An undertaking

People who know me may know that I’m not a particularly religious person. For various personal reasons, my upbringing around the espoused ideals of Christianity didn’t exactly leave me jumping with joy for Jesus. That’s not exactly a complete or correct description. Jesus wasn’t ever really a problem so much as his followers were. I bore witness to a reasonably large amount of hypocrisy that quite honestly left me questioning the validity of the whole works. After all, it seems like a lot of people get into religion for the money. With money, comes power, and power corrupts. Followers of Christianity would think nothing of dismissing that kook Joseph Smith and Mormonism because hey, that religion was started late in the game, and Islam? Pshhh…that can’t possibly be right. Jump across the fence and you have folks on the other side of the coin giving the same dismissals to Christianity. Everybody claims only theirs is correct, the central tenets of all are often ignored, and there is archaic stuff in there that people are ok with glossing over for convenience (even as they cling to other parts). Combined with a love of science, all of this has left me rather agnostic. I’m not one to rule out the existence of a higher power, but I can’t claim to have seen evidence of the existence of such a thing either. On top of all of this, I have not read the Bible cover to cover either. I have a reasonable familiarity with all the usual stories, but can’t claim any first-hand knowledge of many of the other odds and ends I’ll occasionally stumble upon in conversation or reading. With that in mind, I’m going to take a book-by-book look at the King James version with reviews to follow. This won’t be an attempt to convert myself or you, dear reader, but more of a case of learning more about that of which I’ll periodically speak.