For atheists...just out of curiosity, how many of you have actually read the entire Bible cover to cover?

Question

I am just wondering if you have studied any religious texts, not only the Bible, but others too and if you made your decisions about God before or after reading and studying texts. I am curious because I read the Bible, the Koran, the philosophies of Buddha, etc and believed in Christianity AFTER studying different faiths. So I am wondering what came first, your disbelief in God or your studying of God?

A lot of interesting and intriuging responses. I want to thank everyone for being honest and sharing your answers without being negative. And to answer some of your question, yes, I have read the Bible cover to cover about three or four times and read passages from it almost daily.

Answer 1

I have.

And the Tao Te Ching. And parts of the Vedas. And a lot of books on Paganism.

I think you're a bit mistaken though. Atheists usually TRY to be theists out of family or peer pressure at some point. We study and learn, and then find that what we've learned is inconsistent with the existence of a supernatural, omnipotent being. We end up simply admitting that we don't, and possibly can't, believe.

Answer 2

I have read the Bible completely at least two times. I have read large chunks of it many, many more times than that. Here is a list of some of the "scriptures" that I have read:

The Bible;
Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, related to both Old and New Testaments (some);
Gnostic Scriptures (some);
Bhagavad Gita and about the first 1/4 of the Mahabharata;
Bits and pieces of the Buddhist Pali Canon;
Heart Sutra;
Diamond Sutra;
A few other Mahayana sutras;
Tao Te Ching;
Gilgamesh and other religious texts of the ancient near east;
Portions of the epic of Baal and Anat;
Bits and pieces of Oahspe and Urantia Book;
Fairly widely in the writing of Ellen G. White who is considered inspired by Seventh-day Adventists.

The vector of my leaving religious faith did not follow the number of texts I read. Rather, the Bible did not seem to support some important specific doctrines taught by the church within which I was raised. And it did not seem to support much, if any, better the doctrines of other Christian churches. Indeed, the claims of the New Testament came not to add up for me with respect to what was taught in the Old Testament. The whole conglomerate just did not and does not seem to cohere.

God, per se, is not and was not my main concern. It just seems now that the word "god" plays no useful role in talking about most stuff.

The study of non-Christian sacred texts, although very interesting and in some cases useful, mostly made me realize that the answer was not going out to seek some other, non-Christian, orthodoxy.

Answer 3

Cover to cover, no, although I've read the whole thing. (I'm a channel-flipper even when it comes to books.)

When I was about twelve, my mother became really interested in church doings, to the point where she (and therefore I) was the first to arrive and last to leave. Gave me a lot of free time, since all she expected of me was to go to Sunday school and the actual service. So I was pretty bored.

Fortunately, I'm a voracious reader, and there was a pretty famous book just all over the place in the church building.

My first readthrough, over the course of a (literal) month of Sundays, covered the whole Bible except for most of the prophets after Isaiah, and the letters after Ephesians.

The one that really stuck with me was Ecclesiastes. It was troubled and difficult, almost nihilistic. And the study bible I was using helpfully pointed out that the pious ending may well have been a late addition.

Christians: If you want to keep your teens, don't let them read Ecclesiastes. It's like a Biblical episode of My So-Called Life. (By extension, Ruth and Song of Solomon are like late-night shows on Cinemax.)

Disbelief followed hard on the heels of study.

Answer 4

Read it twice, once when I was twelve and had considerable questions my Baptist church wasn't answering that caused my initial doubt, later when I was 34 and doubted claims it is "worth readfing as literature." It's not, though some parts aren't bad (Song of Solomon in particular).

I've also read the Koran, the Book of Mormon, Dianetics, some of Buddha, the Epic of Gilgamesh (on which the bible was based, in part), Homer's Iliad and Odyssey alonmg with many other Greek, Roman, and Norse myths...

Out of all of the mythology, I cannot imagine anyone actually thinking the bible and specifically the NT made any more sense or had anything more worthy to claim than the others. Not a one has any evidence to back up its extraordinary claims.

Answer 5

I was raised Atheist, but have read the Christian Bible cover to cover in an effort to understand the religion. Some parts of it I've read many, many, MANY times even! No, I haven't really studied too many other religious texts because after reading the Bible I knew I was right to remain an Atheist.

Answer 6

I did. I was born into a religious family. I was very active with the church as a child. When I became a teen I started to question a lot of the christian teachings. I read about satanism to get a better idea of what that was all about. Over about 10 years I studies half a dozen beliefs. I finally concluded that while they were mostly based on the same basic ideals none of them had any proof their system of belief was better than the next. Worse yet they were all based on blind faith. You look back on history, religion shows that it was actually just a method of control. People didn't understand thing going on around them like lightning or how a storm could come out of no where. Eventually the priests learned they could use their power to control the masses.

Answer 7

I read the whole bible when I was still a believer. It wasn't until after I stopped believing in christianity for the most part that i read the teachings of buddha and studied other mythologies and really considered the possibility that other religions may also be valid. It was after considering many paths that I finally realized that I could not believe in god or religion at all.

Answer 8

First of all the bible was not meant to read cover to cover, it was meant to be a guide have you ever noticed the references either on the side of the page or on the bottom, second I have a few times trying to make since of it and my conclusion was there is so many contradictions in it and is so chauvinist it could only have been written by man. if it is truly written by God then why was there so many mistake when translated to English, I would think that an all powerful being would be able to make sure his word, the work that determined weather we burn for all eternity or live in bliss forever would be very strait forward and to the point not up for interpretation or translated wrong, Is a great story book much like Paul Bunyan, well that's my opinion anyway

Answer 9

Try studying the Sumerian tablets. You will discover that most of the old testament is taken from them and other cultures, but in a much shortened version. You will discover that the "7 days of creation" was originally "7 days of celebration of creation" and after a couple hundred years of story telling over the campfire they wrote down 7 days of creation. Start with that and then go onto the other few hundred stories the bible plagerized for its own use. Then ask that question again.

Answer 10

I came to the conclusion that the biblical God does not exist years after reading the Bible. In terms of whether or not anything that could be termed "god" exists, I think the jury's still out.

I've read the KJV at least twice and the Catholic bible once.

I've also read Lavey's Satanic Bible, the Tao Te Ching, the Analects of Confucius, and the Sūtra Pitaka in their entirety.

I've read most of the Bhagavad Gita, Liber AL vel Legis, and the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

I've only read some of the Book of Mormon and the Quran.