Reading the Bible, Reasonably

EVERY AMERICAN HAS A FAVORITE FOUNDER, except those Americans unaware of America's relatively recent founding. Among mine are Jefferson, Franklin, and Paine. Of these three, my current favorite is Thomas Paine, though it varies from day to day, and is always a close contest. Paine did more to inspire the revolution than anyone, by writing "Common Sense", which sold half a million copies in January of 1776. Another of his essays, "The Age of Reason", published in 1794, logically dismantles the Christian faith, without harming a hair on the head of Jesus Christ. Paine, like everyone else, could plainly see the enlightened message of Joshua one of Joseph, and, like many other enlightened people, he cold see the absurdity, brutality, and barbarism of the Christian faith, and its Bible Every devout christian should read The Age of Reason", and every non christian should read the bible, the most important book in history. Regarding the bible, Paine wrote:......"When we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions and unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God.".......for my part, I sincerely detest the Bible." .........That's Paine, not me, but I generally agree with him. I don't "detest" the bible, because I think it provides good insights into the psychology of primitive cultures,,,, clues to their history, tough it is not a reliable history text, and it makes good fiction, full of those twin towers of pulp fiction, sex, and violence. What I do detest is that two billion people, incredibly, consider this barbarous manuscript, pieced together haphazardly over centuries by thousands of decidedly ungodly humans, the "Word of God". At the very thought that the word of god is contained is some sex novel, as my father put it, I roll my eyes, marvel, scoff, and sometimes laugh out loud. Judeo-Christianity, like its god, is a primitive, barbaric, cruel, insane religion, and the world would be better off without it, better off to have replaced it, long ago, with sanity, sense, and science. The essential message and morality of Jesus, which had been expressed hundreds of years before he lived by many, including Confucius, is a beacon of brilliance embedded within a wasteland of primitive, barbaric, if illuminating literature and belief. Thomas Jefferson said, when he took a razor and cut the bible to shreds, and constructed his own version consisting mainly of Christ's teachings, that he was "extracting diamonds from a pile of dung." The Holy bible is the most influential book every written, but far from the best, and certainly not the word of god, unless god happens to be a psychopathic serial killer and mass murderer, which, one must trust, she is not. To find the world of god, study nature. The truly enlightened people throughout history and today have always understood that. What else is there? As Goethe said:....."It is beyond me how anyone can believe that god speaks to us in books and stories. If the world does not directly reveal itself to us, and if our hearts do not tell us what we owe ourselves and other, we will most certainly not find this in books, which at best are designed only to give names to our mistakes.".....And......."Behold the phenomena, for they are the doctrine".......I couldn't've said it better myself.