The Christian bible has been scrutinised, criticised, analysed and debated more than any other book in history, yet it still forms the foundation of faith for billions of Christians.
Yet amongst those billions there are massively divergent interpretations and understandings of what the book actually says, as though it contains a mass of oftentimes contradictory, regularly vague and imprecise parables and anecdotes from which a range of people can drag something to reinforce their preconceptions and then armour them from criticism with the shield of 'respect my beliefs'.
It is essentially a collection of books written by people who have witnessed God in their lives.
Allegedly. Those many, many people you cite who have studied it have concluded that: the author(s) of the Old Testament are largely unknown, but that the individuals they depict probably never existed; the authors of the New Testament are not the people to whom the New Testament is credited; many sections of the New Testament were written significant periods of time after the death of any actual figure resembling Jesus, and probably not by people who were alive at the time, perhaps not even by people who had direct access to eyewitness testimony; the various writings were selected by vested interests from a wider range of texts well after the fact; the translation from the original language(s) loses some of the cultural elements that do not traverse the divide; the subsequent choice of poetic translations (particularly into English) has massively altered the meaning of significant portions of the edited versions of the originally unreliable accounts.
As such it is prone to human error in the same way as any other witness statements.
More than that, there is a deliberate effort on the part of later editors to select for a particular purpose, to make additions, excisions and amendments to suit a particular editorial narrative and then the poetic translation to compound the effect.
But the underlying message is a profound overturning of man made aspirations, calling us all to dedicate our lives to the service of other people and God.
Is that what you get from it? I get an authoritarian message of 'don't think for yourself, knowledge is almost as bad as being female, do as you're told or suffer an eternal torment for a finite "crime"'. It's an obnoxious parcel of hate from a bully, with a follow up of trying to paper over the cracks with overt claims of 'love' and 'compassion' without changing the underlying menace of 'my way or endless torment'. That, of course, is if you decide that, like Star Wars, it's probably worth stopping before they get on to the later nonsense like the Qu'Ran or the Book of Moron.
But the most profound message of all is to realise that we are more than mere flesh and blood, and that through the power of the human soul we have been given to gift of free will to enable us to choose between good and evil, and to choose our own destiny.
Yeah, that whole 'free will' thing - where is that in the Bible? That's a creation of subsequent theologians to try and weasel their way out of the realisation that an all-powerful, all-knowing God is responsible for all of the resultant ills of his creation because, in knowing how things would turn out, he'd be responsible for choosing to instigate that particular version of reality. The Bible doesn't suggest free-will, people desperate for the Bible not to be shown to have a fundamental flaw have alleged free will without evidence.
O.
