Christian vs Stan Doffish

The tract speaks like an ice breaker. If everyone is supposed to get one, it makes it easier to open a conversation.

I feel as if most people consider their spirituality to be a private thing, but I notice that they generalize their feelings. So that's why when I'm reading the Bible, I consider the possibility that the Bible writers are writing in context of their own feelings and assuming that they can generalize to the rest of the population, because after all, the Jewish people were more communal in Biblical times than they are now because they always met every day in the town square and were so unified in their daily code of life. They could safely assume that everyone was going thru the sane thing as they were. I'm not saying that God wasn't telling them what to write. I'm saying that He gave them ideas and they filtered it thru their cultural lens, so it's going to seem more passionate if an individual were to express the same feelings as the whole group. I find it clarifying to use "I" statements when reading the Bible, because then I'm there with the writer and getting a taste of the kind of zeal that God's Chosen People had throughout their history. So God can send people feelings that are words, but from the brain to the paper there is a sense of personal authorship, which is why the writing sounds slightly different for each author and we name the authors. So I find it useful to personalize the message by saying, put yourself in so and so's shoes in that historical moment and use "I." It's so much easier than reading different forms of English that came from different forms of Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. I have to admit, King James English may be challenging for those who haven't also looked at Chaucerian, Shakespearian, and Beowulfian English to get the full meaning. But a modern translation doesn't necessarily carry across the meaning either because I've seen what thought for thought looks like from Hebrew and it's so much more poetic and connected to ones life in an eerie mystic way. So I'm thinking, yes I have a particular translation in front of me and that's what's used in the tracts, but people aren't into quotes as much as they are into feelings. So why not read that quote as if it were yours, and then suddenly you realize how out of character it might seem for you because the writer was, indeed, experiencing something that you weren't experiencing, in a time you didn't live. Bringing those same feelings forward in time expresses the direness of the need to spread the message, and the need to read greater portions of the book as if the reader lived these events. That's why I would use "I" when writing Feb scripture. It may be surprising and shocking to people at first, but how else do you get into a writers head when you don't understand the language perfectly?