Slidey said:
I mean I know it's been edited and miscommunicated quite a bit
Firstly, a lot of Christians actually don't read it or try to understand it properly. Exhibit a) with inasero quoting the four horsemen of apocalypse with the wrong fucking names. And yet idiots still bother arguing with him... If I argued with someone who's too fucking stupid to even pick up a basic guide to the Bible and search under "four horsemen of apocalypse", I think I'd go insane.
Secondly, people talk about it being so holy, yet they read it in translation. I find it so fucking hilarious that people spends hours and hours and hours talking about how important the Bible is, when they can't even comprehend the basics because they can't read it. Overall, reading the oldest versions of Biblical tradition (ie in Hebrew, Greek, Coptic, etc) would take most intelligent Christians only slightly more time than in English - because instead of stopping and thinking "but what does this actually mean?", you've already got a basis for understanding and can spend far less time on interpretation. Your interpretation is of course not hinged on the frequently strange and idiomatic translations which may be actually foreign to you, without you knowing it. In fact, decent Biblical scholars will generally learn all the related languages; not just the primary ones.
NB: I totally agree with you about it being interesting, and I wouldn't criticise any atheists, or even "casual" Christians about reading the Bible in translation. However, when it comes to consistently referring to it, believing it to the point where you waste your time going to church just to listen to
someone else talk about it, or when you're just passionate about it... You've really got to bite the bullet and actually be able to read it yourself. So yeah, I'm having a go at Christians which really talk about the Bible a lot, so don't personally take offence.
Thirdly, Biblical tradition extends far beyond "the Bible". The majority of Christians see the Bible as a source of normative law, inspiration, divine guidance, whatever, and yet don't read any of the non-canonical books. Many of these books are actually necessary in understanding the events and times of the Biblical writers. In fact, some of the books which may go against accepted theology (The Gospel of Thomas, for example), indeed force you to define your own beliefs more closely. In many cases of the non-canonical books (the pseudo-canonical Gospels especially), it's not that the "editing team" thought they were wrong, simply that they weren't read and viewed necessary to be part of the canon. Yes, (whilst there's discussion as to the extent and application of this) some books were viewed as heretical and not included, but many were just not included because they weren't read.
In relation to that, lastly, examining what you call editing and miscommunication should itself be a central task of Christians. Surveys conducted in the US show that over 99% of Christians there have no fucking clue how "the Bible" was formed. Simple questions were completely screwed up by the surveyed. I'll have to dig up the article again to have a proper look, but the most shocking revelation (lol) was that most Christians don't understand the relationship between their modern English (in this case) translation and the first records; something like 10% of surveyed correctly answered that the New Testament is written in Greek (most wrote Latin), less than one person in a hundred could identify that it is Koine and not Classical Greek. Over 90% of the surveyed Catholics said that anything that isn't included in "the Bible" was not of value, the following question revealed that actually most Catholics view their entire dogma to be based directly on the Bible. So effectively the Catholic people who filled out the survey were contradicting their own beliefs, but of course they don't know it, because they think it's all from the Bible.
Oops, edit: I would be very surprised if Australian results were significantly different.
TL;DR version:
1. You'd be surprised at how much Christians themselves don't understand the Bible.
2. People can't fully understand it until they read it in the original language. If you're a die-hard Christian, you need to fully understand it.
3. Christians need to read beyond the Bible.
4. Christians generally have no clue about the Bible as a text.
