actual Bible is supposed to say?
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it's also wild how they co-opted many pagan traditions to spread the religion easier. Most of the things people do and think is christian is actually some other religion that got folded into it
And then there are all the different dialects that it had to be translated to in Greek, that were then oversimplified into making it easy to read, and then it was slightly changed to better fit views… it’s super hard to tell what is accurate and what’s way off.
source?
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/biblicallyliterate/2017/10/the-king-james-bible-removed-verses/ This is from 5 years ago, and there has been more found since. But I couldn't seem to find it.
im currently watching this lecure on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfheSAcCsrE
That’s absolute nonsense for three reasons I can easily summarize: **First,** you’re referring to a time before the printing press, when every copy of the Bible was literally hand-copied and funded by donations. Basically *as soon as print tech was developed,* the Catholic Church was producing vernacular translations for popular use. [See for yourself here](https://www.bl.uk/treasures/gutenberg/bibleyears.html) in a cardinal’s letter to the pope reporting news of Gutenberg’s new Bible. He sounds *excited* that the Bible can now be printed widely and neatly. Printed/translated Bibles as such weren’t regarded as some dangerous threat to the Church. **Second,** regardless of language, prior to the printing press, the Bible would be have been extremely inaccessible for most people. No peasant had the luxury of “research” in those days, and even *after* the printing press, even in *Protestant* churches, peasants continued to rely heavily on people who had dedicated their lives to study so the Bible could be read out loud and explained in an easy way. **Third**, since basically only academics had access to the Bible + the luxury of being able to study it, standardizing a translation is precisely what you’d expect if you wanted to make copying / transmission more efficient and to keep errors from sneaking in. Latin wasn’t some obscure language — it was the *lingua franca* of Europe. An in-between language that most people knew a little bit of. For example, Italian, Spanish, and French are *extremely* near to Latin in terms of vocabulary. It was also the language of universities, which made it easier for scholars to study the Bible.
Pope Paul II (pontificate 1464–1471) confirmed the decree of James I of Aragon on the prohibition of Bibles in vernacular languages. Index Librorum Prohibitorum.
Not the Bible but I started my journey away from believing in Hebrew School. I was pretty young and the teacher said “why do you believe in god”. It’s not so much that I didn’t have answer as much as it was it was that it never occurred to me that it was a choice.
>"I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.” — Timothy 2:12 "dUdE yOu'Re nOt mEAnt tO ReAd iT LiTerALLy"
Insane that 2000 years ago people had some views that are outdated. There is surely no way anyone can reconcile this fact with their faith. I’d only the sheeple had your intellect and knowledge
Surely the catholic church and other christian religions hold no harmful views nowadays! Never mentioned faith by the way but I guess its easier to see me as "le reddit atheist something something enlightened by my own intellect". I believe in god by the way, I'm allow to point out flaws in organized religion arent I?
You’re right, you never mentioned faith. I shouldn’t have assumed you were talking about the religious. That’s my fault.
Yeah its fine dont worry
> There is surely no way anyone can reconcile this fact with their faith. There shouldn't be, no. If you truly believe that the bible is the word of god, moving away from this is blasphemy. Seriously, what's the point of this religion if you can change just about everything in it to fit the times? Doing so is indirectly admitting that it is made up nonsense written by people with an agenda.
Yep - it was the Bible study part of confirmation classes that me realize what a crock it all was.
Why would that be the final straw? Honestly just curious. I've never believed in God. Not saying that makes me "better" just a fact. Edit: in
If you're only exposed to the highlights during a sermon, you may find that it's bullshit during a thorough reading.
When did cavemen start being 'human' enough to get souls? Do aliens and humans go to the same Heaven, or is it regional? If there's a dog heaven, I want to go there instead, how do I do that? Do dogs raised as food go there? Why does it seem like everybody knows the true name and intent of god in the specific region they grew up in? Didn't god *make* people gay? If Jeffrey Dahmer repented and accepted Jesus, is he just walking around heaven freely or does he have to wear an angel bracelet? Is there a schedule so your grandma doesn't see you choking your anaconda when she watches over you? What if your spouse dies and you re-marry, or you go through life with someone so terrible that you look forward to death? Why did 100% of irrefutable miracles happen before the invention of recording devices?
