Growing up as a Christian I was always told what Bible passages to read and what they meant.  I would equate this to being “spoon fed”.  Then, as a skeptic who began to read books like The Age of Reason,  I read passages that Paine used to prove his points on the errors and inconsistencies of the Bible.  This is no different than what politicians, bloggers, and mainstream media types do nowadays with sound bites, spinning, and taking people out of context.  The fact of the matter is you can use Bible verses as proof for almost any agenda you have.  You can use it to prove the existence of God and his mercy and grace but, you can also select verses (in the Old Testament) to justify the killing of anyone who is not Jewish and you can use it to justify slavery.  In order to get the full context of any verse you need, at the very minimum, to compile 10 verses before and 10 verses after whatever is being read.  In many cases you need the whole chapter or a few chapters and in some case you need to read the whole book (like Ruth).  The point is you can NOT...
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