How do Religious people have faith despite the Bible?

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This is a question which has always baffled me why do religious people have faith despite what their books say.

I mean lets look at the old testament for one, when Samson died he took hundreds of Philistine civilians with him and before killed innocent Philistine citizens to pay off a debt. How can people look at this work and think their god is good.

How?

Playing the role of apologist:

Because God brought those people into the world, he has the divine right to take them out.

They were taught to believe in the bible at a very young age, before they were able to think critically.
Becouse of this, "God is good and everything in the bible is true" is ingrained in their brains, just as strongly as "my mother speaks english" and "my country is the best, despite what anyone says".

This is true for all religions, not just christianity (with the bible), and it is a bit sad if you think about it...

Isn't that called free-will?

I think it is a bit sad not to believe in God.

I'm sure that's true of most. But lots of people become Christians for the first time as teens and adults.

Primarily because they don't take the Bible literally.

They realize that the content might have been "inspired" by God, but that the "revelations" contained within it came from multiple sources--all of whom have their own "take" on God.

And they remember that the Bible was written between about 700 BC and 100 AD. And that at least of the substance was applicable to that time, but not to ours.

This is a good explanation. I really don't take the Old Testament literally - most of the stories are just not true to life for me (especially since I'm a realist).

So how is a person supposed to separate the real from the fake if that's the case?

What do you mean?

The New Testament (for me) is more realistic in that I believe that Jesus died on the cross for our sins - people are being put to death on crosses today by ISIS.

Is that what you are talking about?

Like the story of Sampson - I read over it because I really do not like reading the Old Testament. Sampson ended up losing his strength because his hair was cut? Sounds like a mental disorder to me.

Metaphors "constitute the only means of communicating the experience of the Numinous." (I'm not sure if that applies to the bible, since I'm not really acquainted with it.)

Reason is overestimated, and so is objective truth. Reason is useful as a tool and good for leisure activities. Unless objective truth is a means of improving mankind or exercising power, it is at least no better than e.g. aesthetic truth, which may give rise to ever-higher philosophies of life.

Very well said. I think the only time we can take scripture literally is in the New Testament, where God with a human face speaks to us directly as Christ. Or at least, that's what I believe.

It is written within the New Testament that "...Paul, as his manner was, went in unto them, and three sabbath days reasoned with them out of the scriptures," (Acts 17:2). In fact, both the Old and New Testaments refer 34 times about using reason (logic) to determine biblical intent such as fact versus parable. So, even the characters within the Bible knew that care and logic had to be used when reading and deciphering the Bible's words.

The New Testament was introduced in order to update and/or correct the Old Testament;

The Testament of Truth was recently written and initially finished a couple of decades ago by the very Messiah himself, although there are still updates made even into this very year, and The Testament of Truth has been introduced in order to correct all previous so-called scriptural-writings or so-called holy books because they ALL contain error and it is ONLY The Testament of Truth that is without spiritual-error due to having been written by the very hand of the ONE «sin-free» man who had come into this universe in order to educate everybody as to the TRUTH (the REAL Truth) that is given by God.

My guess is that most believers take the Bible as a collection of stories that contain truths about the human condition.

Not as a collection of true stories.

The subset who are extreme literalists who do take the Bible as literal fact are actually a modern phenomenon that sprang up around 1900.