> Even today with easy access, a majority of Christians have not read it.
Not read all of it certainly. However, most Christians have definitely read some of it. The Bible is not "the canonical text" for two reasons: there are disagreements about what is canonical, and it is not a single text, it is a collection of works.
Not reading all of it - why should we? What is the point of Christians reading things such as (most of?) Leviticus which is a collection of rules that do not apply to Christians? It is perfectly reasonable to be selective about which books within a large collection people read.
It's like commenting on the book Abundance without having read it.
Or talking about the Death Panels in ObamaCare.
I haven't read Mein Kampf / The Communist Manifesto but I would bet some pages if not chapters are agreeable to a lay-person while the overall theme wasn't.
This is how we end with the Dunning-Kruger effect meaning worse performers rate their own performance than high performers rate their own performance. (The actual effect found was that low-performers could not distinguish between a high or low performance; and although they rated themselves higher than they were it was still lower than the self-ratings of high performers for all tasks but Humor).
Abundance is a book. The Bible is an anthology of various works - letters, poetry, biography, historical chronicles and all kinds of things. You can comment on the books you have read.
You also need to interpret it, which makes it a very hard read. You cannot really understand it without knowing the context (historical, cultural, personal) and about things like disputes about correct translations.
You also do not have to attach the same authority or relevance to all of it. As I said, the laws of Leviticus are irrelevant to Christians and we simply do not follow them (we eat pork, for example). They might be worth reading as historical background. In general the gospels and epistles are the most relevant for most people.
When you say all of it, what constitutes all? Different denominations accept different books - no Judith in protestant Bibles, no Ethiopic Clement except in Tewahedo (Ethiopian) ones, etc. Its not usual for individuals to disagree with their denominations, but it certainly happens. It is definitely reasonable to read the books you think are relevant.
Why would it matter, because Christianity is very much not about following a large set of rules. It's more (some branches of) Jewry, that is famous for knowing and following a large set of rules. Most of the interaction with the priests is about how that is not actually sufficient and doesn't actually matters all that much. There is even a passage how someone following all the rules still won't succeed (the rich young man). The only real hard rule fits into a single sentence (double commandment of loving).
> it's a collection of works that you agree with and want to associate with?
Disagreeing is a normal and expected part of the faith and is the topic of some books in the collection. If you don't disagree with anything in the bible, I don't thing you are actually believing, you are just regurgitating things. The bible is a side effect of the formation of cultures and the getting to know in a relationship, and there is quite a development in it.
> I haven't read Mein Kampf / The Communist Manifesto but I would bet some pages if not chapters are agreeable to a lay-person while the overall theme wasn't.
Maybe in the Communist Manifesto, but Mein Kampf is total bullshit.
> Death Panels in ObamaCare.
No clue what that is, must be an US insider.
> This is how we end with the Dunning-Kruger effect
You know that Dunning-Kruger effect is autocorrelation, right? https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-k...
> Even today with easy access, a majority of Christians have not read it.
Depending on the denomination, 50% to 100% of the service they do revolves around reading from that book.
> preachers of the Church
Also what do you understand by "the Church".
> So the "employees" of X are untrustworthy, but the collection of circular letters for the "employees" of X is not. This doesn't make any sense.
I am not saying anything about whether the text of various ideologies is trustworthy or next. I am contending that contrary to the original comment I was replying to, it's not actually text that converts people to most ideologies. For Christianity, people generally adopt it for reasons like: being born into a Christian household/society; societal pressure; a desire for community; having received charitable aid when they needed it most; mid-life crises seeking a purpose in life; reckoning with mortality after a near-death experience or losing a loved one; witnessing something they perceive as miraculous. There are many, many reasons people become Christians, but I have never once heard of someone being converted merely by reading the Bible, and I suspect that such an occurence is exceedingly rare relative to all the other means of adoption.
My question wasn't about denominations, I wanted to know what you think the church IS. Because the definition I am familiar with is the collective of all people (and creatures) believing in Christ. With that "people get to know about Christ only from the Church" is circular.
> I am contending that contrary to the original comment I was replying to, it's not actually text that converts people to most ideologies.
That I agree with. But that is not what you wrote.
