Reading the Bible

Debate Room
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Christianity is generally pretty prominent and pervasive in many countries, including my own.

NZ was heavily influenced by the religious beliefs of the British colonisers back in the day, hence we officially celebrate Christmas and Easter as national holidays. Some laws have had Christian influence over the years e.g. anti abortion laws which as NZ becomes more and more secular are slowly being eroded to a more inclusive set of laws. Yay!

Anyway, in that context, I feel it makes sense to try to understand the other side. Especially since its such a large group. I have been very guilty in the past of being really bewildered, confuddled, and having a very negative view of the mindset of religious people. But I am trying really hard to be gracious and to try and see their side of the story, even though I’ll never believe it, I am trying hard to understand it.

It is difficult to go to a Christian forum and discuss stuff, because so much is against the rules. Questioning the bible is often seen as heretical.

What I don’t want to do is to have a strawman, almost trollish view of the bible and then challenge Christians on how they can believe this stuff. What I do want to do is to understand their perspective. Like, LISTEN, rather than to get them with Gotcha’s. However, I find it difficult to ask questions of Christians in a way that isn’t going to immediately get them upset, or on the backfoot. Perhaps I simply lack the social skills or emotional intelligence needed to carefully navigate this topic with them. IDK. In the recent past I’ve tried “conversing” with AI (ChatGPT, Gemini) but that is ultimately frustrating because I get lots of praise and lots of echo chamber stuff coming back at me. They profile who they think I am, and then give me answers they think I’ll be delighted with.

Anyway. I find reading the Bible to be very difficult for many reasons:

  1. The preachy-ness of it is extremely off putting
  2. The Childishness of it, makes it feel dumb. “God created light and it was good”
  3. The absurdity to it is often insulting
  4. The contradictory-ness of it. God of the bible seems to be an authoritarian monster.
  5. The brutality of it. God is often slaughtering people, or commanding his people to slaughter others
  6. It’s misogynistic
  7. The logic is really weird. e.g. Eve gained knowledge of good and evil and so God decided to punish all her female descendants for all of time.
  8. Well the list goes on and on….

Christians of course believe god to be good, and the bible to be profound. I wonder how long it took them to be able to read the bible and not have the thoughts that I have about it? Does it takes years of having people try to explain it to them in order to overcome their intuitive thoughts?

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I think in most cases it just takes being raised by parents who believed all this stuff. That’s how it worked for me anyway. You grow up assuming your parents, teachers and mentors know what they’re on about. They don’t seem to have any cognitive dissonance or awareness of leaky abstractions, or if they admit to anything along those lines, it’s seen as struggling with “doubt”, perhaps even a noble “crisis of faith” that people sometimes have to pass through – the so-called “dark night of the soul”.

Since from a very young age this is your entire world and you are also rather sheltered from the Outside World, it holds together well enough until maybe something happens to you in life where the pain of considering change is less than the pain of holding to your habitual thought patterns.

It is not as if people never come to the faith as adolescents or adults, but I think childhood indoctrination is the most effective path – at least unless and until you go to college, especially a secular one, and suddenly realize how naive and sheltered your existence has been. Even when I attended Bible Institute, I met my first black person (an African, no less), my first person from the Indian subcontinent, lived in a city for the first time, came into contact with a lot of people with different ideas and varying levels of “commitment” to the faith. Even THAT was a revelation.

As to how adults work it out, I can only speak first hand to how it works in the evangelical world. Generally someone has a life crisis and faith throws them a seeming lifeline. Maybe it provides social support or refuge they’ve never known. That is how my oldest brother came to the faith in his mid 20s – the vanguard of our entire family, actually. These are usually people who need structure they haven’t found elsewhere. It can get their life “straightened out” – sometimes they overcome various problems. In my brother’s case it was a need to belong and be accepted, which he first sought with his navy buddies but got involved in a lot of heavy drinking and womanizing, and the church had less dysfunctional people who accepted him into the tribe. In other words he was lonely and insecure and got hammered on a daily basis because it was the price of belonging. The church didn’t demand that, so problem solved. This was seen by my parents as transformative and maybe something their rather detached / casual Presbyterianism hadn’t provided, and partly out of guilt, they joined the fundagelical world a bit short of age 50.

