Why don't most Christians read the Bible?

[Angrboda]

I find that people, on the whole, are intellectually lazy. Where you won't find this to be the case is at the extremes, where knowledge is critical to the person's lifestyle. This applies to both fundamentalist Christians and vocal atheists. Everybody else in the middle, whether the non-religious non-atheist or the liberal Christian, is happy to believe they are right without ever doing much to question what they've heard and were taught, nor the myths and memes which populate the popular culture.

It's a difference in motivation and priorities. One might argue that a religious person should know their religion in a deep, meaningful way, but most don't. Even myself as a Hindu, am not well versed on my particular Hindu tradition. Knowing those things is just not an important part of my life. I'm not going to try to persuade anybody of their truth, and while they matter to me, there are a lot of things that matter more. (Like my philosophy and cognitive science, and my atheist, humanist and philosophy book clubs. I wish I had time to read stuff about my Hinduism, even if not tackling the Vedas, but the simple fact is, in my life, doing so comes almost dead last. I'm neither a passionate, extreme or vocal Hindu, so spending time on it is very weakly motivated.) (And to be blunt, I am taking time to learn about Buddhism, but that is because it touches on issues in cognitive science that I do care about.)