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Atheists who said that reading the Bible made them an atheist, how?
Literally there are millions of people who read the Bible daily and still believe in God.
So why say that? I mean unless you want to sound smart & edgy
As someone who went through the “Christianity-to-bible-reader-to-atheist” pipeline, I think a specific detail the question missing is actually the crucial piece to understanding the phenomenon.
Specifically, the way it use the word “read”… See, before my de-conversion happened, I was a member of a “Bible Church” - not Catholic - this church focused on the actual Bible. Except, they (and pretty much every other religious group, too) did so in a sneaky way which most people fail to notice.
When church-going Christians talk about their Bible reading, they aren’t picking up the book and reading it as a narrative book. Christians use the Bible as a reference - they idolize the book, but they don’t just read it - they use guided Bible Studies which are designed to teach a specific lesson using scripture. There are a lot of different guides available, but all follow the same general pattern - there is a lesson they want to teach, so they cherry-pick a few Bible verses, or maybe a chapter or two, and explore into that.
People who use this method may honestly feel they are fully in touch with the Bible, but they really aren’t. These lessons scrupulously avoid anything which feels like a contradiction or evidence of stories not matching up - not even with any specific malicious intent, as those sorts of passages just aren’t useful for bolstering someone’s faith or teaching them how to deal with common problems. It’s not fair to suggest they’re trying to distract - those passages are just the sort of thing you’ll only find while reading it all the way through, not by following guided Bible Study.
Basically, the Christians who most fervently want to get closer to God are probably the ones more likely to believe that reading the whole Bible will help them do that, and they are also the ones who will be horrified when they realize the Bible doesn’t read the way they thought it would.
Christians who are happy with the occasional toe-dip into the Bible through those Guided Bible Studies will keep reading tiny sections of pre-screened info when they feel like it, and never realize their Bible is filled with contradictions.
Literally there are millions of people who read the Bible daily and still believe in God.
So why say that? I mean unless you want to sound smart & edgy
As someone who went through the “Christianity-to-bible-reader-to-atheist” pipeline, I think a specific detail the question missing is actually the crucial piece to understanding the phenomenon.
Specifically, the way it use the word “read”… See, before my de-conversion happened, I was a member of a “Bible Church” - not Catholic - this church focused on the actual Bible. Except, they (and pretty much every other religious group, too) did so in a sneaky way which most people fail to notice.
When church-going Christians talk about their Bible reading, they aren’t picking up the book and reading it as a narrative book. Christians use the Bible as a reference - they idolize the book, but they don’t just read it - they use guided Bible Studies which are designed to teach a specific lesson using scripture. There are a lot of different guides available, but all follow the same general pattern - there is a lesson they want to teach, so they cherry-pick a few Bible verses, or maybe a chapter or two, and explore into that.
People who use this method may honestly feel they are fully in touch with the Bible, but they really aren’t. These lessons scrupulously avoid anything which feels like a contradiction or evidence of stories not matching up - not even with any specific malicious intent, as those sorts of passages just aren’t useful for bolstering someone’s faith or teaching them how to deal with common problems. It’s not fair to suggest they’re trying to distract - those passages are just the sort of thing you’ll only find while reading it all the way through, not by following guided Bible Study.
Basically, the Christians who most fervently want to get closer to God are probably the ones more likely to believe that reading the whole Bible will help them do that, and they are also the ones who will be horrified when they realize the Bible doesn’t read the way they thought it would.
Christians who are happy with the occasional toe-dip into the Bible through those Guided Bible Studies will keep reading tiny sections of pre-screened info when they feel like it, and never realize their Bible is filled with contradictions.