It always boggles my mind when people will confidently and vehemently build arguments or entire philosophies around easily verifiable information that they have never actually, you know, verified.
There are deeply committed Christians who have read less than 5% of the actual Bible, if any at all. Equally, there are plenty of stalwart anti-religion people who will yell about Christianity being bad because of something the Bible says when it does not, in fact, say any such thing. Neither of these groups are lying, either (mostly). They’ve just heard someone they like say something that confirms what they already want to believe, and they ran with it.
My father was a deeply religious man. He was also, thankfully, both deeply curious and deeply suspicious. When someone said anything like “God teaches us to…” he would immediately want to know where, specifically, it says that. Is there important contextual information? Does the information exist at all?
I mean, the Bible is a story. In stories, sometimes characters say things as part of a larger moral narrative, but the direct quote from the character in question isn’t the actual moral of the story. For example, Luke Chapter 9, Verse 12 says: “And when the day began to wear away, then came the twelve, and said unto him, Send the multitude away, that they may go into the towns and country round about, and lodge, and get victuals: for we are here in a desert place.”
If a preacher said, “God teaches us to send away the multitudes to get food on their own when you’re low on resources yourself,” that would be incorrect. In the very next sentence, Jesus tells his followers not to send away the crowd and that they will feed them with what little they have. But if you just listened to what the preacher said – backed up by a direct quote, no less! – you could easily come away with the opposite impression.
So with any source of knowledge, how do you know that’s not happening? You have to go and confirm it yourself. If something is important enough for you to take a stand over it, it’s important enough to get right.
