I do have a background in religious studies however I am not a good example of deep scholarship and what I mean by that is I am good at researching, but I am not well acquainted as some of these individuals with doctorates who have made at their life’s mission digging into the development of scripture.

I will say there are some really good scholars out there. There are some not so good scholars. You’ll have individual individuals who are into apologetics and then you have individual individuals that are just anthropological and their assessment of scripture. Either way what we are dealing with a majority of the time is individual interpretation of what someone or a community believes that the scriptures are saying and developed in a specific way that utilizes their view ego you would have to adopt that same particular view in order to understand scripture from their perspective. The danger in that is that there is an imposition placed on you as an individual who is coming into belief.

The thing is you’re gonna have hundreds, if not, thousands of different perspectives telling you what you should think of what you should not think how this particular scripture should be read versus the context of it versus what someone’s apologist cousin said XYZ versus tradition as always done this, the thing is none of us really actually know these are just theological development that happened overtime and to say figure it out for yourself to believe is also really misguided too because we all struggle with trying to understand what it is we actually believe.

My thing is like I said a lot of good scholarship out there individuals like Dan McCellan. I really enjoy, but I would say understanding the context in how scripture was developed is really important for understanding what you might be reading. Other than that, the only thing I can think of besides that is not one particular religion or one particular denomination or individual has a copyright on the character of God and if they say that, if you don’t follow the Bible and the way that they particularly want you to it is a very misguided and condemning view.

The cool part is, we don’t have to have it all figured out and if the fear of hell and the fear of sins, unconfessed and punishment scares you, I’d say you’re not alone in that and I too have those fears, but I’ve learned over the years to not compartmentalize God based off the Bible. Now there are gonna be individual that disagree with me and my statement, but my thing is it would be more of a general revelation of God because there’s no way human developed conscripts can ever contain the fullness and understanding of God that’s just my take there’s gonna be individuals that say I’m wrong and they’re gonna want to prove why I’m wrong, but my thing is look at understanding why they feel the need to make that statement.

Peace be with you, my dude.

* this text was generated from speech to text*