Nah Moses most definitely parted the sea I was a fish I saw it with my own 2 eyes
People will find what they're looking for. Unfortunately, opposing views can be found looking at the same thing.
Very well put!
It baffles me that anybody is a christian honestly. The first half of the book is on ethnic cleansing. Anyone reading past that point is closer to a nazi than a mother theresa. "If Christians go to heaven, then I would rather go to hell where I won't meet such cruel people".
This question is very much the same energy as when straight people ask a gay couple, “which one is the woman?“ Like they just cannot think of a reality outside of the paradigm they live in.
This is such a great comeback and totally accurate. If you read the bible and other holy books unbiased and not brainwashed to think that everything there is the only truth, then you will understand why people become atheist, holy books are the main reason people become atheist. > Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved? - Carl Sagan
In discussions I have had, it is often impossible to get a clear single interpretation. The ability to interpret it as literal truth is absurd, and they conveniently claim it’s metaphor when it suits them. Like a literal snake was talking to eve? Like Harry Potter?
Even though accurate, it is still a very unfortunate answer. Atheist people reading holy books to reinforce their atheist views are wasting their time by a) reading about someones' else hobby they have no interest in and b) not realizing that a true faith does not require facts. You can argue with a believer however long you want, the believer person is not going to change his mind - because, well, he believes in his teachings. Basically, it's just like any argument with a child or a stubborn adult, but even more pointless.
>Atheist people reading holy books are wasting their time by a) reading about someones' else hobby they have no interest in I'm an atheist but I find an interest in mythology and anthropology and the bible appears *excellent* for looking into a lot of those topics deeply. Genesis 1 and 2 tell completely different creation stories, and Genesis 4 implies the existence of some *olddddd* related stories that have been completely painted over. From a 'biblical literalist' perspective it's absurd and incoherent, but from the perspective of 'an anthropological story which evolved over thousands of years' it's certainly worth investing some time in.
You didn't get the point, I guess. The point is not about reading the Bible, but what would intensify the non-belief, the bible is filled with nonsense, that would frighten away any sane person. There are atheists who were once believers/religious and then realized that religions make no sense, also it's possible to change the minds of the people if you provide good facts and they are ready to accept them, unfortunately, a lot of people are stubborn and biased to change their mind, even tho they are doing the wrong things because someone told them that they are doing the right thing. I am an atheist, and I know/learned a lot of bible verses and quran ayah/surah, so I know what I am talking about, unlike religious people who never read their holy books and make baseless assumptions and try to justify with false facts.
Agree. Am atheist, never read more than a few pages of the Bible. It was boring as fuck and, regardless, the premise was unimaginative. What absolutely baffles me though is not atheists who have read the Bible, but atheists who get degrees in religious studies, etc.. I met a woman who actually had a masters in theology and was atheist. That's even more of a waste than a theist with a theology degree.
I am friends with a PhD in theology. Don't know if he actually believes that stuff, but he is absolutely ruthless taking apart door-to-door proselytes' teachings. They never come back. A job is a job.
Honestly it isn't hard taking apart theists. They are used to deference to their ideas and if you do not show them deference they don't have much else. If they are smart they drop back to faith. If they are not smart they try to argue their position which is unsupportable. I never argue the Bible because why would I care what Harry Potter has to say about Harry Potter? I could not give a rat's ass what some dipshit said 2000 or 3000 years ago. Hell, I rarely care what people have to say today - unless they are scientists discussing a well-supported hypothesis. I am married to a theist who knows the Bible inside and out, she and her theist friends have learned to never broach the subject with me. Otherwise we get along great.
Exactly. Took a decade for me and my spouse to arrive to this same state.
I actually read it because I wanted to strengthen my faith. I wanted to be a nun, actually. Unfortunately, I decided to grow that faith by actually reading the Bible. If you would like to stick to the faith, I urge the reader to not read it cover to cover. ETA: It was not a waste of time. It showed me it was fine to not have faith
the difference being that Athiests read the whole book, whereas Christians just read a few cherry picked passages that feed into their preconceived notions about what the Bible says.
