If you have no religious background at all
You do not have to believe anything
It is the most argued-over book in the world and one of the strangest. That is reason enough to read it.
Plenty of people arrive here with no faith and no intention of acquiring one, and they are exactly as welcome as anyone else. Nothing on this site asks you to sign up to anything, and no page ends by trying to convert you.
There are two straightforward reasons to read these books even if you believe none of it.
The first is that you already live downstream of them. The idea that a person is worth something regardless of rank, the seven day week, the notion that a ruler is under the law rather than above it, the language of the abolitionist and civil rights movements, half of Western literature and most of its art — all of it argues with this book, quotes it, or grew out of it. Reading it is not piety; it is finding out what everyone has been referring to.
The second is that it is genuinely good, and much stranger than its reputation. It contains a man arguing God down over the fate of a city, a book that says everything is meaningless and then tells you to enjoy your bread, love poetry with no religious content at all, and a prophet furious at God for being too forgiving.
What this site actually is
A place to read the text with enough help that it does not defeat you. Every page assumes you know nothing and is written to be understood on a first pass.
It teaches the way Jewish tradition reads these books, because that is the tradition they come from and it has been arguing about them for longer than anyone. That tradition is unusually comfortable with disagreement — many of its central texts are records of people not reaching a conclusion. If you dislike being told what to think, you may find it more congenial than you expect.
How to read it without believing it
Read it the way you would read any serious book: ask what it is arguing, who it is arguing with, and what it wants from you. Notice when it contradicts itself, because it does, and the tradition noticed first.
Where a page here says what a text means to people who live by it, that is reported, not required. Take the parts that are true about being a person and leave the rest. That is a completely ordinary way to read this, and it always has been.
When you are ready to stop reading about it
Start with the fourteen days
Fourteen chapters, chosen so that the arc makes sense end to end. No commitment beyond reading.
Open day oneNot quite you? If you come from a Christian background