Have you read the bible for real? by yourself? and not only verses here and there towards religious study?
If no ... Try it.
That is the right question you have asked.
I'm 60 years old.
I was a small child sitting in my grandmother's lap when the bible was first opened up in front of me and words soothingly read into my innocent ear.
As a young teen my best friend (a JW) started tossing religious questions at me I was unable (ill-equipped) to answer.
Never once did it ever occur to me to ask the most important question of myself: Why is this book (bible) trusted as having superior information from a superbeing? Is it a real document of communication or is it the result of many men over many centuries fooling themselves and others?
I never aksed that question!
I have read the bible at least once a year since I was 19. At first I filtered what I read only through the interpretations of the Watchtower Bible and Tract society. At the age of 30 I left the Kingdom Hall forever. My views of the bible and "meaning" lingered in the same zone of JW influence for at least 10 years.
When I met and married my Jewish wife I encountered a completely different mindset and sensibility.
I had to rethink how I was coming off and presenting my views.
I started reading "other" scholars, historians and professors of religion which I'd ignored over the years.
That is when my mind began to change.
From about the age of 40 I started to view what I'd thought all my life about the bible as being naive and ill-informed.
I started to learn that things weren't as they had been presented to me. Had I been lied to? Or, were the viewpoints I'd been presented with as fact merely been uninformed and colored by an agenda?
For the first time in my entire life I took a more objective view about Holy Writings. I decided I'd read about the history of scripture, the bible canon, the early church, religious doctrine and the spread of ideas among first century believers.
My world changed!
I'd invite you to take a similar voyage of discovery. At your tender age it is very easy to remain complacent. You feel comfortable. That is a bad thing when it comes to knowledge. Feeling comfortable can make you intellectually lazy about subjecting your ideology to a stringent test by exposing yourself to scholarship that challenges your belief.
So, in answer to your direct question: HAVE YOU READ THE BIBLE FOR REAL? I'd say that now, finally, I can define the "bible" as something completely different than you and inject reality into what I read.
That is different from what you are doing.
You have swallowed a very large presupposition and never tested the reality of it.
The words you read and believe and base your opinions and faith on are not much more than the result of a process repeated thousands of times by religious people with an agenda in mind. Stories, rumours, hearsay and myths have been worked, reworked, polished, added to, omitted and restructured time and again to fit a mindset and a belief.
What you read when you open your bible is just that.
Am I the only person who thinks this? Read books by bible scholars, professors of theology from a very wide range of thinking and examine the history for yourself FIRST before you answer.
There never was just ONE Christianity nor one bible. Everything was an argument, an opinion, a battle of minds and words and persuasions. Whoever had power for a moment tried to control the "word" and the thinking of others. People who disagreed were labeled heretics, apostates and banished, stoned, hanged, burned and driven away. Back and forth this process went over centuries and centuries and centuries.
You cannot know this unless you are honest with yourself and take the necessary courageous step toward self-discovery.
I invite you to do this for your own sake.
Thanks for asking the question.