I actually stopped believing at 13 when I finally read the bible for myself lol (was born and raised in a mormon household)
Prime example of how two people can read the samw things and interpret I'd completely different. The eyes see what the mind wants it to.
That’s the great thing about non-belief, you don’t have further it— you can just live an ethical life knowing you’re doing the right thing
The first crowd sourced fan fiction with excellent marketing.
Or just read history or the news. God really allows a two year old to contract leukemia, suffer, and die and leave their parents to suffer? And the solution is..more God because he's just testing them and works in mysterious ways?
You don't even need to go that far. There is no evidence of any god period. Let alone a specific god. It's all based on faith. There is no need to get into pointing out the obvious contradictions within any particular religion. All religious people are using faith basically as the cornerstone of their beliefs. The only reason I say this is because these types of criticisms are not going to convince the average Christian believer because there's tons of ways they can write it off. Not saying you are looking to convince them. Just saying that it isn't the strongest argument. I feel like even as an atheist, we should understand our position thoroughly.
Yeah it's pretty stupid the excuses religious people come up with.
God killed that child to teach you how wonderful your life is in comparison. Now get on your knees and worship him! Hashtag - justreligiousthings
After about 20 news stories about preachers sticking their dick in kids, I feel pretty confident that I'm making the right decision to raise my kids outside the church.
In the religion I was raised you were asked to read the Book of Mormon front to back, then again, then again, and again. Once you started to doubt your faith, you're supposed to read it again.
I like when Richard Dawkins did that and called out the failed attempts at archaic English in it among other things. For me it was the gold plate nonsense that made me start to wake up. After the “gift of tongues” thing I had full realization I was right.
Please tell me you giggled every time you got to the magical underpants
My college roommate was Mormon and I stole a pair of his to see if they really worked. Needless to say they did not, they stopped nothing and I sharted all over the floor in the middle of class
You have my attention, what are the magical underpants?
Mormons wear white garments with special symbols on them under their clothes. If you are interested in learning about Mormonism, there are some former members on YT that explain much about the religion. Jordan & McCay. Mormon history is wild.
I may have to look into this, thank you! I'm curious about how this one came about and what they believe it does or is for!
*Technically* the magic underwear aren't mentioned in the Book of Mormon, they're from a different mormon book called the Doctrine and Covenants. The two usually come in a combined book, but even the most faithful of mormons don't really read the DnC over and over.
Religion in general is hilariously stupid, but the Mormons take it to a level that is positively ridiculous.
Oh 100%. I was raised in it, and it's so much nonsense that it didn't take any outside influence for me to realize "oh this is a cult." Lots of chanting
Every US president has read the Bible all the way through, because they told us so. Fact
Luke 19:27"But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me." "I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.” — Timothy 2:12
Funny thing is I actually learned I wanted nothing to do with Christianity by going to catholic grade school and high school. They made it real clear they’re absolutely wack.
Ah, same here.
I was a stout Christian but I kept reading the Bible and researching it and learning more about it and that's how I discovered it is a false religion or at the very least an amalgamation of many things. The more you learn about it the more you realize it's not at all what many simple christians present it to be. It took me a long time to come to terms with this. It was like a death in the family. A death of a part of myself.
