(skip to third paragraph after the "--" if you don’t want to hear about me)
if it has not been obvious to you that i was born and raised Roman Catholic, i'd like to tell you now that i was. although, i have not been a Catholic my entire life. there had been a brief portion of my life where i considered and called myself an atheist. ironically enough, i decided that i no longer believed in God on the day of my confirmation at age 12. as i've written in a previous post, i grew up with a very overprotective mother, and because of this i spent a large amount of my time on the internet at a young age. this was during the 2000's when atheism was becoming a very popular thing. i was, and still am a person interested by science, and due to being a young impressionable man discovering reddit (awful,) i fell for the lies. 99% of reddit atheist’s arguments can be boiled down to a few phrases - “if God good, then why bad thing?” “science shows no proof for a God, so i don’t think there is one.” And last but not least - “i don’t need an imaginary man in the sky to be happy and be a good person.” we get it, they’re morally robust intellectuals. (i hope you detected the sarcasm.)
so how did i break free from this sort of thinking? well, after abandoning God, everything went to hell, no pun intended. it was only four years later at age 16 that i was selling drugs and getting high, horrifically depressed and anxious. it wasn’t until i went back to my faith at around 22-23 years old that i started to feel any relief, although i am not perfect now, i have been getting much better, at a slow pace. i did not expect to be fixed in a few days and i was certainly right for thinking that. the path to God is a never ending road but it is a joyous ride and the sights are beautiful.
--
the bible is not one book, it is a collection of books within one, some call it a library. and while there is an optimal, or recommended order in which you read the books, i’ll leave the order in which you read them up to you, or rather, up to God. do some research online about what some of the books are about, and go from there. it is certain that you will find a book that you find either interesting or related to something you are experiencing in your current situation.
if you are reading this, i’m assuming you are someone who is either currently not a believer, you’re someone who has never read the book for the first time yet, or both. the key to reading this book, what i found most helpful, is to completely suspend all types of scientific thinking. read this book as if you are reading harry potter or something else where you are not asking “how?” all the time, you just simply take the stories for what they are. how they occurred is irrelevant, because only God knows. getting caught up in the “how” will cause you to miss the point of the words.
when i first thought about coming back to the faith, i thought i should just read the scripture and read it as if it is fiction, a story, and see if i could gain anything from what i was reading. this is when i realized the vast amount of wisdom in the books are immeasurable. you could write volumes of books pertaining to mere sentences found in the scripture. it’s truly an amazing thing to experience. to me, i find it downright unlikely that humans were solely involved in it’s creation. there was never anything like it before it’s inception, and there hasn’t been anything like it that has come after.
when you read the stories, it is much more important to extract the lessons, themes, and ideas from them. you should be reading it in a way that whether you were a Christian or not, you could learn something from them. my problem was that when i was younger and thought i knew everything, i was reading the stories with the intention of finding conflicts of logic, things that seemed unrealistic, or anything that i might deem silly, or just plain wrong. the point is that these words were so powerful to so many people that wars were fought over them, cities were built. some of the most incomprehensible feats of human ingenuity were accomplished in the name of these words, so clearly i was missing something my first go-around. make sure that while you’re reading, your intention is to figure out what the LORD is trying to tell you. sometimes He makes it very blatant and obvious. but sometimes His message is vague, and could be interpreted in many different ways. there are many passages that i’ve read on multiple occasions and each time i understood it in a different way. the words in the bible are alive, they breathe along with you.