re: #68 engineer cat

bible study

the discipline of ignoring everything you don’t like about the bible, especially the teachings of jesus, and re-interpreting it to say what you want it to say

that’s why “bible study” is so hard - the new testament can be read from end to end in a week. but it says so many things that evangelicals don’t like that it takes years to learn how to turn the teachings of jesus upside down

Face it, there is no way to study the Bible in a way that can be considered neutral: on one side, you have evangelicals taking every opportunity to praise its divine wonderfulness, on the other side you have secularists taking it to task for inconsitencies and contradictions.
In the middle you have historicists putting it all into its social, historical and political context, which also destroys a lot of people’s subjective interpretations of the Bible.
Then you have a history of how the Bible has been read and interpreted over the years, which really quickly turns into a sectarian clusterf*ck.