Building Your Own Hell: How Bad Interpretations of the Bible are the Devils Greatest Instrument.

It feels like Christians have a harder time figuring out what the Bible is saying than people who don’t adhere to the faith. We go through countless interpretations and commentaries. We look at the Greek then the Hebrew and try to piece together contextual facts to give us a better understanding of what exactly we are supposed to do; how we are supposed to live our lives.

That’s were we may be going wrong.

The Bible is not a rule book. It’s a story. A story with some important and (I believe vital) lessons. A story that although exhausting, MUST be read in context. For example, the Jewish law that Jesus speaks about fulfilling is not the same law that establishes marriage, equality, and human rights in our society. And to believe that a deity of love would rather see you suffer through your mistakes, rather than free yourself from self-prescribed slavery and abuse is not only irrational, it’s simply wrong. If that’s the end game, then what is the point exactly? Why are we more eager to save ourselves from a life we haven’t lived yet, rather than the one we are living right now?

A God of love does not want us to suffer through life so that we can (one has to believe) avoid suffering in eternity (which is an eschatological question that we also don’t have figured out and can’t make definitive assumptions about). This is all based on faith. We choose to either believe to suffer the rules and live with…