>>9765220Very very few Christians have more than a passing and inaccurate view of the Bible. The point of church is social bonding but with a very huge secondary component of curating the Bible and filtering it for the masses. It’s both largely nonsensical and also full of things unacceptable to modern society (this has been the case for a thousand years).
It needs somebody to decide what version of events everybody’s goingto go with as the right one, and somebody to make it palatable, and somebody to drag the meaning and point out of what is, on its own, largely nonsensical and full of self-contradicting filler.
I have read several versions many times over the course of my life and this is just how it is. It was never meant to be one big fat volume read by regular plebs, taken too literally, or taken as fact across the board. There’s a reason the most important stuff consists of personal testimonies and many separate “books of”. And there’s a reason one of the main over arcing themes is personal faith and what you see in your heart. For this and the reasons in my first paragraph, no you’re not really expected to read it.
THAT SAID you still should. Because you don’t want to be one of the masses you want to be exceptional and be one of the people like me who can explain it to all the people who don’t have the capacity to read it. Biblical literacy (even if you’re an atheist) is a bare minimum for ANY relevant verisimilitude with western culture as a whole. You have zero chance of actually grasping and appreciating classical art unless you know the Bible for example.
