The bible
I don’t even need to buy them. They just pile up unread. One of them has nice art in it.
I don’t even need to buy them. They just pile up unread
How? I’ve read this many times, but I never understood it. Do people just hand them out on the street or is it customary to give bibles as a gift?
When I was in college, once or twice a year there were people from some religious group who would come and stand at the most busy intersections for foot traffic and literally hand them out on the street, yes. They were quite pushy about it
You missed the chance to push back in your refusal. You had plenty of justification to be nasty.
Why refuse free toilet paper?
When you celebrate a life event in church you go home with a new Bible.
Really? I’ve been to weddings and funerals and baptisms in churches and never have I been offered a bible. Maybe it’s a local thing?
Count yourself lucky. If you want one, any church would be happy to provide.
American? I haven’t seen a bookstore selling a bible in ages, if ever
I was going to contradict you, that bookstores always carry bibles…but then I realized the memory I was thinking of was from the 90s.
I’d say this is just a good excuse for me to go to the bookstore and check…but they’ve all become so small and sad that I kind of don’t want to. I just get depressed.
I know ebooks and audiobooks have massively taken off so people are reading/listening still…I just miss my childhood refuge being stuffed chock-full of treasures.
Sucker play, it’s trivial to get a bible for free. For instance, one could find it on libgen or something idk
They’re really lousy for critical reading, though. I like the ones from United Biblical Society, with maps and appendices. They’re good for linguistic reference, and they add titles and illustrations.
The Bible
When I was in elementary school I actually tried to just read the bible. I didn’t get very far through Genesis before I gave up.
You didn’t even make it to the part where a man of god uses nature magic to summon bears to kill 42 children, or where a guy is mad that a father gives him the wrong daughter as property that he combines genocide with animal abuse!
For me, nothing tops the guy whose neighbors want to rape the angel that came to visit him, so he offers the crowd his daughters to rape instead.
That first bit is part of the Apocrypha. It’s not in the official bible.
It’s from Second Kings 2:23-25, which is part of the Torah and the official 66 books of the bible. Though some (most) translations say that the curse is in the name of the lord/god.
From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. “Get out of here, baldy!” they said. “Get out of here, baldy!” He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys. And he went on to Mount Carmel and from there returned to Samaria.
some boys
two bears
mauled forty-two of them
Just how many boys in totality are we talking about here? And did the bears have to stop and take a break?
And he went on to Mount Carmel and…
"And then he went about his day, completely disregarding the two exhausted bears and the 42 mauled boys that were part of a sizable mob that he casually called a curse down upon’
I can’t name very many people that have finished the whole dictionary
The book gave me a roller coaster of emotions, I never knew what was coming next!
When it defined Zyzzyva, I cried butterfly tears.
I think kids might. I remember reading it front to back when I was first really getting into literacy, hoping to get adults’ seemingly godlike intuition for spelling words. Still like to open it up from time to time to peruse a letter
hoping to get adults’ seemingly godlike intuition for spelling words.
Dit you manege to sucseed dough?
The dictionary
The
dictionarydikshunaryDo they have those at the lie-berry?
Atlas Shrugged.
It’s a massive paperback and looks impressive on a bookshelf but it’s a dull narrative. I got about 200 pages in and was like fuck all these people and these stupid trains.
That was legit one of the few books I read halfway through then put down in disgust at how banal, ridiculous, and repetitive it was. The first part was okish because there’s something of a mystery, but the “revelation” that all the industrialists moved to a sort of entrepreneur’s shangri-la and that life without government created this perfect utopian society, it was just such a stupid thing and I was so tired of all the dead horse beating. Anybody who says they like this book is either lying or has mental problems.
When the completed manuscript exceeded 600,000 words, Cerf asked Rand to make cuts, but backed off when she compared the idea to cutting the Bible.
Wow, I didn’t know this author, and it seems I wasn’t missing much.
Her writing is simplistic, but conservatives and libertarians have pushed her as an “intellectual” because it gives them a well-known writer that supports their trash values. She was strongly against the welfare state and altruism, yet she herself received social security, so she was a bit of a hypocrite as well.
She was also an unabashed atheist, which is why she was able to promote the idea of selfishness being good.
What’s funny is it’s the mostly Christian right-wing which has embraced her.
I guess they’re okay with atheism as long as its playing for the right “team.”
I mean, they’ve elevated Trump as their God-Emperor and he’s very likely an atheist, had multiple affairs, and paid women to get abortions, but whatever, none of that matters when you’ve been conditioned all your life to believe impossible things. Next to Jesus walking on water and two of every animal fitting on a boat, the rest of it is child’s play.
She was also an unabashed atheist, which is why she was able to promote the idea of selfishness being good.
What the hell is this non-sequitur?
Anything by Ayn Rand. She’s a terrible author and most people are more interested in showing that they could have read The Fountainhead than actually reading that unfun, meandering garbage.
I read The Fountainhead in a high school English class and then got super into Ayn Rand and read Atlas Shrugged and some of her other stuff on my own. What actually happened was that I was a child in the Florida Public School System and so 1) didn’t understand what capitalism was, 2) couldn’t recognize terrible writing, and 3) was enjoying how proud my dad was for once.
Now I’m in my 30s and I can’t bring myself to throw away books at all, but also refuse to give them away and put them back out into the world for other dumbasses and/or impressionable children to find. They live on a bookshelf in my back room strategically positioned so that even if someone did go into that room they’d have to dig through a bunch of French textbooks and ancient American Girl books to find them.
If anyone would like some garbage propaganda advocating for a society of psychopaths written in the style of your drunk uncle’s auto-transcribed voice memos, hit me up.
You should burn them for warmth so they finally serve a purpose
I tried to read the Fountainhead twice when I was a teenager and I never got more than a third of the way. It felt like watching an old person try to remember their shopping list
Without a shadow of a doubt the Bible.
No, reading the Gospels, Paul’s letters, Revelations, Genesis, Exodus, and selected Psalms doesn’t count as reading the Bible. Do you count reading 10 chapters of a 60+ chapter book as reading the book? Of course not.
I grew up in an evangelical house and I constantly get to wield the line: “I guess I took the wrong lessons” as my comeback to literally any political dispute and it is wonderful having the ability to actually quote the Bible when arguing with my child relatives
I was raised in a Christian household, and I was told that when I turned 12 I could be baptized. I looked forward to, and on the summer I was 10, I decided I wanted to be ready. I sat down and read the bible, front to back. I got to the end, and I paused: this was nothing like what they were telling me! I decided to read it again through, certainly I missed something? At the end, I decided to work through again, one more time, and then I was no longer Christian, at least not like these other ones. Now I’m not at all, but I love being able to source the bible more accurately than my Christian family members.