This points out another aspect of these conversion stories: my brother was already somewhat religiously primed. Not really indoctrinated but habituated. Religion was what Decent People did, he was getting in trouble, so it made sense as a new direction for him.

I have also heard second hand stories of unbelievers not by conviction but just by an unexamined life – they had no religious upbringing, knew little about it, saw no point in it, and then at some opportune time they come in contact with the gospel and it clicks with them – again, often at a vulnerable time in their life.

What all these people (including me in my callow youth) had in common was that they weren’t in the habit of critical thinking, and then a herd mentality takes over (we are, after all, herd animals). Often if you grow up that way and are habituated to the idea that critical thinking is a Bad Thing and religious faith is a virtue, you will at least make a carve-out or compartmentalization for your faith, even should you go on to an academic discipline / profession that requires some degree of critical thinking (law, science, medicine).

Then there’s the matter of inertia and cost/benefit ratios. If you consider leaving the faith you may lose all that social support and acceptance. You may even, in the extreme, be disowned by your own parents.

So really it has little to do with the Bible and more to do with refuge, belonging, and group identity. The Bible is just post-hoc rationalization for the tribalism. It gets interpreted in various creative ways to support the belonging. After all, there are thousands of Christian denominations, and more subdivisions in other religions than most people realize. Using the same holy book, you can cherry pick love and kindness, or bigotry and violence, or anything in between, and justify it from the book.

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Thanks for taking the time to offer all that information.

Yeah, kids are new to the world and don’t really know its limitations, so that’s why they believe in Santa, and ghosts and what not, it takes some time existing to workout existence.

But stuff like reading the Bible, doesn’t that shock even some Christians when they read it for the first time. Like god lying to Adam and Eve about dying if they ate from the tree of knowledge, and God entrapping them by pretending to leave so that they would be brave enough to try the “fruit”. And even they idea that it is somehow wrong for Adam and Eve to learn the difference between right and wrong, or that god then punishes Eve for learning something and then not only punishes her but punishes all her female descendants. For me, that story alone is really shocking and makes God look absolutely terrible and tyrannical. The snake looks like the good guy, telling the truth and trying to get Adam and Eve to learn things, and to make decisions for themselves.

For me that story alone highlights the complete difference between myself and the Christian mindset. For me, my philosophy is that we should encourage our children to become independent, to learn and grow, we shouldn’t be demanding blind obedience, we shouldn’t get them to think of their parents as people that must be obeyed. But, from that story alone, it seems Christianity wants people to be subservient even into adulthood. Rather than decide for themselves what is right or wrong, to look to the Church for the answers. etc.

It is the antithesis of my own personal philosophy, of my parenting style, of my expectation of schools looking after my children, of my expectation of government in governing society. Grown adults should decide for themselves how to live their own lives, how to find purpose, how to develop their own reputations etc.

But I am also quite confussed about how to talk about this stuff with Christains, can’t they see the difficulties a non Christian would have in reading the bible? It’s not that I am trolling them, I feel these concerns I have are very valid and extremely obvious from reading the stories of the bible.

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They have an “answer” for everything. In this case, generally, God was saying they would die spiritually, in terms of no longer being innocent. Even literalists do not take everything literally when it suits them. And non-theists reading the story of the Fall in the Bible and in other ancient writings from which it borrows, see it as a generic fable about the loss of innocence that comes when a person or a tribe or country matures. The “knowledge of good and evil” is moral awareness as opposed to moral innocence.

I think that a lot of people are better than you or I at reading things in this metaphorical way. It isn’t natural for me. I recall being uncomfortable over the same questions when this story was new to me, but also in my experience, people generally seem more inclined than I to see fabulist tales or logical inconsistencies in terms of metaphor or simile.

