READING IS BAD FOR YOU

A comic strip the other day provoked a memory and got me thinking about some things I grew up thinking.  The strip was Betty and it features a running routine about her kid always playing video games.  The other day it threw his multiple readings of Harry Potter books into the mix.  Betty reacts just as negatively about his reading as she does his playing games because she doesn’t think he can tell reality from fantasy or that he prefers fantasy to reality.

I didn’t have video games back in the day but I did have books, tons of books.  I would spend hours a day in my room reading my books.  I loved them.  I spent all of my allowance on them.  When I started working I spent my money on more books.  I wasn’t much for playing outdoors, I had few friends and I absolutely hated sports.  I had other interests as well, I loved building models but that was another indoor activity.  It was a solitary activity but I enjoyed it.

My mother, however, did not approve.  She was especially critical of how much money and time I spent on books.  She scolded me and chewed me out on more than one occasion when I came home with more books.  It wasn’t a matter of her thinking I lived in a fantasy world.

She thought reading was a waste of time.

I did not know it at the time but I had inherited my natural father’s love of reading.  I also got his love of music, drawing, design, painting and a number of other creative pursuits.  I was complete unaware of this because he abandoned us when I was nine years old.  My mother hated him with a passion because of that.  Unfortunately for me, I talked and behaved and had the exact same interests as he did.  So everything I did or said that reminded my mother of him caused her to lash out at me.

I grew up believing I was worthless and unloved.

I grew up thinking that reading was somehow bad but that I had to do it anyway.  This set the stage for when I became a christian.  I was a voracious reader and here was the book with all the answers.  I read the whole New Testament all the way through in the very first week of my faith life.  Eventually I read cover to cover but concentrated on the NT to the extent that I read it at least 85 times over the next eighteen years.  I could put together a lesson or a sermon so easily that I hardly had to think about it.  And I could combine verses to prove any point I wanted to make.  Of course, I attributed that all to god but the reality of it was simply that reading something that many times made a person awfully familiar with it.

It would be a wonder if I couldn’t put lessons together.

My reading was one of the things which made me different from other church people.  There are very few christians who have actually read their bibles all the way through.  There are very few who have read any single part of it very many times.  Even the ones who claim to love the word the most haven’t got that kind of fanatical devotion to it.  Mostly it is taken in bite sized pieces and short segments and then only in the places the pastor or teacher tells them to study.  Read enough atheist blogs and you will see that atheists know the bible better than the christians because they’ve actually read it through, not just the parts they were told to read.

That right there is what makes reading dangerous.  Read the good book enough and it will convince you not to believe it.  Selective reading is necessary to retain certain doctrines and behaviors because you might find out there are other verses which completely cancel out the ones you hang your hat on.

I haven’t studied the bible much in the last several years but as you might have noticed I can still find any verse I need to make my point.  That much reading sticks with you.

Nowadays I spend several hours a day reading on the internet.  My mother could never comprehend that either.  I’m just glad I decided to defy her in this area when I was a kid.  I can’t imagine what kind of life I would be leading if I wasn’t an avid reader.

How much reading do you do?

This entry was posted on 7. June 2009 at 15:35 and is filed under communication, education, religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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