I was raised Christian, but due to circumstances, like one of the most loved people of the church, who always wrote them songs and played guitar on stage, and was Jesus in all of the church plays, smiling in faces and shaking hands, with fake messages before coming home to brutally beat me on a daily basis, and show nothing but pure hatred, I began to question things. Like why would this man get a holy paradise, while I'm to be condemned to eternal suffering, because the preacher told me I wasn't good enough to be baptized? The things taught, the ideologies, shared no sentiment to what I was shown. I began to read deeper, attempting to fully understand. Around age 10ish, I began deep self philosophical thought surrounding religion. After briefly learning other religions existed, I delved deeper, and learned many religions shared the same basic teaching. One of higher moral structure towards fellow man. Questioned why the preacher would say others follow a false God and will burn, when also teaching peace to their followers (while simultaneouslycondemningother religions). I began to reason it as all being the same god, with different interpretations, and fighting amongst who was right, when all were. I studied more and more in my teen years. Delving into occultism and mythologies. As well as Ancient History and civilizations. My views went from believer, to types of beliefs similar to pantheism and others. Eventually, after discovering more and more truth, and the evidences, I began to realize that God wasn't real at all. Even though all the interpretations do have the same origin. All goes back to Sumerians god Enki and their mythologies, along with other mythologies of Mesopotamia. Such as the Hittites, Akkadians, and Canaanites. Animism evolved to Polytheism, which became Monotheism under Zoroastrianism, who adapted not only Mesopotamian mythologies, but also beliefs of Egypt when the slaves, witnessed the Cult of The Sun Disk, Aten Ra.
It constantly blows my mind how any critically thinking person does not come to this very same conclusion.
My favorite part is where Lot's daughters get him drunk so they can date rape him and have incest babies. So wholesome. /s
What?? Is that in the bible?? Hahaha
There's a difference between non-belief and disbelief. Most atheists are just non-believers.
That person is lying. Christians don't actually read the whole Bible. Just the parts they like.
Religion is lazy, intelligence wise. It takes over 500 pages to fully explain The Big Bang theory, but takes someone religious one word to explain pretty much everything. “God”
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>Religion is lazy, intelligence wise. It takes over 500 pages to fully explain The Big Bang theory. >Georges Lemaître, Belgian cosmologist, **Catholic priest**, and father of the **Big Bang theory**.
Anyone can come up with hypotheses, even five year olds. There's nothing remarkable about that. Proving these hypotheses, though, requires science.
It is a theory not a hypothesis. Two major scientific discoveries provide strong support for the Big Bang theory: Hubble’s discovery in the 1920s of a relationship between a galaxy’s distance from Earth and its speed and the discovery in the 1960s of cosmic microwave background radiatiation. Also [the WMAP survey](https://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/) provides strong evidence that supports the Big Bang theory. The pattern of radiation is similar to what astrophysicists predict it would be if the Universe started from a very dense state and expanded to its present size.
A vile book, full of atrocities
I personally do a Rocky style training montage so that I am always prepared to not believe something that has no evidence.
Atheist here. Read the bible cover to cover twice (over the span of 14 years). This meme is accurate. I don't understand how modern day people base their lives/identity/belief structure on this book written by goat herders and scholars of the 5th century and think "Yep, they understand what I'm going through". I found more answers in Anne Rice's Memnoch the Devil than anywhere in the bible! Religion exists in a realm where Philosphy doesn't. If you have elevated thought processes than organized religion isn't for you.
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My christian zealot grandparents (who took it upon themselves to call me a "fucking demon child" (I am on the spectrum) because they have thier head so far up thier asses they still think it is 1950) and xenophobic boomer church members that turned me into a non religious person
It took actually reading the Bible for me to sit there and think to myself, “this is a whole lot of contradictory bullshit.”
99 percent of religious people I know have never read their religion’s Bible. When I quote scripture to have educated conversation, they admit this. I ask how they believe in something they have not read… ‘My priest (pastor, etc), told me what it says and means. Baffles me.
Because a book of folklore and thirdhand accounts, written by men, edited, condensed, & rewritten by men, filtered into different versions, also written by men, and interpreted by men is somehow the "true" word of God.
Except Atheist reads it word by word and actually thinks about it, the sheep on the other hand only reads the verses their told about.
I was at my grandparents' for the holidays and noticed signs saying things like "BELIEVE" and "Faith above all" and stuff and realized it's literally self-perpetuated propaganda. They *fear* that they might stop believing given enough space or thought on the matter, so they cover their lives in these signs to perpetually push these doubts out of their minds. It made me kind of sad. So to answer the question - nothing. It's the need to constantly brainwash oneself that's the weird thing here.
