I grew up in a firmly "independent evangelical" household. What that meant is we believed Catholics, Lutherans, Mormons, etc, were all various flavors of Sinner

I grew up in a firmly "independent evangelical" household. What that meant is we believed Catholics, Lutherans, Mormons, etc, were all various flavors of Sinner, Idolater, and False Prophet. The bible was 100% true, every word protected by god through the ages. Sunday and Wednesday's were filled with hours and hours of listening to overweight preachers struggle to draw a correlation to 3 out-of-context verses and whatever mortal sin they were railing against that day (it was never, ever Gluttony. Usually some sex thing) In my experience the Bible is only hard to understand when you're frantically, desperately trying to extract a per-determined result for your modern day problems out of what are fundamentally the oral traditions of dirt farmers. When read as a historical piece of combined fable, family history, nation history, and oral tradition, it's an interesting if hard to follow book. It's obviously written by dozens of writers at different times. Reading different translations reveals obvious bias of previous translators, making it more interesting when viewed as one of the worlds longest-lasting games of Telephone. If you're going to take it as advice for life, well, look around you. Dozens of different religious, many fighting for centuries because their interpretation of dirt farmer words is better than yours. And they'll kill you for it too.