Reading the Bible purely as fiction is quite entertaining

Comments

• TheFunkyMonk@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  How else would you read the Bible?

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  • LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Under duress, with crushing feelings of obligation, guilt, shame, horror, and dread of course 😄

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    • Colonel_Panic_@eviltoast.org ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      This guy Bibles.

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  • hOrni@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Whack off material.

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    • FenrirIII@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Song of Songs?

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  • FishFace@piefed.social ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    As history

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    • FistingEnthusiast@lemmynsfw.com ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

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• drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  It’s really not.

  There are large chunks of it that are really repetitive and boring, just things like the number of goats and chickens owned by so and so.

  And like a lot of ancient mythology it can be really hard to relate to, given the vastly different cultural context that produced the text. That can be kinda entertaining in it’s own way, but mostly it just means that you’re not really going to understand the character motivations or themes of a story. Also sometimes the protagonist will do something horrifically immoral by today’s standards without the text treating it as notable at all.

  IMO all of the actual interesting parts (like Genesis) are all really short and you probably know them already from cultural osmosis.

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  • UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It is also important to note that the bible was curated (and probably even edited) by the Catholic Church in the past. So what you read is basically only what they wanted you to read to begin with. I would really like to get into the apocrypha at some point - especially into alternative descriptions to the biblical canon

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    • m0darn@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I don’t think it’s accurate to only indicate the Roman catholic church. The creation of the bible was a process of curation and editing intentional and accidental.

      But the Roman catholic church is defo responsible for the inclusion of the Johannine Comma in the KJV.

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  • volvoxvsmarla@sopuli.xyz ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    There are large chunks of it that are really repetitive and boring, just things like the number of goats and chickens owned by so and so.

    That honestly sounds like the exposition of every character in a Wes Anderson movie

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    • oozynozh@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      except that Anderson films use comedy and cinematography to maintain viewers’ interest in expository scenes that might otherwise feel mundane

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• Valmond@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  And then the writer just pulled the most unimaginative deus ex machina and the hero just “comes back” from the dead, pff lazy writing.

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  • Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation.

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• ladoga@sopuli.xyz ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Old testament is quite rough. Lots of killing and raping going on.

  God tells the chosen people to kill this and this tribe. Take virgins as wives, kill all males. I never understood killing of livestock though.

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  • SarahValentine@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It’s bettwr of you read it as “some guy tells the nation that God told them to beat each other to death over petty shit and not only did they agree to it, they extolled it as righteous and holy”

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• FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I read the Bible last year and tried to imagine how it would be perceived if it were any work of fiction. Looking at it just as a fictional book, it’s very poorly written. For one thing, explanations of Jesus sacrifice only come after the fact. A good book would have set it up and explained the necessity of the sacrifice beforehand.

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  • IlmariGanander@lemmy.wtf ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I was kind of musing in a corner of my mind that Jesus acting as a sacrifice to god…really only makes sense in a cultural context where basically everyone around you is already sacrificing goats and chickens and bulls and whatever to their gods.

    When that cultural context is removed (as in our culture where generally nobody slaughters animals as a sacrifice to any god) the whole crucifixion thing comes off as…weirdly pagan.

    Like, HAVING to have a human/god sacrificed to god to…remove sin I guess…it only really makes sense if you have the cultural expectation that sacrificing things to some god is…just what you DO to get rid of sin or stuff that’s harmful like curses or whatever?

    I’m not a bible scholar, and I know there’s tons of theology that’s already argued about Jesus “dying for our sins” into infinity.

    I’m more vaguely looking at this from a layperson secular standpoint, where I’m thinking about the cultural context of “sacrifice” as it pertains to 2000 years ago, and how it pertains to now in our current culture. Like…wow, the culture and how we see things has totally shifted and the Jesus died thing is a really weird boondogle/relic of those ancient mindsets, isn’t it?

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    • FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Yeah, a lot of things in the Bible probably made more sense for the culture it was written for. Of course the books of the Bible were written over hundreds of years and so culture shifted in that time, explaining some of the contradictions. The reason it doesn’t work very well as a book is there is a lot of background information the writers expected the readers to know that now most people don’t

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• bizzle@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  When I was in college. I took a class about the Bible as literature. It was super good. Really interesting. I’m not even necessarily like religious, but it’s cool to look at it from that sort of a literary perspective especially because it’s such a foundational work in Western Civilization

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• Rusty@lemmy.ca ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I was raised without any religion and when I was 6 I found “Bible for kids” in a fairy tale section of the library. I’ve read it thinking that it’s a weird fairy tale.

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• FilthyHands@sh.itjust.works ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  "I started reading the bible. It Sucks. I can’t get past the first chapter. Don’t buy this author’s books."

  • Sir Baby of Cakes

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• aeronmelon@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I had a youth pastor that said if someone made movies out of the Bible, they would all be R-rated and very popular because of all the drama, sex, and violence.

  But for some reason it’s okay for little kids to read that shit out loud to each other.

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  • rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Their idea is interesting, but there’s plenty of material out there that’s absolutely loaded with drama, sex, and violence that no one cares to watch.

    But religious people do love watching religious material. Those Hallmark films don’t make themselves.

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• night_petal@lemmy.zip ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  The more entertaining read is God saying “fuck you, in particular” to Job.

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  • MiddleAgesModem@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It is entertaining in a fucked up way that god kills his family and then at the end is like “uhh… here’s a new, entirely different family, let us never speak of this again”

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    • oozynozh@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      relevant Crimes New Roman book report on Hell is the Absence of God

      www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3l35CZK0LY

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• RattlerSix@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I like some of the stories in the Bible but it’s still pretty hard to read. I don’t know why, I don’t have that problem with other, even older writings. There is nothing confusing about the Enuma Elish, for example. I think the Epic of Gilgamesh is freaking great.

  But when the Bible steals a story told in the Epic of Gilgamesh and makes it Noah’s flood, it loses all meaning. The original wasn’t all that exciting to begin with but there was a deep meaning to it being in the Epic. But in the Bible, what is the meaning? What’s the moral to the story? It just doesn’t work.

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• watson387@sopuli.xyz ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Well, it is fiction, so there’s that.

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• RogueBanana@piefed.zip ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Maybe the author saw his own work, decided it’s shit and the only way to redeem it was to make a religion out of it.

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  • IntrovertTurtle@lemmy.zip ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    You could made a religion out of this!

    m.youtube.com/watch?v=xuCn8ux2gbs&pp=ygUjaGlzdG9y…

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• Sine_Fine_Belli@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Dank Christian memes

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• ArgumentativeMonotheist@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Read “Ecclesiastes” and the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7). 👍

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  • mastertigurius@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I find Lord of the Rings to be a better read myself

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    • ArgumentativeMonotheist@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      It delivers a message of righteousness, even to one’s own physical detriment… If you won’t read the words of the prophets, it’s better than nothing. 👍

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  • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Or just read a good book instead

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    • ArgumentativeMonotheist@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Ecclesiastes is a fantastic book that’s part of the collection of books we call the Bible!

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• Gates9@sh.itjust.works ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I find it interesting to consider that Judas was designated by Jesus for the task, in order to fulfill the prophetic criteria in the book of Daniel, which many prophetic figures in Judea were obsessed with, not just the Jesus movement.

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• stiffyGlitch@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  honestly I can’t understand this either

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