Atheists and Biblical Familiarity

In My Humble Opinion
101

I put other. I’m a very slow reader, sometimes I used to spend hours and days just on one verse, going to original languages, comparing various interpretations, finding out a lot more than I ever could had I just took it and read it from front to back. But I also needed a lot of help with certain texts, original languages, euphemisms, and I would have never picked up any of that on my own.

I spent most of my time on the Pentateuch and the Gospels. With the rest, I was a fast skimmer especially with the begats, and also the book of Revelation, not sure if there are parts I haven’t read.

Have a fairly large private collection of biblical criticism reading from layman with a critical eye, as well as scholars, exploring the quests for finding a historical Jesus, prophecies, contradictions, other aspects. Spent way more time reading and studying from them than I did the Bible. This was stuff I did mostly in my twenties and thirties. I’m 60 now, don’t have as much interest in it, and have forgotten a lot.

I think it was Betrand Russel that proclaimed he wasn’t sure if a single line of humor that graced its pages. Regardless, I think there is lifetime of material there for comedians.

Concerning the Good Samaritan parable, I think most decent people would still know how to treat the traveler without ever having read it. If anything it shows how a person, although religious, can still be rather shitty towards the traveler.

Once you start getting away from a literal reading of it, allegory gives an unlimited number of choices of what that parable means to them. Augustine, Origen, Ambrose, Irenaeus all give allegorical accounts of who they think the traveler is, along with other aspects, Augustine gives more than one allegory for it.

So, I’m not convinced everyone knows what is meant by a Good Samaritan. I’m not even convinced I know what is supposed to be the correct one, just know what it means to me.

102

A bit of a hijack, but could you direct me to one of these? I’ve been discussing atheism online for over 40 years, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen one. Disproof of certain gods maybe, but all gods? No. I’m curious as to how someone would go about this.

103

Read a few versions over the years, also Koran (in English) and a bunch of other sacred texts.

104

I figure there are two ways to “read” the entire Bible. The first is to get one of those books intended for children (I got several from my godparents) which pretty much hits the highlights to the point where you can learn most of what is referenced in culture. The second is to get a copy of God is Disappointed in You, which pretty much does the same thing for each book. I’ve never read the entire thing, but I’ve “read” it.

To actually read and understand it, you need a good translation with accurate annotation. Classes that put the text into context helps. And reading the thing cover-to-cover has always seemed to be a waste to me. Someone can read every single word and not have any more understanding of it before they started. Don’t get me started on people who stick with the Scofield annotations or insist on the KJV but clearly can’t understand the language. I once had someone seriously tell me that Matthew 7:14 was about homosexuality because they understood neither the difference between “strait” and “straight” nor the concept of slang or that it was a translation out of Greek.

105

Well, reading it cover-to-cover will yield some confusion, because the material is all out of order. Job, as I understand it, takes place in an era coincident with early Genesis. I remember seeing a list of the chronological order of the OT, but reading it that way would be pretty darn disorienting.

106

Seeing as how Job is not supposed to be historical in any way and is about theodicy, the reader would already be doing it wrong. And that’s just one book. As I said, just reading it doesn’t mean it was understood.

107

^^^

Seems obvious to you and I Job wasn’t historical. I’m not up on the latest of what believers think of Job, but Wiki says the majority of rabbi’s still treat Job as historical. For Christians, I imagine most of the conservative ones would still vouch for him being historical as well. There is a Greek Old Testament that also list Job’s genealogy claiming him to be grandson of Esau.

108

I Googled “Is the Job story real”, and the top three sites on the list say the story of Job is historical.

109

Could there be an historical figure named Job? Sure, and the name is mentioned in Ezekiel and the Septuagint added a claim to a genealogy. But that doesn’t mean the author (likely 6th century BCE) meant it to be an actual accounting of something that actually happened. Telling new stories using known figures or writing in the name of a known person (the Deutero-Pauline epistles, for example) is an old, old tradition.

110

Read it, cover to cover, several occasions. Not sure which version, but I most likely stole it from a hotel drawer, so whatever version the Gideons distribute.

As a narrative, it’s a complete disaster. Stories get repeated and are frequently contradictory, time and tense are inconsistent as best, there’s abrupt flash-forwards/-backwards everywhere, there’s some really important character that’s only ever referred to as a pronoun, it’s full of run-on sentences and fragments, and long, unintelligible passages that are essentially just lists, among other problems.

It’s almost as if the thing was written by dozens of different, unrelated people who weren’t working together.

111

Sounds like a mix of *Rayuela *by Cortázar and the Bible would be a good idea.

112

I read “the proofs some atheists put up for the non-existence of any gods” as meaning “the proofs some atheists put up for the non-existence of any [of the] gods”, because, like you, I’ve never seen any atheist seriously arguing that they can disprove all possible gods. (It’s pretty easy to prove the opposite, actuality: My desk fan is possibly a god. It exists. QED.)

In the event that they actually did mean they’d seen some atheist attempt to disprove all possible gods, I’d be interested in seeing that too, if only for the laugh value.

113

As a faithful Christian (though not a fundamentalist), yes, exactly.

Which, somewhat ironically, makes it far more valuable to me that if someone came around and ironed out the wrinkles in editing.

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114

Heh.

115

They might be mistaking “any god” for “my god” since theists in the West mostly agree that god claims are absurd - unless you’re talking about the god they happen to believe in.

116

I’ve only skimmed the bible, but I doubt that anyone believes in God, simply BECAUSE they read the bible. That would be equivalent to believing in Paris SIMPLY because you read “A Tale of Two Cities”. Or you believe in Gandalf SIMPLY because you read The Hobbit. There HAS to be more to it than that (either that, or you are incredibly suggestible to the point of being a danger to yourself and others).

Personally, I don’t believe in things without evidence. I follow Voltaire’s statement that those that can convince you to believe in absurdities, can convince you to commit atrocities. So I need evidence. But as a starting point, I need a more specific definition than ‘a higher power’, because that one is absolutely useless. And I need a more plausible definition than ‘the creator of the earth’ since there’s no evidence that a creator is necessary for the Earth to exist (and believing that it is necessary leads to paradox). And then I’d ask you how do you know that that is what a deity is, and if you tell me “the Bible”, I’ll punch you for being a wise-ass.

117

Sorry. They were some random YouTube posters and, yeah, they mainly were disproving the Abrahamic god then by extension all the rest of them. Their arguments were only somewhat less :dubious: than the flat-earthers’ and I have expunged them from my mind.

119

Okay… anyway, who was that atheist Doper who would routinely and deliciously destroy posters with his chapter-and-verse biblical erudition? Diogenes the Cynic, perhaps?

120

I feel I’m an unusual case. I was raised a fundamentalist Christian, and didn’t reject it until I was in my 30s. I’ve read the Bible a couple times; in fact it was after the second time that I realized that I just didn’t buy it anymore. (Too self-contradictory.)