I hadn’t myself understood why I disliked one style of biblical quotations until I had to explain it to you.
Other reasons for biblical quotes are fine, such as showing how telling a story several times and differently has an effect, or showing something about how people then likely thought, or having an old source for “Nothing new under the sun”, etc. There’s nothing about the books that makes quoting them magically a bad thing to do, it’s just that there’s enough contradictory stuff (probably in Exodus or Numbers or Deuteronomy alone, much less the Pentateuch, much less the Old Testament, much less...) that saying there is Biblical warrant for something similar to one’s position is the most unspectacular thing one can say. A quantity of quotes from among sources showing preponderant and/or broad and consistent would be something else and as valuable as perhaps a small quote from a dissimilar source, but by definition that’s not something that fits in a reasonable amount of space and is more of a thesis paper.
The first sentence of this comment is the important one, we can probably constructively generalize from it.
As an atheist in hiding knowing the bible well can be extremely useful though. Due to how you can support nearly any position using biblical quotes, it becomes a lot easier dealing with strongly religious people when you disagree with them if you can argue based on their own priors. Telling someone about a logical fallacy, information colelcted using carbon dating, etc only works when they actually assign weight to your sources.
Another bonus, when people find out I am an atheist and I have been liberally trolling them for years it might shake up their faith in the community if I am lucky, but I am not sure how I would test this.
A big problem with trying to pull wisdom out of the bible and similar is that there is a whole pile of cultural context that is either gone, or requires large amounts of study to discover.
Like someone a thousand years from now who has somehow dug up an old blog post that strongly asserts that “The Cake is a Lie!” you’re missing a massive portion of the story. And you can justify almost anything you want to just by filling in the missing bits differently.
And this is before you even get into the biblical religions having all gone through historical phases where they deliberately filled in the cultural bits incorrectly for political reasons.
The best thing I’ve found to do with it is set God = Truth, and remember that someone’s story being included isn’t an assertion that they had everything right. There’s plenty of satire in there too. Most of it exceedingly subtle. Something about criticizing the powerful being a potential death sentence so they had to make it look like praise. But if you actually lay out the statements and evaluate them as a whole instead of individually it paints a different picture.
Like when you suddenly realise that they’re praising Solomon as being a great king by describing the grand temple and palace he built, but if you pay attention to the descriptions of each it seems that he not only built the palace out of grander, more expensive materials, he built it as a mirror of the temple with his throne room in place of the holy of holies… And suddenly the description of the man’s character takes on an entirely different tone if you know anything about what the relationship between God and the King was supposed to be.
And yet various branches of bible-based religions spent hundreds of years using Solomon as part of their description of a “Godly King”. Because it fit their political narrative and kept the peasants in line.
In short, Biblical stories are like any other repository of folk wisdom. The only way to find the truth in there is if truth is what you’re actually looking for and you don’t stop until it makes coherent sense. And this whole site is dedicated to showing all the ways in which human beings generally aren’t actually looking for the truth… So… Good luck?
I hadn’t myself understood why I disliked one style of biblical quotations until I had to explain it to you.
Other reasons for biblical quotes are fine, such as showing how telling a story several times and differently has an effect, or showing something about how people then likely thought, or having an old source for “Nothing new under the sun”, etc. There’s nothing about the books that makes quoting them magically a bad thing to do, it’s just that there’s enough contradictory stuff (probably in Exodus or Numbers or Deuteronomy alone, much less the Pentateuch, much less the Old Testament, much less...) that saying there is Biblical warrant for something similar to one’s position is the most unspectacular thing one can say. A quantity of quotes from among sources showing preponderant and/or broad and consistent would be something else and as valuable as perhaps a small quote from a dissimilar source, but by definition that’s not something that fits in a reasonable amount of space and is more of a thesis paper.
The first sentence of this comment is the important one, we can probably constructively generalize from it.
As an atheist in hiding knowing the bible well can be extremely useful though. Due to how you can support nearly any position using biblical quotes, it becomes a lot easier dealing with strongly religious people when you disagree with them if you can argue based on their own priors. Telling someone about a logical fallacy, information colelcted using carbon dating, etc only works when they actually assign weight to your sources.
Another bonus, when people find out I am an atheist and I have been liberally trolling them for years it might shake up their faith in the community if I am lucky, but I am not sure how I would test this.
A big problem with trying to pull wisdom out of the bible and similar is that there is a whole pile of cultural context that is either gone, or requires large amounts of study to discover.
Like someone a thousand years from now who has somehow dug up an old blog post that strongly asserts that “The Cake is a Lie!” you’re missing a massive portion of the story. And you can justify almost anything you want to just by filling in the missing bits differently.
And this is before you even get into the biblical religions having all gone through historical phases where they deliberately filled in the cultural bits incorrectly for political reasons.
The best thing I’ve found to do with it is set God = Truth, and remember that someone’s story being included isn’t an assertion that they had everything right. There’s plenty of satire in there too. Most of it exceedingly subtle. Something about criticizing the powerful being a potential death sentence so they had to make it look like praise. But if you actually lay out the statements and evaluate them as a whole instead of individually it paints a different picture.
Like when you suddenly realise that they’re praising Solomon as being a great king by describing the grand temple and palace he built, but if you pay attention to the descriptions of each it seems that he not only built the palace out of grander, more expensive materials, he built it as a mirror of the temple with his throne room in place of the holy of holies… And suddenly the description of the man’s character takes on an entirely different tone if you know anything about what the relationship between God and the King was supposed to be.
And yet various branches of bible-based religions spent hundreds of years using Solomon as part of their description of a “Godly King”. Because it fit their political narrative and kept the peasants in line.
In short, Biblical stories are like any other repository of folk wisdom. The only way to find the truth in there is if truth is what you’re actually looking for and you don’t stop until it makes coherent sense. And this whole site is dedicated to showing all the ways in which human beings generally aren’t actually looking for the truth… So… Good luck?