actully reading the babble and thinking WTF every 5th verse can be quite instructive!
also remembering parts and using them to crush those who hurl verses at you AS IF it were their own dung is fun......

Reading the bible has not been a problem with me.....a book, regardless of what it contains, is a book with words.....religion, on the other hand, is a teaching tool that has lasting consequences....teaching religion is as evil as it gets.

I read about aliens (especially the ones on the moon), ancient civilizations/structures, the universe, whatever I'm curious about at the moment, and people in general...scriptures? How much are you going to pay me?

I have tried - seriously, I'd rather read Doyle's Sherlock Holmes again. My Dad was atheist yet he collected Bibles and read up on various religions and world views, like Communism. He believed in Unions and found the John Birchers really offensive. He said I should read the Bible, he said it was full of good stories. I preferred Ray Bradbury.

NO!

The Beatles were more famous!!!

Make a just cause as do any dog=god agreement!!!

Sorry, U, wouldn't waste my valuable time. So many other real ways to learn and become.

The bible parables hold as much water as Aesop’s fables, or Calvin and Hobbes for that matter. It’s the contentious dribble in between the validating lessons on humanism that spoil the entire oeuvre.

You don’t have to believe a literal interpretation of them, but you do have to be open to discovering some symbolic truth in them in order to see those lessons. And we humans are vulnerable to reading our preferred meaning into symbols, so it can be tricky.

What has worked for me is to understand my species first from a biological perspective, and then let that knowledge guide my interpretation. It shines an entirely unexpected light on the world’s ancient scriptures.

When I first started teaching, one could teach the bible as literature, and I was ok with that. In the lit book that I used were a few pieces from the King James bible - the nicest sounding bible, while considered the least accurate translation. No difference than when I taught early Greek literature. That is filled with gods. Too many crazies out there now - "Jesus was the greatest American ever. He wrote the bible."

When I studied the bible everyone around me took it literally. Most in my area still do. I have kept my books in a small 3 shelf library but today I hold very little of it to be true. Stopped reading it for good when I became atheist but I might still look something up for a friend. Evangelicals today stray from what they think it all means and most do not even know it.

You can of course learn from fairy tales. And what is more you can freely cherry pick the ones you like, which is a good idea, because the messages of a lot of them are truly nasty. As long as you never claim that they are more than cherry picked.

What you can not do however, if you have any honesty at all, is cherry pick them and then claim that they have deep meaning and authority, not found in, for example, popular novels. Because if they are cherry picked, then the only real authority to be found there, is your own. Yet a lot of people do try to do that.

The Abrahanic religions were written by and for bronze age goat herders, and reflected the cultural values of that time.

Written language developed primarily to support commerce. Even so literacy was rare. However because it was first used to keep business accounts, anythign written was given much heavier weight than it actually deserved. Pretty much if it was written, it was considered sacred and worthy of study.

From what I've read, many, if not most, stories in the bible were taken from earlier religions and myths.

Most stories, religious or not, have some meaning an insights. However, most of the intended insights and meanings have been lost because the culture in which it was written in and for, no longer exists and so the original context has been lost. If it seems to apply today, that is more by accident and misinterpretation than by intent.

Religious scriptures are like glorified fortune cookie platitudes. They just don't come with an order of beef lo mein but they're no more insightful nor inspired.

Here is a story I tell to Christians I like.
"And who is my neighbour...?"
Many years ago I was in Isreal with my then gf who is Jewish. We were on a tourist bus on the Jaffa road. The guide points out "And if you look to the right you will see the inn mentioned in the parable of the Good Samaritan". Well, my gf gives me a "What she talkin bout Willis?" look. So I went through the whole story to someone who never heard it before, on the road that is depicted in the story!
That can make the odd Christian slightly envious. But then I looked further into the story. It seems that picking a Samaritan as the hero was not a random choice. They are a tribe of people that still lives in the area. They celebrate Passover but do not go to the temple. Historians figure that sometime in the past they must have been Jews who fell out with the religious authorities. Now nature being nature, we all hate the tribes closest to us more than anything. Red Socks/Yankies, Shia/Sunni, Catholic/Protestant, Babtist/Presbertian, even the Tits on my birdfeeder fight between Great/Common. As so, the Samaritans were those guys, you know the ones your mom said not to talk to. It certainly adds more flavour to the story.
Ps. I love to tell them about that bit too. Blows their minds when an atheist like me knows more about their book than they do.

I use the Bible as a reference book, occasionally looking up selected passages. I have not read it straight through.

I don't think one has to believe fairy tales to take lessons from them.

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