Quoting Trent W. Buck (trentbuck@gmail.com):
The response I was actually expecting is that USA is a Christian millet, so non-Christian USians need to read their holy book to understand their legislation.
Heh. My experience was not that, in part because I was raised (part of my boyhood) in California, not in the Bible Belt or Oklahoma. In part because my parents were non-militantly non-religious. We did observe Christmas and Easter, but I as a boy would have been utterly astonished by the notion of these being Christian. Christmas was a tree and presents, and a dinner with family. Easter was decorating and finding eggs in the outside lot of one of my aunts and uncle's house, and then a dinner with family. And, the larger point is, in California, nobody pushed religion at you. That would have been deemed terribly impolite and Not Done. I was distantly aware that religion existed, but it had no centrality in public life, because that was (and still is) deemed inappropriate. In 1980, I mentioned during my time as a kibbutz volunteer that my family had observed Christmas in this fashion until 1968 when Dad was killed by the negligence of Boeing Company and his employer Pan American World Airways. One of my fellow kibbutzniks, an Israeli, made a comment about 'you Christians', and I boggled and said 'Excuse me? _Whom_ are you calling a Christian? I don't hate Christians, and some of my best friends are such, but I never said I _was_ one, and haven't been one for a day in my life, thankyouverymuch.' I was obliged to explain that, among other things, we Scandinavians had been celebrating that seasonal occasion since long before Christianity showed up, under the name, Jul, that it is still known by in the Germanic-language Nordic countries such as my father's native Norway. So, Christmas doesn't necessarily imply Christian, dammit. Get it right, my Israeli friend. And never accuse me of membership in a Middle-Eastern death cult again. Because of a historical oddity, I am technically an arguable Christian on account of baptism, even though absolutely not in any real sense: When my parents found they could not conceive children, and arranged adoption of first me and then my sister in infancy from private parties, they found to their great annoyance that a fossil statute of the state of California still required adoptive parents to give their children some bare minimum amount of religious instruction and education. (Christianity was not required.) Mom and Dad therefore sought locally for the least-bothersome option. They found a new social-activism-oriented congregation, that didn't yet even have its own building. (It met at, I believe, a high school's building on weekends.) The main attraction was the minister, a great and good man named Reverand Stephen Peabody. Rev. Peabody met the highest ideals of Christianity by my standards, in that he didn't care what if anything you believed. He just wanted to help make the world a better place, and he and his congregants would be found helping and feeding the poor, doing civil rights actions, and other deeds of good character. My family thus became in theory congregants from 1958 to 1962, and I attended Sunday School there at which I remember colouring books and instructive toys but no religion whatsoever. Many years later, when the elderly Rev. Peabody and his wife retired, they sold everything they owned and moved to rural Bolivia to spend the rest of their lives trying to teach and feed poor rural children and their families. And that was their story.
Personally, I tried to read an English translation, but didn't get past about page ten. That seems to be about par for holy books for me.
The key to reading the Tanakh (the Old Testament) is to prepare to skip great gobs that are just peculiar wastes of time, such as all the begats, and read it in the framing of ancient politics, as if you were reading about the Wars of the Roses. And of course there is obvious and less-obvious mythology lying and pretending to be history, but you can read all that tall-tale gibberish and just think 'This is mythology, less accessible than Edith Hamilton, but also less grim and terse than the Eddas and less alien than Hesiod.' There is some fine writing, such as the tales of King Saul and King David. The history is suspect and sometimes outright fraudulent, e.g., the invasion of Canaan and the 40 years in Sinai and escape from Egypt, none of which happened and are pure literary fantasy. Even the _Iliad_ is better founded in fact. But you don't read it as history. You read it as politics and commentary on the human condition. It helps to adopt the (imperfect) framing used for the Tanakh by Jewish tradition, which divides it (the 'Old Testament') into three parts. (1) Torah (law), the first five books. Of course it's not just the 613 commandments to the Jews from God, but that's the concept applied. (2) Navi'im (prophets). These are the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, etc., social critics of several stages of the (claimed) history, and a meaty source of insight into character and society. (3) Ketuvim (holy writings). This is the grab-bag of Everything Else, stuff like the Book of Esther, a bloody-minded fairy tale set in Persia. For the New Testmament, the main attraction is the four Gospels, which comprise the three 'synoptic' ones, the ones that are in close agreement about the life and teachings of Jesus, and then the outlier, the Gospel of John, from an author who spent way too much time warping his mind on Greek mystery cults and tried to overlay that on a biography of Jesus. Following that, you have many books largely concerned with the annoying and somewhat retrograde street-politician figure Saul of Tarsus (yclept 'Saint Paul'), the guy who inherited leadership of early Christianity when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and Christianity's incumbent (Judiasm-oriented) leadership along with it. Saul transformed Christianty away from Judiasm, intuiting that he needed to broaden its appeal, which paved the way for Emperor Constantine later to use it as a unifying principle for his east-leaning Roman Empire. Saul is also where much of Christianity's misogyny came from (or started and was perpetuated). An Israeli friend called him 'a one-eyed Jew who couldn't get laid', which is about the size of it. ISTR that if the book has 'Epistle' (letter) in its title, it's in almost every case Saul writing to somewhere to speak in either a selling-his-religion role or writing to other church functionaries to tell them what to do. (I'm perhaps a bit vague on Saul/Paul's epistles because he struck me as repulsive in his ways of thinking.) And, as with the Tanakh (Old Testament) there is the grab-bag of stuff, some of which will cause you much WTFery, such as the Book of the Revelation of Saint John [of Patmos], which is like a terrible B-movie horror film directed by someone on magic mushrooms. (One theory is that it's mostly political allegory, avoiding using contemporary real names of powerful people so the author would not be killed.)
Shakespeare I had no problem with because it's mostly cross-dressing and fart jokes. The comedies, anyway. The tragedies and histories never interested me much.
They are worthwhile. And all of Shakespeare matters because a huge amount of the vocabulary and expressions of modern English come directly from his words. Seriously.