religion

When trying to understand why Christians believe the Bible, one of the first things to consider is Christians and non-believers have a different mind set.  This leads to some of the contempt non-believers have for the Bible and God that Christians do not have.  Most Christians see the most important thing in life is believing in Jesus and spending eternity with Him.  In the big picture, this life is just a blip compared to eternity and spending eternity with Jesus is worth anything in this life.  On the contrary, non-believers typically don’t believe in an afterlife so this life is all we have.  With this view point, the only fun and pleasure you will have is while you are alive.  So it is very important to have a happy, fulfilling and long life.  Being told to deny yourself fun or pleasure seems crazy because this is the only chance you have to enjoy it.

Also when reading the Bible, it’s important to know that it was written to the people living at the time that particular book was written.  It is in their cultural context and understanding of the world.  This can make it hard to fully understand and to translate the Bible to our understanding.  Many non-believers hold this against the Bible and think God should make us be able to perfectly understand everything in the Bible in every language very easily.  I would say that are also many Christians who take the English translation of the Bible as being perfect and there are no misunderstandings.  But this is not how it works and trying to understand the cultural context along with the translation to your language is what causes many of the different interpretations Christians have.  The Bible is pretty clear in all the books on the major beliefs of Christianity but there are definitely some parts of the Bible that are not very clear.

There are a few fundamental beliefs that almost all Christians believe but there is also lots of room for different interpretations of the Bible that do not impact these core beliefs.