The Bible is Over-Glorified, and I Don't Buy It

Or, What's Wrong with Rational Thinking?

It is not my belief that the bible is anything more than a book written by men for (most likely) the reasons it most obviously serves the purposes of. Those purposes, I assert, are a curious admixture of population control and contextual reinforcement of a desired atmosphere of guilt-ridden fear.

Honestly, what else does the bible accomplish? I hear so many say that it is the source of "hope and inspiration", but in the face of what? What 'problem' does it address that it does not, in a breath prior or proceeding, create by virtue of context and condemnation? Would 'sin' exist in your vocabulary or consciousness if you were never introduced to the bible? Would you have some sort of instinctive fear of it if you were never told that you have to?

Let's run a short comparison here. What would life be like if the bible didn't exist? I'll give the fundamentalists a moment to calm their hyperventilation, and then we'll commence.

Done? Good.

If the bible never existed, our society; indeed, the society of all the western world and (to a slightly lesser extent) world society as a whole; would be very different. There is no way to predict or extrapolate how different, as there's simply too much of a time frame involved to even make permissible the taking of wild stabs at guessing.

What has the bible done for us? Well, it's given us a guide for life, right? It's the poor man's handbook to living and dying in the grace of God Almighty, yes?

That's wash. Why is it wash? I'll tell you why. It's wash because everything depicted in the bible has no continuity outside it's own reference. It, by demerit of it's own method and assertion, demands that the reader accept what it defines as truth no matter what the reader thinks. It condemns questioning of it's veracity, and it, by proxy, condemns thinking about it in any way that doesn't agree with it.