Hi Kevin Gonzaga

Thank you for your comment at Provoketive Magazine (http://provoketive.com). We’re creating a space of rich conversation about life, faith, justice and culture without judgment. Our desire is to provoke the reader’s imagination through conversation and open up spaces of dialogue, learning, and hope.  We want to invite you to come back soon and continue to participate in the conversation. 

Thank you,
Jonathan Brink
Provoketive Magazine

You posted the following comment:
---------------------------------
jeremyers,

I can relate to a lot of what you said.  There have been many times where I felt certain passages of scripture were bold faced lies because of my personal experience or what was going on in the wider world.  For example, when Jesus talks about bringing life and life to the fullest, I had a hard time reconciling that with a Jesus who would allow people to be sexually assaulted or for my own painful descents into depression.

That being said I think you are ultimately right in that many times it is how we use the Bible that is more the issue.  I am so tired of people using "verse-bites" of the Bible to support their own agenda and attack other people, usually other followers of Jesus when read in context, or when the Bible is read as a whole, these are usually not justified.

At the end of the day I think we need to wrestle with the whole Bible, even when parts of the Bible are difficult to accept or difficult to reconcile with our experiences of life, but we should never use the Bible as a weapon or it (or faith in general) as a way to control people and stay in power.