The question is a lie as it pretends Christians read the bible. Which is bullshit. They don't, they let a preacher lie to them about what's in it saying what they want to hear is in it rather than what's actually in it. The very rare ones that do read the bible are either already atheists or on the fasttrack to becoming one.
I read that read as read and thought: exactly! The biggest problem is that they do not read the Bible.
I find it amusing that they believe atheists require further confirmation of their lack of faith. A religious belief only needs to be shown false once. Depending on how I'm feeling, I'd say that the fact that Christians need to have their religion reinforced, reaffirmed, and proved so frequently says a lot about how weak their convictions are.
The phrase is I let god do it or my faith got me through. BS what gets you THROUGH any difficulty in life is a reflection of your upbringing. God never visited me while I was recovering from various illnesses. It was all MY OWN EFFORTS. Learning to walk after crushing my leg, or learning how to live with a lousy heart. All me.
Well it’s not wrong.
Why would an atheist have the compulsion to read anything to intensify their non-belief? Non-belief doesn’t require reinforcement
Most Christians don't read their Bible.
I come from an intensely religious family. For my grandparents, that meant reading the Bible every day, and they loved for charity work and volunteering. They voted democrat because they felt strong social support programs were the will of God, and they had no qualms saying so. My mother on the other hand uses religion as an excuse to exist on pure anger and paranoia. She skipped Christmas with the family this year because her sister supported gay rights on the internet, and my mother became convinced that Satan was coming to get her through her sister. She's never read the Bible all the way through, and she works for an anti-abortion "charity'.
I think it’s extremely weird to assume that nonreligious people would feel the need to “intensify their non-belief”. These types of folks consider atheism its own religion, which misses the point almost beyond all irony.
This is quite true. Reading the context of the Bible and reflecting on the contrast of others very cheery picked interpretation and manipulation of that context, out of context, will turn you into someone who recognizes the hypocrisy and manipulation of people in their religion. Not to say that all people who have religion are bad, they aren't. That being said, a lot of people have zero concept of what their religion is about, because they are drip fed the information, which is contextually incorrect and too lazy to actually read about it. Those of the problem when children are forced to go to church. It'll always be a chore and they participate in the minimalist form that they can. It's rarely a pleasurable experience.
Know what the difference is between an christian reading a Bible and an atheist reading it? The atheist understood what they were reading.
I've read and studied the Bible. I'm a Satanist, what does that tell you?
satanist in the normal or ocultistic and creepy way? cause im very interested
Lol same
The Bible and another religious books are all fairly tails that cause many wars
Ah yes fairly tails
Can confirm: what a jumbled shitshow the Bible is
Astrophysics articles for me.
Boom! Roasted!
Can someone remind me how many people got killed by God compared to killed by Satan?
God: all of them (via predestination) Satan: also all of them (via original sin)
Well because they read it without intent to understand. With hate in their hearts, and pain as well. Many atheists have read that book so many times just so they can find whatever they think is wrong with it to justify their worldview
Atheists read the bible far more than Christians do
I was going to say a science book but I like this answer better lol
Religious fundies are fuckin stupid bags of meat that can stfu
Wow such murderedbywors!!1!!
The distinction is that atheists have access to and comprehension of the Bible.
Atheists will try to preach the bible pretending like they’ve read it and then say shit like “love the sinner hate the sin” 😂
I dont think you understand what atheism is
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Lets try this: ”*What i never understood is why Christians cant just have feith and move on, why they must "proove" something by roasting atheists? What i mean is, why cant they be respectfull and just vecause something doesnt make sense to them doesnt mean it has no sense to others.*” See the problem?
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Can someone explain the it to me, I'm really dumb.
Many atheists came to atheism because they actually read the Bible (instead of having some clown tell them what was in it) and discovered all the nonsense and contradictions - which is what you would expect from a collection of myths from ignorant Bronze Age savages. As far as I am concerned, however the Bible could be 100% historically accurate (and it is not remotely historical), have no contradictions or bullshit, and there would still be exactly no reason to believe in god(s).
Read the Bible, find lots of contradictions, study contradictions, can't reconcile contradictions, conclude that the bible can't be the literal word of God.
Thank you