Why you do not get taught about religion properly
Something that always bothers me is the supposedly very religious folks, who will often use religion as an exuse to be super hateful towards one minority or another... but also don't know jackshit about the content or history of their religion. Mostly obviously this is Christians. Because, well... the thing about Christianity is, that most people who claim to be Christians and are from any western country never once have read the whole Bible, let alone a whole proper translation of the Bible - given that the most common translation is notorious for being horribly badly translated.
But even outside of this, there is the context that most Christians - no matter what side of the political spectrum they lie on - do not actually know how the Bible was "written", or rather collected. Why some texts are canonized (yes, this is where that word comes from) and others are not. Let alone the historical context.
And when we talk historical context, we also need to address that most people are also not taught the historical context of actual events. After all, there are some events in the Bible, that we know did definitely not happen. (The entire Egypt thing, for example. We have so many sources on Egypt that we can most certainly say that nothing of this happened. Just as we can say that there was no world wide flood after humans came to be.)
And if you talk to actual Bible scholars, you will also learn stuff like: "Oh, yeah, we are also fairly certain that this bit was added way later because in the Greek text it uses a word that was not around till 500 AD." And many such things. I mean, I got probably a better Bible education than most, but the context of the translation? Nobody explained that to me.
Once again, I will also remind y'all of that Christian on Christmas that got angry because non-Christians were celebrating Christmas, the "most important Christian holiday". While... Christmas is very much not a really important holiday in terms of Christian lore and the Christian calendar. Both Easter and Pentecost are easily more important in their importance for the religion. But Easter in modern times is barely adopted - and Pentecost is often not celebrated outside of a couple of Catholic places in Europe.
There is also the thing that a lot of American Christians apparently believe that Catholics are not "real Christians". You know, Roman Catholics, the OG Christians.
I could go on and on. But the basic thing it boils down to: Chances are, that even if you were raised Christian (no matter the domination) you never really got educated on the religion, never read the whole bible, and do not really know anything about what current Bible research says about the different things.
I will openly admit, that yes, at times I will use this as a gotcha in terms of debatebro-ing Christian right wingers. Because, again, I read the whole thing several times, and I do also read research on it these days. (And no, I am not Christian.)
But the thing is... let's face it, there is a reason why you do not know most if not all those things I named above. And that reason is politics. For some people it is just very, very conveniant that you do not know that kind of stuff. Because a lot of conservatives do love to use out of context Bible quotes to manipulate people into their conservative believes.
Mind you: Yes, given this book was written between 3500 and 1500 years ago (depending on the parts), this book is fairly conservative... Just not as conservative - and not in the same way - as most people using it to defend their bigotry.
And mind you: There are a whole of bigoted things in that book. Yes. Obviously. Because it was written in Ancient times. You will find the same bigoted stuff in other texts written at the time. Which is why it is important to teach the historical context.
And frankly, I also think it is incredibly fair towards anyone learning about the religion, to also learn about the context of it evolving. We know after all, how YHWH came into the pantheon and then took up Ba'al's position and later that of Elohim and such. We know how both the believe in the one god over the others came to be, and who this was addressed at.
Like, I am all for people finding the religion they vibe with. But at least give people some context to how it got to be. Because we know it - and keeping it from people to me is lying.
