I guess my talking points so far are —
There are plenty of different meanings within life.
The “Utilitarian” ethics of John Stuart Mill are a pretty good example of ethics without religion.
Jesus clowned the religious of His day, and praised the atheist (samaritan) and the pagan (roman centurion), so, ya
(Try to do a lot of good in a lot of different ways.) is supposed to be in your post, but whenever i erase it the next one moves up here lol
The Bible is worthy of the same respect as an ancient book, like Shakespeare, but not more so.
Well i def wouldnt suggest blindly worshipping it, but it is hard to hear by design, and what one is able to hear gets involved. As we have recently witnessed, i guess. But Paul even tells us that
All writings are God-breathed, in the often mistranslated v in…idk, Timothy or somewhere? Which might apply to Shakespeare, although idk about most of today’s fiction so much, that is a relatively recent genre
The OT has plenty of lying, though; they just lied in a different way, by exaggeration, called “conquest genre.” Which no longer searches like it did even three years ago, strangely, but survives in our sports writing; “The Yankees slaughter the Mets” who died?
so, i had a little luck searching “genre writing, ancient conquest” which has to be searched that way bc of some pc game called “ancient conquest,” but one extraction might be that we have accounts of pharaohs “completely annihilating to the last man” some foreign culture two or even three times, i guess
The Bible actually has a lot of problems, but then, I guess so does Shakespeare.
i suggest that any problems in the Bible are perceived rather than actual, and it should pay dividends to delve deeper into them, as they are often indicators of where wisdom might be lacking. Usually some meme has been misidentified, i think? Often by the religious, and their definition has just been accepted, which i could easily fill this page with stuff like that, Yah judging us at literal death, etc
Furthermore, the Father judges no one…or Who Jesus is, really, stuff like that
If the Bible seems wrong to you at some point, you might seek the opposite of whatever concept you find wrong, as it is likely to be in there somewhere too