Originally Posted by
squern;1576953[B
]If you take the Bible as literal fact, you ignore the idea that it was written long after the events described in it, by people who were not born when they the events were supposed to have happened. You also lose the poetry, the symbolism, and the sense of analogy.
[/B]If you place the start of organised religion in the West at about 1100 AD, you have to consider the feudal nature of society, and the almost universal ignorance at the time. People then could not have coped with the ideas that are common to us now about the origin of the world and the universe, for instance.
They would not have had even the vocabulary to be able to understand it. So it was presented in easy-to-understand images and concepts.
And it was presented by people who were keen on control, obedience and deference from those seen as their inferiors.
A thousand years later, those ideas don't ring true because we have accumulated so much knowledge in the meantime, and we no longer defer to authority in the same way. In the intervening millenium, we have learned to think and reason for ourselves.
None of this means, of course, that there is not some higher power; just that the Bible is a tool a thousand years out of date, if you regard it as a literal guide for life.
The question I would ask of a person of faith would be: "If the Bible had never been written, would there be a God?"