(April 1, 2014 at 5:29 pm)sven Wrote: Again: I say this without in any way critiquing the truth of the bible, or its moral and religious significance.I find the Koran even more boring than the bible. Maybe it's better in Swedish than in English?
By comparison, the bhagavad gita and its 'mommy' the mahabharata are beautiful and poetic texts that are fun and exiting to read. Even if they can be a little hard to understand sometimes, and they don't exactly end on a high note.
The Koran has a spaced-out poetic quality that makes it interesting, even when you don't understand it or it seems bat shit crazy (although I'm told much of this poetic quality is lost in translation from the Arabic)
The Poetic Edda is a fun read and contains a lot of thoughts and sayings that are valid even today, without mixing in any spirituality.
Some Zoroastrian texts I've read are interesting to read because those guys seemed to be like christians on LSD or something... Marry myself? Fuck yeah!
I twinge slightly with guilt when I think about the fact that I only know the overarching story of the Bible because I read a series of biblical comic books in my early teens.
So. My question to christians and de-converts alike: how the heck does one find the strength and energy to read the entire bible? Do/did you find it as boring as I did? How did you find it?
As for the bible, there are some good bits: the stories of Job and Jonah are both well-crafted fiction. Ecclesiastes is an intriguing skeptical philosopher. But, yeah, much of it is boring, where it's not gruesome like all the genocides and the barbaric punishments. I used to be a devout Christian, and I realize in retrospect that I was reading it with my mind on cruise control. The words were flowing through my mind without registering the meaning, at least until I came to an interesting passage.
I can't resist recycling some of my old humor. Several years ago on the Friendly Atheist Forum one of the guys challenged us to write a review of the bible as if it was newly published.
I started off
Quote:The Holy Bible. Anonymous. Zondervan, Grand Rapids, 2010. 1341 pp. $18.99 @ amazon.ca.If you want to read the rest of my "review" you can follow this link.
This book will never sell. It’s a big anthology, and it suffers from a lack of focus on a target audience. Do they want to sell to kids? To fantasy fans? To the self-help market? It’s got all that and more.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people — House
