Personally, I find any Holy book to be nothing more than a series of stories to help set your moral compass (akin to Aesops Fables) as well as "wives tales" to help teach the population about proper diet and survival for the time in which they originated. Alot of these diet and survival stories are severely outdated and provide incomplete or inaccurate information, like using a 19th century industrial manufacturing processes for work today (can you say mercury, lead, and asbestos?). Shellfish are seen as an abomination (Leviticus) and pork is seen as "dirty" because at the times these were introduced to their respective holy books, the population did not have the safe and clean harvesting, preparation, and storage capabilities we have today, and because it was easier to write them off as "dirty" because they didn't have the understanding of bacteria, fungus, disease, and why people would get sick and die from eating them. They wrote their "policies" and stories based on the limited information they had, and unlike the manufacturing manuals and policies we have generated over the last hundred or so years, the "policies" became hard centuries old, unquestioned and unchanged.
I also agree with Highway in that these stories originated 2000 years ago and were passed on by word of mouth for centuries before they were ever written. Then they were re-written by their respective religious figures who have been proven time and time again to be very politically biased. Additionally, how many Kings, Lords, Sultans, etc had sections of the Bible possibly re-written to "allow" their actions to be ok (Can you say King Henry VIII?)? These revisions were to allow these heads of state to avoid religious fall-outs, not to update them like the manual example I referred to above.
Combine all of that with the language translations. Has anyone seen an American movie translated to Mandarin, then have re-translated english subtitles across the bottom (lookup Mandarin Return of the Jedi on youtube sometime)? Even the original intent of what was said is oftentimes butchered.
I have no issues with people using them as a moral compass. There are alot of great life lessons to be learned on how to be a good person and productive member of society (kindness, love, trust, friendship, honor, humility, etc). It's when they start using the Bible as fact is when I start having issues. I like to use the current internet cliche: Pics or it didn't happen.
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<puts on fire-resistant suit>
oking: Just briefly weighing in on the subject, I say the question is disingenuous and has become an oversimplified point of polarization. Iraq had WMD - chemical, biological, and pre-nuclear. This is fact. Did the state of readiness of Iraqi WMD warrant an invasion? This is the subjectively debatable question. Many people believed based on what they had seen that it was so. Many people were skeptical and unconvinced. I propose that this is metaphorical to the present discussion.
