How do non-Christians think of the bible? Do they think we follow it as if taking stories from it and try applying it to our lives? I know I don't.
To me, the Jewish bible is first of all a collection of stories with the intend of highlighting the importance of Israel, its people and their relationship to God. It is also a book that from an ancient person point of view, probably held some answers to some of lives difficult questions. Among the stories there is a mixture of moral driven stories, but also historical ones about the history of Israel.
When that is said, it is also an ancient book of laws of how the Israelites ought to behave and treat other people and each other. My initial thoughts, even though I haven't checked this, is that its fairly common at the time, that laws and religious views are combined into one and the same, and is used as a way to justify why people have to do certain things in certain ways, or why someone is allowed to do something rather than something else. If a person believe in an all mighty God, then who are they to question his authority? We find lots of examples of this between the stories.
In regards to whether I think people follow the stories? My answer would be no. The reason is obviously because they believe in Jesus as the Messiah, so a Christian is obviously one that believe in Christ. But if we look only at the bible and ignore all the interpretations that have sprung from it later on.
I think pretty much all Christians today would be executed due to blasphemy or for breaking the law. It seems that most Christians belief, rely on Pauls writings and one very dodgy verse in the gospel of John about the fulfillment of the law, which is used as an excuse for not having to follow it anymore. Which is not really fitting well into the stories of bible when one read it in context, I think.
In my opinion, John is probably the worse and least trustworthy of the four gospels. It is very obvious when reading it, that a lot of what is found in it, especially near the end, is simply made up as such information would be near impossible to obtain. For instance, John apparently knows what Jesus and Pontius Pilatus talked about while Jesus were imprisoned and only those two were present.
Also Jesus were a Jew and several places makes it clear that the law is to be followed. He even uses an example from the law, that if a child curses their parents, they are to be put to death as the law command. For some reason, Christians ignore this, as again Paul and that one verse in John seems more compelling than all the places where Jesus say that the law should be followed and not changed.
I was just thinking about how a poster claimed that the bible tolerates slavery and doesn't speak out against it, but then I read online how the bible isn't really telling us what to do, or how to think, but rather, describes events that have taken place as a sort of historical news article.
As mentioned the Jewish bible is a book of law, how the person you refer to, tries to defend it is beyond me and seems to be a standard believers way of trying to justify something that is clearly wrong in their scriptures.
But lets try to compare it to a fictive scenario, imagine we found an old law book from a now extinct civilization. Among the laws we read the following:
And God told them, these are the laws:
1. If you marry a girl of the age of 10, you must care for her until she can carry your child. For she is now your property.
2. if she refuse to obey, you must punish her for she is your property.
Now regardless of whether the God demanded that men married girls of the age of 10 or not, it would be clear from the laws being in such book, that doing such thing is not seen as being wrong and also we can assume that such thing probably were rather normal in such society or else they wouldn't have made such laws in the first place.
So when we find laws in the Bible telling the Israelites how to treat slaves, how to punish then and how far they can go in beating them, without themselves getting punished, then they are obviously not encourage not to take slaves. Besides that you have stories in the bible where God command the Jews to kill some others people, but the women they can take for themselves.
Why the person you talk about would ignore those stories and laws, again seems to be just an excuse to justify things that are clearly immoral, because God is, as we know, said to be all good, so clearly he can't do anything wrong. So ways to get around this and not point a finger at God, is to spin the stories or ignore them. Other excuses which are also very common, is that this were different times and therefore it was needed. Which clearly doesn't fit well with an all good, all knowing and all powerful God, if this is the best he can do, with such abilities.
I do however think that its good that we do not follow the bible today, because it is probably among some of the worse morality that one can teach others. Again talking about what is actually in the bible and not the cherry picking and "want to be true" stuff, that religions are teaching people, which have very little to do with the teachings of Jesus, Moses or even God for that matter.
