Reading the Bible the first time

I picked up a Bible the first time as an atheist.  I wish I could say I wanted to be convinced by Christianity.  Instead I read it as any other book, except with added significance, because this was the book of my tradition.  My father had read it, my grandfather had read it, and his father, etc.  It was an attempt to connect to a past I did not know.  I felt a comfort in picking up a book my family had always known.  Each generation had identified itself by picking up this book, and interpreting it in its own unique way.  As part of the latest generation, I had every right to interpret the Bible too.

I saw the Bible as a worn out traveling trunk.  It didn't contain anything anymore, but it was wonderful to think of the places it had been and what it had seen.  There was no reason to use it as anything other than a way to see into the past and to marvel at how it had shaped history.  But it was only a hollowed out book, its cover more meaningful than its contents.

I started at Genesis, as every amateur does, thinking that because it was just any other book, I would read it cover to cover.  My goal was to read it without the restraints of taking it literally.  With Genesis this is easy to do, because it is mythological.  We can view these stories as something like the bedtime tales we learn as children.  Except, these are stories about the beginning of the world.

I read Genesis much more quickly than I anticipated I would, but at some point in Exodus I gave up.  My mistake was to assume the rest of the Bible was so easily dismissed.