If the Bible had a Parental Guide Sticker

trophy33 said:

"Based on the content descriptions in the search results, a book containing depictions of murders, slavery, rape, incest, genocide, and post-apocalyptic themes would likely receive an R or NC-17 rating due to its disturbing and mature subject matter."

AI response, I think its quite accurate. At least the Old Testament should not be given to children. There are children Bibles, which may be a better way to get them familiar with the stories.

Click to expand...

HTacianas said:

I wouldn't consider the bible to be suitable for all ages. I would probably rate it at best PG-13. But that is how the bible has been treated all along anyways. We have "children's bibles" that censor a lot of the information to make it suitable for younger people.

Click to expand...

Ted-01 said:

I wouldn't go for the PG-13. As I understand it... back in the olden days... Scripture was used as a primer for people of all ages as they learned to read. So, I think that children can it just fine, especially with a guardian explaining.

I would also add to your Parental Guide points:
-readership encouraged.

Click to expand...

pgp_protector said:

Yea, some of it really isn't appropriate for the little ones.
Mommy?
What does it mean "she lusted for her paramours, Whose flesh is like the flesh of donkeys, And whose issue is like the issue of horses..." ?

Click to expand...

okay said:

We made the mistake of allowing our children free access to the bible, especially after our church gave them bibles in 4th grade. That was how we were raised so we didn’t think much of it.

One of our kids was a prolific reader, requiring at least one trip to the local library each week. We knew some of what she read in the bible (we talked about it) but didn’t think she even had time to read a lot more of it. Only years later we learned that before the age of 10 she had read Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Daniel and the Revelation of John. As a result she had literal nightmares about the bible. I think this had a profoundly negative impact on her. At best this was negligence, at worst spiritual abuse.

Even adults have a hard time with the divinely-ordered genocide and other violence, treatment of women as property and virgin girls as spoils of war to be kidnapped after murdering all other people and animals in the city, etc.

On a lighter note, the bible is what sent her to the dictionary to understand the meaning of ‘wh0re’, ‘prostitute’, ‘lust’, etc. Also while in elementary school.

For sure PG-13 for most of it. And just telling kids not to read certain books is not a safeguard. She recalls a Sunday school teacher telling her that Revelation is hard to understand and really only for grown-ups, which of course made her want to read it.

Don’t make the same mistakes we did.

Click to expand...

jas3 said:

This question is usually badly motivated (not saying you are, only pointing out that it's normally a "gotcha" question). It's used as a setup to an argument against censoring obscenity: "we rate media based on things that occur anywhere within it, and we restrict kids' consumption of this media based on its rating, so we should focus on the lurid details as much as possible and give it a terrible rating, and therefore we should restrict kids from reading the Bible. But you don't want that, you want kids to read the Bible. So to be consistent, you have to allow this other book which contains themes of sexual immorality and graphic descriptions of said immorality to be placed in the kids' section."

The people who make this argument aren't looking for rational discussion. They don't want to hear that there's an obvious difference between the two; they know there is, they just want to promote degeneracy. So for them I don't even entertain the question.

For the sake of discussion, though, I think the most fair way to break it down is book-by-book. For those who want to harp on Ezekiel 23:20, Ezekiel can be R. Most other books would be PG or G.

Click to expand...