• Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      18
      ·
      2 months ago

      In my experience, if you read it cover to cover, it either makes you an atheist or makes you super religious. Not too many people go into it as a basic “I go to church on Sundays” Christian and come out of it the same.

      • Boozilla@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        2 months ago

        I highly recommend the Esoterica channel on YouTube. He gets into all the interesting stuff that was left out of the Bible. The greater context and pre-Bible history is fascinating.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          2 months ago

          Does he go over the apocrypha too? I love the Infancy Gospel of Thomas where teenage Jesus is an asshole who abuses his powers because he feels like it.

          • Boozilla@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            2 months ago

            He mentions it fairly often. If he doesn’t have some videos on it yet, I imagine he will add some. I’ve mostly been watching his videos on Gnosticism and also some about the early pantheon from which Yahweh likely emerged. He covers a wide variety of stuff.

      • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        2 months ago

        I have been reading scholarly works about Jesus, the formation and development of Christianity, previously lost teachings and such. I’ve read a lot of OT passages in these books about later events as a result. I am have become convinced that the Old Testament god was a mean piece of shit.

        • luciferofastora@lemmy.zip
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          2 months ago

          What gave it away? Ruining someone’s entire life, taking all he loves, inflicting him with the worst pains a human can feel, just to prove “See? I told you he’s my greatest bootlick”? Nuking an entire town and killing someone for the entirely human reaction of looking back at the home they left behind like some even more twisted version of Orpheus and Eurydike?

          Or giving his creations curiosity, tempting their curiosity, enabling them to indulge their curiosity, then yelling at them, throwing them out, condemning them to mortality, inflicting suffering on them and all their descendants as punishment for their ancestors’ curiosity who didn’t even have the comprehension to know what they were doing was wrong?

          Yes, I know that story is supposed to be a metaphor, but I have yet to find an explanation that doesn’t make him look like an absolute twat.