Lots of good stuff in your comment. Let me reply to a couple of items:
First, I salute you and your brother for leaving "the Truth" in order to be honest to yourselves, even when it meant losing your community. You overcame the wall that keeps lots of people locked inside.
"Reading the bible cover to cover over and over didn't strengthen my faith in the bible, it destroyed it."
Amen. Ask a bunch of atheists what's the one book they'd like Christians to read, and you'll get a lot of answers – but one very common answer will be The Bible. The whole thing, not passages cherry-picked by a pastor. There's no better reading to make a believer queasy about his faith than all those blood-soaked, hate-filled, women-loathing scriptures that the sermons gloss over. Unfortunately, few believers actually will read the whole thing...
Job? Yep, a horrible story. The pastors and elders, following the biblical authors' lead, tell the story as if Job were the center of the universe. But how about this: Try telling the story from the point of view of one of Job's kids:
"You're a kid. God lets the Devil kill you as part of some bet they're playing out. You aren't consulted or divinely 'visited' or anything. There's no test of your faith. No coming to 'know God' and living your life accordingly. No choices for you to make, no options, no anything. The story's about Job; you're a prop. A dead prop. Later, Job gets new kids, but you stay dead. The end."
Lovely. Now repeat the above obscenity for all the first-born in Egypt, for every child on Earth in Noah's flood, and on and on. The Bible's message: "Unless God picks you out as a main character in his little play, you're lower to him than a tissue. Now shut up and die already."
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Render unto Caesar
Godspeak
We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr, poet, novelist, essayist, and physician (1809-1894)
Lots of good stuff in your comment. Let me reply to a couple of items:
First, I salute you and your brother for leaving "the Truth" in order to be honest to yourselves, even when it meant losing your community. You overcame the wall that keeps lots of people locked inside.
"Reading the bible cover to cover over and over didn't strengthen my faith in the bible, it destroyed it."
Amen. Ask a bunch of atheists what's the one book they'd like Christians to read, and you'll get a lot of answers – but one very common answer will be The Bible. The whole thing, not passages cherry-picked by a pastor. There's no better reading to make a believer queasy about his faith than all those blood-soaked, hate-filled, women-loathing scriptures that the sermons gloss over. Unfortunately, few believers actually will read the whole thing...
Job? Yep, a horrible story. The pastors and elders, following the biblical authors' lead, tell the story as if Job were the center of the universe. But how about this: Try telling the story from the point of view of one of Job's kids:
"You're a kid. God lets the Devil kill you as part of some bet they're playing out. You aren't consulted or divinely 'visited' or anything. There's no test of your faith. No coming to 'know God' and living your life accordingly. No choices for you to make, no options, no anything. The story's about Job; you're a prop. A dead prop. Later, Job gets new kids, but you stay dead. The end."
Lovely. Now repeat the above obscenity for all the first-born in Egypt, for every child on Earth in Noah's flood, and on and on. The Bible's message: "Unless God picks you out as a main character in his little play, you're lower to him than a tissue. Now shut up and die already."