Reading the Bible: why bother?

I had quite a productive day today. I am starting up a new student club at my university to promote locavorism: eating local food. There was quite a bit of interest and I'm hoping we can share some tips and recipes and have some fun potlucks this year.

While I was at the University's Clubs and Societies Fair, I chatted and signed up with all the Christian groups as well as the one pagan group who was there. I think it is important for me to get over my fear of Christians from other denominations. It frightens me to think of meeting people who believe that they have a monopoly on the truth. It really leaves no space for constructive dialogue. The only thing I really believe is that no human or group of humans can fully understand God. So you can see why I have a strong urge to avoid fundamentalists.

I picked up a bunch of pamphlets from "The Navigators". These people want to "know Christ and to make Him known". The lady doing the tabling was very nice. We didn't talk about Jesus at all, we talked about the pros and cons of French Immersion and homeschooling.

The first pamphlet I decided to read tonight was "The Bible: Inspired by God or thought up by men". You can actually read it online on their website. Here:
http://considerthegospel.org/resources/fulfilled_prophecy_pamphlet_2005.pdf

I've encountered this before: people who claim that the Bible is the word of God because it has prophecies in it which came true. Well, this pamphlet has a lot of details about those prophesies, and how Jesus fulfilled them, and you can read it if you care. I don't find it very interesting though.

The only Bible quote in this pamphlet that really interests me is "All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness" (2 Timothy 3:16). Now, I conceive of God as the Creator and if you are into the poetry of the Genesis story, he breathed life into into Adam's nostrils (Genesis 2:7). So if humans wrote the scripture, which, you know, they did, then it is God-breathed.

So in point number two, the Bible is supposed to be useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness. It's not a how-to manual for life on Earth. It is useful for teaching, rebuking correcting, training because it is a lesson in subtlety, because there is more to it than meets the eye. It is a lesson in rebuking, because it is in itself contradictory. The Bible is God-breathed, but the breathers who wrote it were human beings, just like us, and we should be reading the Bible critically to think about how we can learn from our past mistakes and triumphs so that we can live as best as we can possibly know how.

The prophesy proof for the Bible isn't important to me. The Bible is a good book to read whether or not the New Testament is the official sequel to the Old Testament, whether or not the two books together are the official version of God's word. I often think about how in the tradition of Aboriginal storytelling it is said that "this story is true, even if it never really happened".