I'm going to say this. Every religion has a story that is mostly ridiculous and irrational. The plot holes have plot holes. The biggest issue I have with the bible is the assumption that magic exists without at any point proving it or providing even a cursory fringe allegation to suggest where magic originated. And it is the fundamental basis for the whole bible.
The whole story is about a magical being doing magic and proving he's the supreme being because of his ability to do magic. And then he has a magical son born from magic that can do magic and prove that he's the son of God by doing magical things. Does he save his people from Rome as the Messiah was prophesied to do? Did he bring about world peace as the Jews believed their messiah would do according to prophecy? No. He save only believers from a virtual problem creating a virtual crime with a punishment not proven to exist at all. And he didn't even save them from doing the crime (sin) to God and each other; only from the unproven fantasy consequences of the crime. We all die but Christians believe we'll all be brought back to life, judged, and then either murdered, executed, or tortured forever depending on your brand of Christianity.
Should we believe ANY of that? No. Should we throw out the bible? ...no.
Why not throw it out if it isn't true? For a strictly logical person having a rational argument it seems irrational to hold on to a book that purports to be true and is wildly deceptive. We're told not to lie and this book tells the biggest lie in human history. We're told not to kill but millions have died because of this book. Why is it okay?
Every religion has a ridiculous story that ultimately doesn't matter in the literal sense. The story is just a container for a shared set of ideas, dreams, goals, aspirations, hope, etc. God is a symbol of love, justice, perfection, etc. He is a container for our own thoughts and ideas that we, together, turn into something bigger than ourselves. These stories have examples of good and evil, both the act and the consequences. I don't believe in restricting one's self to the Jewish/Hebrew narrative of the story because biblical morality is relative and subjective and I have an aversion to that. It's works if you're on the right team. But if you were born on the wrong team, as we found out with slavery, no amount of the bible told them they were wrong. In fact it was a priest who suggested that we be used for manual labor. And it was the good ship Jesus and others that brought us to the Americas.
The bible, because we read it from one perspective, secretly psychologically trained us to also be one-sided and rationalize evil as long as we were the ones doing it. The bible trains you not to care about the plight of the Canaanites or the people of Jericho or the people of Sodom and Gomorrah who had no record of prophets being sent to preach to them and no real proof that they were all as corrupt as it makes them out to be. It attacks your empathy on the basis of "well they were sinners". But holy hypocrisy Batman! You're all sinners too according to the self-same book. So according to the book you can all get some. We can all lose our heads or have our children dashed to pieces and our wives raped and taken as spoils of war.
But again... the story itself is ridiculous because its not about the story. It's about the unquantifiable feelings that religions use the story to contain. We can pick these stories apart but we can't pick apart the feelings and the sense of spirituality and the path of righteousness that are fundamentally attached. I simply which that we all weren't bound to the literal stories and could go beyond the perspectives of the sinners who wrote the book and see it as God would see it; judge it as God would judge it. Not black or white. Not love or hate. But through the eyes of balance and harmony.
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