I grew up in a church that was consciously literalist and held the Bible as inerrant. I’m no longer religious, but looking back with the blinders of those doctrines on, I have to wonder if I might still be a believer if those ideas hadn’t been drilled into me.

I’m all on board with the Jesus of the Gospels; he seems like a pretty cool dude who didn’t have any time for people in power exploiting the downtrodden. But the Old Testament, on the other hand, is a mess, and it includes passages casting God as a bloodthirsty murderer making the Pharoah resist Moses just so that he could send more plagues against Egypt, prophets speaking for God in the language of the abusive boyfriend who tells his partner that it’s her fault that he’s hurting her (basically every one of the prophets, but take Ezekiel 16 as a representative example), God guiding Joshua through an ethnic cleansing of Canaan, and God commanding the genocide of the Amalekites and then punishing King Saul for being insufficiently thorough about it.

Let’s not even mention that weird bit of erotic literature that’s tucked into the middle for some reason (and don’t try to sell me on the idea that “Your breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle” is a metaphor for anything other than really nice boobs)…

Then, on the other side of the coin, you have the letters of Paul where, when you look at it without bias, it’s plainly clear that he’s a religious conservative trying to pull the radical early church back into line with his own personal mores. Small wonder that hundreds of years later, when the church was The Church and falling into conservative patterns of orthodoxy, they picked the epistles they did to canonize as The Complete and Unerring Word of God…