• folkrav@lemmy.ca
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    1 month ago

    You have to be particularly dumb to read the old and new testaments

    Do you legitimately think that the same people who get into organized religion, that buy into thought systems that tell them how things are supposed to be and how they should feel about stuff, as a general rule have read their own source material that meticulously?

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      You don’t have to read it meticulously to see the contrast he’s taking about.

      But few actually read it at all. They say they do, but their reading consists of looking up verse references they saw on bumper stickers, leafing through the first pages of Genesis, and occasionally reading a random page only to say to themselves, so silently that they are not actually conscious of it: “hm well I don’t know what all that old timey language means but I’m going to go see what’s in the fridge now.”

    • Yes. Some do. I was raised by a fundamentalist; they read the Bible constantly. Like, book clubs, a couple, three times a week, reading and discussing different parts of the Bible.

      By the time I left that home (went to live with mom at 14), I’d read the thing myself four times all the way through, and various sections of it far more often. When dad visits, I hear audio book versions of it playing in the night as they’re getting ready for bed. Self-indoctrination.

      IME, they’re not all that unusual in their church.

      • folkrav@lemmy.ca
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        1 month ago

        That’s why I said “as a general rule”. I’m not sure I would consider fundamentalists to be representative of your average Christian - their whole thing is Biblical literalism, after all… I was raised Catholic, in an era where we still had religious courses in school, and I can pretty safely say that pretty much nobody read it outside the bare minimum they had to for First Communion/Confirmation/wedding prep.