Recker's World
Reason 24
The bible can be used to defend any crazy belief you want
It seems that no matter what a Christian wants to believe they can always pull out some scripture that will back them up. That’s why you have so many different versions of Christianity and so many wacky cults. Just attend a bible study and you will get all sorts of claims with scriptures used to back them up.
When one Christian reads a scripture and interprets it differently to another, both claim to have Holy Spirit understanding. Many heated discussions can come up about what a simple scripture actually means. One person then accuses the other of not understanding what the bible says… or worse taking it out of context.
It became obvious to me after many hours studying the bible, that what you get out of it has nothing whatsoever to do with understanding. It all comes down to perspective. You can take a scripture and look at it from various different perspectives, thus coming up with completely different meaning. If you’re clever you’ll even find other scriptures that when read in conjunction with your first scripture, paint an entirely different picture of the text. It’s easy and the winner is the person who can come up with the most impressive, most convincing arguments.
The fact of the matter is, scripture is open to interpretation, and it can be taken so many ways. Who gets to dictate what the correct interpretation is?