That is exactly correct.

Even apart from religion, there’s a tension between making a child resourceful, adaptive, and freethinking, and maintaining adequate control and discipline. As parents of adult children, we feel sidelined when our children don’t have much interest in us or initiate a lot of contact with us in the middle of their busy lives when we should take it as evidence that we succeeded in what we set out to do: raise them to be their own persons. They don’t need us any more, by design.

By contrast the Christian God is incredibly needy and insecure and demanding of fealty and love and adoration and blind obedience. He’s basically an avatar of the only kind of leader that was known in ancient times: the despot. He’s an all-powerful king and his goal is for all his subjects to be groveling to him for all eternity with no effort at independence. Dependence is a feature, not a bug, for the Christian believer. It’s the entire point.

Think of how religious faith is lauded as a virtue, and “mere human reasoning” as inferior (if not a vice). Think of how the teaching is perpetually that you’re nothing without Jesus. That questioning is naught but the sin of doubt. That we must have a “childlike” faith (= never grow up or take personal responsibility or make personal moral judgments). Infantilizing the believer is the objective.

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Yeah I get that many Christians interpret the bible differently from each other. One can’t simply say Christians believe X. Some have literal interpretations, some have a mixture of allegory, literal, tradition etc.

In my view it is pretty obvious that the story isn’t talking about a literal fruit and that the writers have pondered over humanity’s concept of morality and the seemingly lack of “morals” that other animals have. The authors seem to have recognised that humans are animals, but at some point in our development, must have gone from not having a moral standard to having one. And so the story is a myth story about that.
But in the world of Christian land, as I understand it, many believe that the universe has bad things happen (such as death, disease, crime) due to the fall of humanity, due to humans developing the idea that some things are right, and some things are wrong. I don’t know how many think that there wasn’t death at all until Adam and Eve did their thing. I don’t know how many literally believe Adam and Eve were the first two humans or are just symbolic, whether their offspring procreated with each other, or if their offspring procreated with other “humans” that were around at the time.
Do they believe god punished women with pain in childbirth or do they just think of that as a myth story as an origin of why child birth is painful?

It seems to me that many Christians take great stock in the idea of the Fall or original sin, and think somehow this is relevant to the death of JC. Do they literally think it is a sin to know right from wrong?
I feel that many Christians today, put themselves in the place of Adam and Eve but try not to eat the fruit of knowledge,. e.g. don’t take it upon themselves to develop their own moral standard, don’t listen to science regarding evolution and other things, basically see it as a test of their faith, and feel incredibly proud that despite the contrary evidence that they are not tempted. Or perhaps that is just flat earthers? IDK.

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Mostly what your question is getting at is, how many Christians take these things fairly literally.

The way I answer that is to use evangelical Christians as a rough proxy for that kind of thinking. On a worldwide basis, I’ve seen a figure of 17% of Christians being evangelical. But they are not evenly distributed; in the US, it’s easily twice that percentage, and then THAT percentage has an outsized influence because it’s more aggressive and expansionist, and rather ruthless in enforcing its hegemony in the parts of the country where they dominate politically (basically, the Bible Belt southern states, parts of the midwest, and rural areas moreso than urban ones).

If you live in the US, this can make them seem like more of a force / more inevitable than they really are, and it’s possible to think of them in terms of a dangerous cornered animal in their death throes because the important thing to understand IMO is that their ideology isn’t sustainable; it always results in failure ultimately because it can’t produce a cohesive, healthy society for everyone (even, ultimately, for themselves). It must always exclude and sort people according to beliefs, culture, skin color, etc. And it must always make a totem out of their cultural norms, which must be defended and preserved at all costs.

And yes, many Christians do avoid the fruit of knowledge, “mere” human wisdom, or any sort of intellectual curiosity (“doubt”) because these things are scary and bad.

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