Old testament is quite rough. Lots of killing and raping going on.
God tells the chosen people to kill this and this tribe. Take virgins as wives, kill all males. I never understood killing of livestock though.
It’s pretty much how violent and dog eat dog world the Middle East was 2500 years ago.
The scariest thing is that even today billions of people believe in this ancient Abrahamic BS. (Christians, Jews and Muslims)
It’s better if you read it as “some guy told the nation that God told them to beat each other to death over petty shit and not only did they agree to it, they extolled it as righteous and holy”
When I was in college. I took a class about the Bible as literature. It was super good. Really interesting. I’m not even necessarily like religious, but it’s cool to look at it from that sort of a literary perspective especially because it’s such a foundational work in Western Civilization
I read the Bible last year and tried to imagine how it would be perceived if it were any work of fiction. Looking at it just as a fictional book, it’s very poorly written. For one thing, explanations of Jesus sacrifice only come after the fact. A good book would have set it up and explained the necessity of the sacrifice beforehand. Another problem is parts of it are very boring, like the parts that describe the temple in detail. However, I recommend Genesis and Samuel because they are very eventful, a lot happens in them
I was kind of musing in a corner of my mind that Jesus acting as a sacrifice to god…really only makes sense in a cultural context where basically everyone around you is already sacrificing goats and chickens and bulls and whatever to their gods.
When that cultural context is removed (as in our culture where generally nobody slaughters animals as a sacrifice to any god) the whole crucifixion thing comes off as…weirdly pagan.
Like, HAVING to have a human/god sacrificed to god to…remove sin I guess…it only really makes sense if you have the cultural expectation that sacrificing things to some god is…just what you DO to get rid of sin or stuff that’s harmful like curses or whatever?
I’m not a bible scholar, and I know there’s tons of theology that’s already argued about Jesus “dying for our sins” into infinity.
I’m more vaguely looking at this from a layperson secular standpoint, where I’m thinking about the cultural context of “sacrifice” as it pertains to 2000 years ago, and how it pertains to now in our current culture. Like…wow, the culture and how we see things has totally shifted and the Jesus died thing is a really weird boondogle/relic of those ancient mindsets, isn’t it?
Yeah, a lot of things in the Bible probably made more sense for the culture it was written for. Of course the books of the Bible were written over hundreds of years and so culture shifted in that time, explaining some of the contradictions. The reason it doesn’t work very well as a book is there is a lot of background information the writers expected the readers to know that now most people don’t
It’s really not.
There are large chunks of it that are really repetitive and boring, just things like the number of goats and chickens owned by so and so.
And like a lot of ancient mythology it can be really hard to relate to, given the vastly different cultural context that produced the text. That can be kinda entertaining in it’s own way, but mostly it just means that you’re not really going to understand the character motivations or themes of a story. Also sometimes the protagonist will do something horrifically immoral by today’s standards without the text treating it as notable at all.
IMO all of the actually interesting parts (like Genesis) are all really short and you probably know them already from cultural osmosis.
It is also important to note that the bible was curated (and probably even edited) by the Catholic Church in the past. So what you read is only what they want(ed) you to read to begin with. I would really like to get into the apocrypha at some point - especially into alternative descriptions to the biblical canon
I don’t think it’s accurate to only indicate the Roman catholic church. The creation of the bible was a process of curation and editing intentional and accidental.
But the Roman catholic church is defo responsible for the inclusion of the Johannine Comma in the KJV. (Because they fraudulently inserted it into a copy of a Greek manuscript they produced to claim that clause’s authenticity)
There are large chunks of it that are really repetitive and boring, just things like the number of goats and chickens owned by so and so.
That honestly sounds like the exposition of every character in a Wes Anderson movie
except that Anderson films use comedy and cinematography to maintain viewers’ interest in expository scenes that might otherwise feel mundane
Now I’m a little curious what a Wes Anderson Bible movie would be like. Owen Wilson can be Jesus
Bill Murray as God trying to tell Norton-Adam about sin, while Dafoe-Satan in snake form tries to convince Swinton-Eve to eat the apple. Jason Schwartzman voices the apple. Adrien Brody and Jeff Goldlbum get to be 2 of the 3 wise men, the third is just Bill Murray in another costume. Even the blood is pastel. Only 20% of the film is not stop-motion miniatures.
Bill Murray is God who is so fucking over it and just wants to hand this shit off to his son.
Jason Schwartzman is Satan trying so hard to get everybody to like him even though he sucks.
