Hey CP,
I have asked this exact question within this past year, and within this limited time this is what I have discovered...
Isn't it all summed up by the words to love God and your neighbor?
For a child, there would be no question about following that. The problem is that we grow older, mature and gain the ability to reason and doubt what we hear, we as humans have to know the reason behind what we believe, and we loose the sense of 'trust' in just 'being told'. For example, when I was a child and my dad would say something like 'It's raining cats and dogs outside' I would run to the window to see if there were actually cats and dogs falling from the sky. As I grew older, I realized that it wasn't true... not that he would lie to me, but that what he was saying wasn't possible and I learned to
not believe everything I was told. The bible shows us that God will not exagerate, nor will He lead us astray in anything. It shows us all we need to know about God, about His love, faithfulness and mercy towards all mankind; that God is Truth and we have no reason to mistrust Him because He has never gone back on anything He has promised... and it shows how we can share that truth and love with other people.
Sure it tells of God and man yet it really is a cause of much confusion and fighting and hatred.
The problems come in when people don't read the bible for what it says and they try to put hidden messages into things that are straight forward; they try to put a different spin on verses to make it suit their life as to make it look like they're 'not so bad' people. People forget that the bible was a book written some 1950+ years ago
to the people of and for that time, not about people of the year 2010. It's like reading the Lord of the Rings and saying that the ring really symbolizes man's selfishness (sin) and the journey that Frodo, who was the only one pure enough to handle the burden of carrying this evil ring, went on with this ring was to battle the 'demons' (pride, greed, arrogance, etc.) within himself. That it's about the people that went with him were either angels or demons to him in his life, to either help him or try to cause him to fail in conquering his own demons and succeeding, and that the battles along the way symbolize the struggles we all face day to day in life. The summary of the story is that because good overcame evil in the world that Frodo can be likened to Jesus because he 'defeated' the evil powers in that world. But that's rediculous and we all know that's not what the story is about. There is no hidden menaing! It's about a ring with power given to a naive child-like hobbit who has the task of destroying it lest it fall into the wrong hands, and those wrong hands want to destroy the world they live in, and about what happens to them along the way.
It's once you put that 'hidden meaning' behind something that was written that it becomes rediculous. It's when people do this with what was written in the bible to suit their own lifestyle that other people will argue... 'Does it mean this? Because if it does then I'm still safe, but you're not'... the whole thing is rediculous then and becomes a useless bone of contention.
