John Hobbins recently published a post with the following title: Claims about the Bible work best if you actually read it. To be certain, the title is somewhat lengthy, but one can hardly fault John for that. In fact, much of what he says is spot on. Too often people who read the Bible (I primarily speak here of people reading it from a faith perspective, though this is by no means the only subset of people who make claims about the Bible but fail to read it) do so with a preconceived notion of what it says. They then conveniently skip the parts that don’t fit, or they ignore what those parts actually say and reimagine them as something which they most certainly aren’t.

John’s post is worth reading, and I encourage you to do that. I have only one thing to add: I’m really not sure how how might go about changing this. How does one impact the “popular” reading of the Bible in order to bring it around to something that takes the text itself more seriously?¹ A further challenge is that often certain readings of the Bible, which might be “mosquito netting” as John puts it, are part of the special doctrine of a particular church, denomination, cult or other group. This is an area in which, perhaps, pastors and other religious leaders need to take part in the discussion. But alas, many pastors read the Bible with the thickest mosquito netting possible.