People here are quick to dismiss the Bible as trivial but it has some very good stories and wisdom if you read it with an open mind. In the same way some books help you understand life, relationships and your place in the world the Bible will help you with that. Unfortunately some people start interpret it towards their view of life which lead to some extreme and harsh views that separate us.

Yes it does.

It is also great source of knowledge of what to do for example:

how to beat up your slave so to not offend god

what to do if your daughter is raped (spoiler alert sell her to the rapist).

what to do to people having tattoos or wearing mixed fabrics.

It is also a great that non of it contradicts itself: https://infidels.org/library/modern/donald_morgan/contradict...

Bible is what it is, but its not a source of never-ending wisdom. And being treated as holy book gives impetus to bad people to do bad things and feel good about doing it.

You have to remember that The Bible isn't one book. It's a collection of a bunch of different books in one convenient binding. I finally finished reading the whole thing last year and was surprised by how many different perspectives it contained. Anybody who says "The Bible says x!" is at risk of missing the point. It's far more accurate to say something like "In one of his letters, Paul said x" or "Esther told her father x." Context is critically important for this collection of very different books.

Yes agreed, there were a lot of studies done on the bible its origins and authors, its undisputable that it was written by several authors in several different historical periods (Including new testament).

Problem with bible is that people clam it was divinely inspired - written by god through human hand. Well it is clearly not. But all it really is a tool in hands of extremists justifying their evil deeds. That's how you have 'thou shall not kill' but wanting all gays to be killed etc.

Quite amazing, happy to hear you have found Jesus! Did you read the Bible without any help? It's such a complex set of texts, all from very different ages, from very different people. Couldn't imagine myself getting the most out of it without help.

"I read the Bible out of curiosity and ended up joining a church, so that's pretty consequential."

In that case, to be fair to yourself, did you also read the Quran, for comparison? Other religious texts?

I read some of the more notable Greek and Roman mythology if that counts. Otherwise no.

Wow, a lot of these resonate. Epp's Discrete Math was so much fun--definitely my favorite textbook from college. Moby Dick was mindbending, and my favorite novel until reading Homer's Odyssey. The Bible was a great education in ancient cultures. I was just reading an interview of McPherson on NYT's 1619 project, too.

May your journey of faith be fruitful. I enjoyed reading Dostoyevsky and G.K. Chesterton along those lines.

I've enjoyed a few Dostoevsky books, especially Crime and Punishment. The Odyssey is also a blast.

Question about the Bible — is Jesus a real person or could it be that he is a symbol of and an invitation for, choosing love, to the best of one’s abilities, in every present moment and choice on one’s life?

What is your take on this? What about the Church’ take?

The way I read it, the Bible makes it a point to communicate that Jesus was/is a real person (and that his importance actually hinges on that fact). AFAIK, this is and has always been the Church's position.

> I read the Bible out of curiosity and ended up joining a church, so that's pretty consequential.

Is there a bigger story here? I'm not the type that would find reading the Bible appealing but I can say without a shadow of doubt that if I would, it would not awaken any latent desires for religion.

I've read 3 different versions of the bible and it converted me from an agnostic to an atheist. I think GP may have been predisposed to religion (or at least to the social aspects of joining a church) as the bible, as interesting as it is, is only as interesting as any other selected and vetted collection of philosophy and story telling. Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism and Islam also have very interesting texts worth reading.

This isn't meant to be insulting or dismissive, I have nothing but good will to GP, but statistically just reading the bible doesn't usually lead to joining a church. If it did, you could lose the rest of the evangelism and missionary practices and not really see a dent in the population of Christianity.

> it converted me from an agnostic to an atheist

I don't think these are necessarily mutually exclusive, but treating them as if they are, I'm curious why. I would presume your definitions, based on this, that:

* agnostic = "I don't know if there is anything" * atheist = "I do know that there is nothing"

I have mostly met agnostic atheists, being "I don't know if there is anything, but I believe there's nothing", whereas it seems you are a gnostic atheist.

I'm curious because I somewhat took an opposite path in my life - reading Godel's Incompleteness Theorem exposed myself to the idea that I can't ever know what's out there, so it lead me to agnosticism.

Philosophically I call myself agnostic. But colloquially I call myself an atheist. Also while I'm agnostic about there existing _any_ powerful being (god), I'm pretty dang confident that the gods described in religious texts do not exist. So in that sense, I am atheist (towards human religions). And it is in this last sense that I could see someone going from agnostic-to-atheist by reading the Bible or in other ways learning more about religion/psychology/history.

I translate atheism similarly to amorality. An amoral action or thought is orthogonal to the existence of morality. An atheist is orthogonal to the existence of god / gods. The existence or non-existence of any deity is not only unprovable, it has only academic influence on my actions or thoughts.

To be fair, few people actually read it in the first place (one big way in which my experience of church was not what I imagined)

Which is actually a pity. The bible is at least as full of pithy quotes and genuinely helpful, thoughtful points to consider as the usual self help books. It's definitely worth a read, but so is a lot of Greek philosophy, poetry, other religious texts and a bunch more. Hence the original question that spawned this whole thread! There is original, thought provoking content being written all the time. This HN post has already given me a few recommendations for finding it, both in fiction and non-fiction.

There are factors working against it, like the length, the popularity of the KJV with its archaic language, long sections of somewhat boring genealogies or religious laws, and so on. But I'd always chuckle at Bart Ehrman's observation that it was very strange how many students he had who said they believed the Bible was the literal, inerrant word of God yet hadn't ever read it -- after all, "wouldn't you want to know what he had to say?"

I wonder what the absolute number of living people who have actually read the bible is compared to the number of people who have read Joyce, Tolkien, Tolstoy, even George R R Martin!

There are many texts that are long and arduous, yet they are sometimes worth the effort to read! In many instances the rewards are seemingly unsubstantial but they all provide something that can shape subsequent thoughts in many ways. I suppose it's a matter of priority and interest. Ah well, vive la différence!

And of course, some of the authors on your list would be enhanced by being conversant with the Bible. That was kind of what led me to read it in the first place.

I finished the Bible last year. It took a lot longer than other equally long books have taken me to read. The Bible is really a collection of a bunch of different books. The constant narrative changes can be hard to follow. To be clear, I'm really glad that I read it, but I understand why a lot of people don't.

Not really. The New Testament grabbed me in a way I didn't anticipate.

That's interesting. I was raised Catholic and am still now a sort of very detached Catholic and I read the New Testament earlier this year and it had kind of the opposite effect on me --- not so much in any fundamental way regarding what I believe spiritually, but in my attitude towards the church itself. I spent 12 years having priests and nuns drill the basic story in all its details into my head, and what's in the actual book is very different.

Tom Bissell --- who is sort of a lighter, breezier version of the kind of essayist David Foster Wallace was, and who has done a lot of serious writing about and in video games, which is not my thing at all but maybe HN's --- has a sort of travel/essay book about the apostles, where he visits each of their purported burial sites and uses that as a starting point for an essay about some aspect of the region, the particular apostle, or some broader aspect of christian faith, which you might find interesting.

That sounds interesting. Thanks for the recommendation.

I do think coming into it without any particular expectations, and while watching secular videos about it, was actually helpful in being able to get something out of the text. I was raised Catholic but I guess my upbringing wasn't particularly rigorous in that way so I didn't have that many preconceived notions about what the text was "supposed to" say.