I am not arguing that one should not read biblical texts. Just that the recommendation to read 'The Bible' is really a recommendation to read the central texts of Judaism, the central texts of Christianity plus hundreds of pages of not particularly edifying and largely irrelevant historical and spiritual marginalia, which were collected into a specific text known as 'The Bible' for fairly arbitrary reasons.
If the OP had said to read 'Genesis, Psalms and the Acts of the Apostles' it would have made some kind of sense to me. But dsr3's use of the fact that the Stanford course includes Genesis and the NT as support of the recommendation to read 'The Bible' is just sophistry.
Saying 'you should read every single thing Aristotle wrote, the important philosophy along with the archaic geometry and the incorrect biology' is on the face of it quite a lot less silly then saying 'you should read The Bible'.
I am not arguing that one should not read biblical texts. Just that the recommendation to read 'The Bible' is really a recommendation to read the central texts of Judaism, the central texts of Christianity plus hundreds of pages of not particularly edifying and largely irrelevant historical and spiritual marginalia, which were collected into a specific text known as 'The Bible' for fairly arbitrary reasons.
If the OP had said to read 'Genesis, Psalms and the Acts of the Apostles' it would have made some kind of sense to me. But dsr3's use of the fact that the Stanford course includes Genesis and the NT as support of the recommendation to read 'The Bible' is just sophistry.
Saying 'you should read every single thing Aristotle wrote, the important philosophy along with the archaic geometry and the incorrect biology' is on the face of it quite a lot less silly then saying 'you should read The Bible'.