Religious beliefs need to stop.

[Captain Colostomy]

Reading the Bible without supplements or rose-colored glasses should not be necessary if the Bible truly is the "good book".

It's a very difficult thing to understand and there are of course various things in there that an atheist would like to bring up as evidence that God is actually pure evil and all that business. If you're not prepared to encounter that then it may well "fix you up" for reason, logic and pure science or however you see it. But then it also has the power to "fix up" an atheist and give him the delusion of theism (as you think of it) if they were to seriously study it and understand it within the context. So you should read it yourself, again with a scholarly guidebook because it's difficult stuff to deal with. Before you do this you may need to free your mind a little from your little naturalistic box, else you will get nothing from it at all.

This is silly. When the source book of 'all that is good and holy' needs layers of interpretation just to make it palatable there is a huge freaking problem. That mere mortals pass along these interpretations as the true 'insider' meanings says less about the book and more about their own compulsion to make a purse from a sow's ear.