I feel like it shouldn’t. You see a lot of fundamentalists taking things literally and believing for instance that the Earth is 4,000 years old, and who don’t believe in evolution ect. But I feel that especially when looking at the Old Testament the God in the Bible there is more abstract and complex (almost like a force of nature, personified), and if you read it literally you would be more or less required to treat a lot of the ‘stories’ as historical (in practical terms), like humans getting kicked out of Eden, Cain getting punished by God, ect. But given how complex and even hard to understand God in that part of the Bible is, it seems unlikely that its meant to be taken at face value.

To make it clear, I’m not Christian but I find the Bible quite interesting (well, some parts of it), but I’m curious how everyone else feels about it.

I personally think it shouldn’t, partly because of how I feel that God being such a nasty prick in the Old Testament is (frankly) more realistic, and I feel like there are some deeper themes touched on that the New Testament ignores - such as when Moses leads the Jews out of Egypt, which I feel is a way of teaching ppl to resist tyranny and not to take everything that’s given to them if it’s shit. Or how Cain’s sacrifice wasn’t rewarded because he was kind of an envious asshole. Things like that. Whereas the New Testament can, as far as I can tell, be put down to ‘be nice’, which I feel is a very simplistic way of looking at the world.