As the title says. And I'm not talking about whether or not you think Christianity is stupid, or brainwashing people, or religion is ridiculous, or whatever. We have enough discussion threads about that. I mean just as a book -- religion aside. As a collection of stories. Do you like the way it's written? The New Testament? The Old Testament? Do you think Jesus was correct in his ideals? Discuss. Me personally, I find the Old Testament scary and for the most part unnecessary. The Ten Commandments are all fine and good as moral guidelines, but most of it is God saying "Follow me or you'll suffer painfully," which isn't what the New Testament shows at all. It seems to me like the Old Testament is more a collection of stories about war and such; it's way too harsh for my tastes. The New Testament, though, is nice in my opinion. Even if you don't believe in it religiously, it teaches about using love and kindness to reach out to people... Perhaps in this world it's a bit idealistic, but it's a place to start and a good example to follow, at least if you ask me. The way the Bible is written is painful to me though. Extremely choppy and has a tendency to state the obvious. So there's my two cents... What do you all think?
My favorite part about the old testament is the war stories but it is a little bit harsh in some senses and the new testament is good because it teaches about love and sacrifice.
i've actually tried reading the Bible a few times but i could never get through it. i wanted to see what all the fuss was about with people always referencing and talking about the bible so i decided to give it a try. to be honest, i found it a little boring.
The Bible is like the world's most imaginative history book. It's not a novel, so don't try and read it like one. Plus it was written by a bazillion different authors over a period of several thousand years, so of course some parts seem a bit choppy, and some parts even contradict each other. The difference in tone between the Old and New Testaments is because of the difference in message and intent: the Old Testament is a "history book" of sorts for the Jews, while the New Testament was written primarily for the conversion of people to Christianity (the Gospels especially in this regard).
I know most of the moral based stories from school but I've never had a good read of it myself. As a way of teaching it's not so bad, it reminds of some self help books, that referrence an 'actual' event and place in in context, and at the end we all know the moral of the story. It is tough to read, like Shakespeare's works, but insghtful into basic Christian beliefs that I may not have known before. Not the best book I've read, but not the worst. 5/10
The messages are definitely nice, but actually reading it is a bit of a chore. There are plenty of ways to make the stories fun, though. See: Takes lots of liberties with the source material, sure, but I think the overall point gets through. I'm not even christian and I like this movie.
