The reason for the blog

One of my many goals in keeping this blog has always been to keep a record of my adventures reading the king james version of the bible.

When I was a high school student I would often wonder through my student's version of the bible but I always had a difficult time sticking with it, for various reasons. One of those reasons was that the passages that needed the most explanation were left completely unexplained (in the annotations of my student's version). Shortly after making my way through about 10% of the old testament and all the way through MARK in the new testament I had come to the conclusion that anyone who had read the whole bible and was not completely befuddled was simply not paying enough attention. So I gave up with the impression that the only way the average person could read the bible and not be left with millions of questions was with close guidance from a parishioner or completely uncritically.

Several years ago, after gaining a little more theological background through outside reading and a little more practice in literary criticism (and logic, and philosophy) I tried going through the King James Version (KJV) on my own once again.

I couldn't even make it through Exodus.

I spent too much time searching the internet for theological explanations regarding the problems of free will and God's omnipotence. None of the explanations I found were satisfying but i trudged on. When I eventually quit I did so with the intention that I would come back to it but with a better method of note keeping, such that I would be able to come back to my issues and discuss them in a more open forum.

So one of my goals is to slowly take notes on the blog as I slowly read and analyze each book, chapter, or verse. There are over 30,000 verses in the KJV so if I went at about 500 verses per week I could finish in a year. It's easy to read 500 verses a week but it's hard to read them AND pay attention AND critically analyze and extract meaning.

We'll see how it goes.

Also, I realize that there exists something called "bible study" which is, presumably, exactly what I need. I've tried "bible study" and I have a few problems:
A) I have not been able to find a bible study group that even attempts to check out the old testament. I've been told that the old testament is too complex, that it takes several years of background knowledge to interpret accurately. To that, I say phooey. Why would God send his message to us in a language that required years of training to decipher? More importantly still, why is it that so many people justify their political actions on chapters and verses which they don't have the skill to understand?
B) The more complex explanations provided by the bible study leader I've encountered have been oversimplified and logically flawed. The idea, I suppose, is to keep things simple and digestible. I need more detail, I can handle it.
C) As a bible study participant, you are not allowed to press issues or question the logic of the explanations. In theory, of course, you are allowed, but when the flawed logic of an argument is made evident the leader tends to move things along and you get evil eyes from the other bible study participants.
D) In the last bible study I attended, one of the other attendees commended me for bringing up good points and suggested I not return to the next session, all in one sentence. To be fair, he told me that the class was not at my level of analysis yet and I should wait for a more advanced class. But his message was pretty clear "pointdexter is messing things up for the rest of us".