The Bible is not a bunch of strung-together quotations. It's a history book and a future book... Although so many hate it, and such great attempts have been made to destroy it, it has never been destroyed. It is the world's most translated book.
Why are you so against it if I may ask?
That's a very literal reading of what I wrote, and reading like that gets you into misunderstandings. We use a lot of images and stories from the bible in everyday life. Most people don't know they're from the bible, just as they don't know the lines from Shakespeare are from... Shakespeare. Both are key writings in western culture, and I was being facetious about how people sometimes don't get where the expressions they use daily come from.
There are parts of the bible I quite like, just as there are plays by Shakespeare I like more than others. People love to jump to "hate" and "haters" these days, but that's silly, in my view. I've read the bible and am glad of it. How you choose to use it in modern life falls into religion, which is a taboo subject on the forum, and art, which is accepted as not nearly as political. But if you look at it like a book, as you started out the thread with the bible and Nancy Drew (I prefer the bible as a read), it would be very hard to read and enjoy the richness of western literature if you had no idea of the tales and myths constantly referenced by great authors, especially older ones. The King James translation into English was a starting point for a lot of our best written culture.
I like art museums. I can spend hours in them, and I marvel at the subjects and symbols chosen by people before the 1800s. If you haven't read the religious works, you won't know your Michael from your Zeus, and you'd be lost. It runs deep, and is very cool. Writing, painting, storytelling.
I keep wanting to get around to reading the Islamic holy books. I like the way many religions want their students to learn to read their books in the original languages they were written in, rather than via translation. But I was too lazy to learn German to read all the best aquarium books, let alone to learn Greek, Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic and Latin for religious texts. So many books, so little time.
This is many of our only social media, so why not.
