American adults between the ages of 18 and 65: 70% of them do not read well above a 9th grade level. Public health notices in the USA have to be written at a 5th grade level.
Can American adults read newspapers? Only around 30% of them are up to the task.
Mostly no.
Can they read the constitution?
Mostly no.
These are just fundamental facts about our opponents in the culture wars. They are people who appeal to texts they have not read and cannot read.
Have I read the bible? No, not really. If you mean all of it, then, no. If you mean all of one book, then, no. If you mean not at all, then yes. I attended a Catholic elementary school. We read bible passages. I lost interest in religion in junior high school. I studied philosophy, and took one medieval philosophy class that featured a good deal of churchly philosophizing. Beyond that, I have frequently searched topics in the bible.
Have you ever searched the bible for a topic? Try searching the word "philosophy" Apparently there is only one use of the term, Colossians 2:8, and it is an ugly piece of bigotry and religious presumption of the most sickeningly arrogant hue.
A world in which only the few can read well ought to be a world in which the bible dies out.
The trouble is, we read the bible in little snippets. Hardly anyone sits down with the intention to consume so much as a whole page of this gibberish.
So, the person who consults their bible about whether or not to sign up for a philosophy class, or about what to think of their fellow students who study philosophy, etc., this is what they find. A short, digestible, dismissive and bigoted remark. The kind of thing semi-literates can internalize and use.
And this shows why this book will never die; because those who can barely read it are masters of it.
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