Is it okay to just read Ecclesiastes and not the rest of the bible...

Is it okay to just read Ecclesiastes and not the rest of the bible? I am of course talking about a secular reading of it as a piece of literature.

No!

Well Ecclesiastes is good for secular reading, but Romans is just as good.

Romans 5:1-5 basically talks about how suffering leads to endurance, character, hope and hope does not disappoint us. How we rejoice therefore in our sufferings. It can get pretty philosophical.

You don't need to read most of the OT. NT is pretty important though.

Niggra most of the bible might as well have been written by a Neolithic autist, just read Ecclesiastes and dump that trash

The Bible is many books that all tell the story of Mankind's fall, salvation, and eventual judgement.

No, it is not okay.

Yeah, I just don't want to read dry moralizing passages or creation myths. As I understand it the bible was written by more collaborators than a Nicki Minaj album, so it hardly seems all that preposterous to curate a selection of it for non-devotional reading.

Yes. It was written as a singular work and can be enjoyed as such.

Obviously you're going to have a very limited understanding of God, which the verses constantly refer to, but that won't keep you from not understanding it

>As I understand it the bible was written by more collaborators than a Nicki Minaj album
Wow it's almost like it's a collection of multiple books or something

You can't really ever gain much of a full understanding of Yahweh because he is one of the most schizophrenic characters in literature.

Yes that is my argument. I am saying one shouldn't really feel obligated to read all of it when it is clearly a number of distinct works. You don't really need to read the second half of the Quixote either given that it was only tabulated at the behest of an importunate public.

>Yahweh
>characters in literature
if you approach something with that level of stupidity what could you possibly expect to get out of it

So he is real then?

>he
>real
I stopped having these sorts of discussions with people who arent very well read on the subject.
Read up, form your own understanding.

Shut the fuck you crucifix-tipping obscurantist.

ok

>You don't really need to read the second half of the Quixote either given that it was only tabulated at the behest of an importunate public.

Here is when I jumped off the bait hook. You were doing fine up until them.

You should almost certainly include Genesis and Exodus desu, those are the serious workhorses of its literary merit. Especially God as a historical ideal of masculine self-actualization.

>inb4 psalms

>story
*myth

No book should be given a "secular reading"

if you have no capacity for a religious/spiritual depth, reading serious literature is massive waste of your time.

approach the bible like it's the fuckin bible. You won't turn into a southern baptist

...

>my fantasy is ~*necessary*~
this is why everybody laughs at you FYI

No, this is really not the case. Overlaying your own "capacity for spiritual depth" onto a text is the opposite of a critical reading.

This.

If you don't read with your heart, you may as well be reading the phonebook.

kys smug Christcuck

> Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.

This really applies to just about anything you do.
Closed minds miss out on everything worthwhile.

>there is no way the person I'm speaking to has ever experienced true belief himself because if he had he would agree with me
Following your heart is just a different kind of bullheadedness.

>bullheadedness

Didnt you just tell me to kill myself?

Yeah, people who think that their feelings are supposed to be compelling to other people are cancer. You're an overgrown wart on the face of a race capable of doing much better than the particular set of myths you grew up with.

>people who think that their feelings are supposed to be compelling to other people are cancer

what about your friends and loved ones?

is everything just a selfish impulse to you?

My friends and loved ones share a lot of reference points with one another and so their feelings often are compelling to me for what I suppose you would call selfish reasons. Your feelings about a book that I've read reverently at one time and critically at another in addition to a lot of commentary from all angles are not very compelling.

>Your feelings about a book

When did i say i had feelings about a book?

The book brings out those feelings as it deals with the transcendant which lights the path of any worthwhile life.

> My friends and loved ones share a lot of reference points

I'm sure they're very glad to be called referance points.

>The book brings out those feelings as it deals with the transcendant which lights the path of any worthwhile life.
If you define a worthwhile life as one that follows a transcendent path, I suppose.

>I'm sure they're very glad to be called referance points.
Oh, you can't read.

>If you define a worthwhile life as one that follows a transcendent path, I suppose.

I don't think anyone can define a worthwhile life outside of the transcendant.

They would consider your fixation on being "worthwhile" by some universal standard to be an erroneous construct.

you have already deemed my life unworthy.

i seek that which has made life possible, not that which is defined by what it lacks.

Calling your life "unworthy" would imply an authority I lack and that does not exist in anything or anyone. Your beliefs and way of thinking are antithetical to the well-being of me and mine, and so I would prefer you kill yourself. That's all.

But this is an appeal to reason.

Also, you can touch a man's head (and hope his hair isn't greasy).

this

Yeah. Suspension of disbelief is necessary, at least initially, when reading any work.

>reading
I should amend that: not only when reading.

For me this approach is better that reading just pieces of the books and making sense of them.

I will add Proverbs because it makes an interpretation from a less pessimistic perspective so by reading both you get the two sides of the argument. Be advise that Proverbs talks a little bit more about God than Ecclesiastes

If you're just reading it as a book you can do whatever you wanna do m8. I'd recommend doing more though cause its a pretty fascinating book.

In the OT Ecclesiastes is good but so is Proverbs, Job, Jonah, lots of them are interesting honestly. I think people assume that they're all stuffy old stories about boring perfectly obident people but they really aren't, sometimes people in the OT get mad at god, question him, even challenge him. Its very interesting. Honestly its more interesting than the NT which is basically just "Jesus says be nice".