Revelations with shrooms. Better or worse?
I read part of the bible cracked out of my mind before. Everyone who saw me reading was so happy for me at first. Then they figured out I wasn’t reading it right and they would be mad when I pointed out the literal meaning hidden in all the subtext
I like some of the stories in the Bible but it’s still pretty hard to read. I don’t know why, I don’t have that problem with other, even older writings. There is nothing confusing about the Enuma Elish, for example. I think the Epic of Gilgamesh is freaking great.
But when the Bible steals a story told in the Epic of Gilgamesh and makes it Noah’s flood, it loses all meaning. The original wasn’t all that exciting to begin with but there was a deep meaning to it being in the Epic. But in the Bible, what is the meaning? What’s the moral to the story? It just doesn’t work.
I was raised without any religion and when I was 6 I found “Bible for kids” in a fairy tale section of the library. I’ve read it thinking that it’s a weird fairy tale.
How else would you read the Bible?
Under duress, with crushing feelings of obligation, guilt, shame, horror, and dread of course 😄
This guy Bibles.
Whack off material.
Song of Songs?
Genesis
Gimme that sweet tower of babel sugar
As history
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
The history of the Bible is really interesting. Not saying the stories are true but more about how/why they were composed. Especially when looked at in the context of the Ancient Near East.
I believe certain texts/stories had been floating around for centuries but Jewish leaders decided to make an official text after returning from Babylonian exile in the 500s BC.
You asked
Tell us more about the historically-accurate talking donkey and the historically -accurate description of an angel with a million scary eyeballs & feathers, and how a virgin woman somehow historically got pregnant, and how did Noah historically fit SEVEN PAIRS of every animal in existence onto a handmade boat, how did he keep them all fed & hydrated for 40 days, and how did the feline species not devour all the rodent species while they’re all cooped up together in a small space for 40 days? Historically please tell us. Remember, “history” implies that the story is factual. Like it REALLY happened.
- When you read a document as history, you absolutely should not have the mindset that everything in the document is true. If you read the historical documents that were used to convict Albert Dreyfus, you should bear in mind the possibility that they were forged… because they were. But they’re still historical.
- There are over 2 billion Christians in the world who believe the Bible to be more-or-less historical. It is unlikely most of them believe in the literal truth of all of it, but that’s still essentially how they read it. The OP shouldn’t have asked the question if they didn’t want to hear an honest answer.
If you think that because I answered “as history” to the question “how else would you read the Bible” that I must believe in its historical truth (either in the normal manner of a Christian, or in the insane manner that everything in it must be completely true) you’d be wrong. I just answered the question.
If I’m understanding your position, I think a better way to word your answer may have been “as an historic text to provide context for religious beliefs”. “History” comes with the implication that it is truthful to events in the past, not that it was just “written before right now, even if it’s fiction”.
That would have been reasonable but I wanted to also encompass the way in which a Christian would read the bible, because asking such a question needs to have that pointed out. I have close friends and relatives who are religious, and don’t want to people to essentially deny that they exist.
The history isn’t the stories. It’s who wrote them, why and what the stories meant in their lifetimes and social context.
And then the writer just pulled the most unimaginative deus ex machina and the hero just “comes back” from the dead, pff lazy writing.
The more entertaining read is God saying “fuck you, in particular” to Job.
It is entertaining in a fucked up way that god kills his family and then at the end is like “uhh… here’s a new, entirely different family, let us never speak of this again”
relevant Crimes New Roman book report on Hell is the Absence of God
I had a youth pastor that said if someone made movies out of the Bible, they would all be R-rated and very popular because of all the drama, sex, and violence.
But for some reason it’s okay for little kids to read that shit out loud to each other.
Their idea is interesting, but there’s plenty of material out there that’s absolutely loaded with drama, sex, and violence that no one cares to watch.
But religious people do love watching religious material. Those Hallmark films don’t make themselves.
Well, it is fiction, so there’s that.
“I started reading the bible. It Sucks. I can’t get past the first chapter. Don’t buy this author’s books.”
- Sir Baby of Cakes
Dank Christian memes
Maybe the author saw his own work, decided it’s shit and the only way to redeem it was to make a religion out of it.
You could make a religion out of this!
I find it interesting to consider that Judas was designated by Jesus for the task, in order to fulfill the prophetic criteria in the book of Daniel, which many prophetic figures in Judea were obsessed with, not just the Jesus movement.
