I was atheist my whole life. Grew up in an atheist household. I never once read the Bible or knew anything to do with Christianity or religion. I knew of it but didn't know any of what anything meant. I actually didn't even know who Jesus was until I was an adult. I also thought Catholics and Christians were different religions entirely.

I'm just trying to explain how little I knew about religion. About two years ago I started having some experiences that made me question if I was missing some aspect of reality. I started to wonder if maybe there was something to the whole religion thing. I decided to read the Bible myself a year ago. In my opinion, the Bible is fairly easy to understand and it makes a lot of sense when you're approaching it without all these influences by church doctrine and other people telling you how you're supposed to interpret certain parts. After I read the Bible and started trying to get to know Christians more, I realized how I read the Bible and the way people were interpreting things started to differ dramatically. But it shouldn't be that way. The Bible isn't hard to understand.

It reminds me a lot like the second amendment. It's pretty clear. Then people who don't like what the second amendment says change the meaning entirely. Oh, you need to understand context, there were no machine guns then so clearly they meant muskets only... Huh what? That's not what it says, at all. You're making it up. That's pretty much how I feel about a lot of modern Christianity. Which is sad because if you understand philosophy and how moral values impact society, we'd be much better off as a society if people simply followed the moral values in the Bible without trying to corrupt the meaning to mean something else.