Deceptions and Myths of the Bible by Lloyd Graham

Ever wonder why the Bible (especially the Old Testament) is so strange? After reading this book, you won’t think it so strange after all. But you will wonder why so many people take it literally and treat it as though it was scripture. Includes a fairly easy to understand thesis of how Adam, Cain, Noah, Moses, Abraham, Jacob, Elijah, Samson, etc. are all actually one in the same creation/evolution principle/myth told over and over again. And all this time you thought God enjoyed killing people just for sport. ;) If every believing Jew and Christian could just open their mind long enough to read this book, the world could be changed forever. I don't believe everything in this book (but so far in life I've yet to find a book that I could believe in 100%), but it is an interesting read. Some of the scholarism is shaky to say the least. Here are just a few of the many great quotes from the book:

“All religions have good moral teachings, but religion is a duality--a morality to live by and a philosophy to think by. Today most people know that the philosophy of Christianity is false and so have thrown out the morality with it. ...(by throwing out the bad philosophy and keeping the good morality)... This would not be religion but ethics, morality practiced instead of preached.”

“The mystery of life is manmade, not God-made. When an ignorant priesthood introduced the supernatural into a perfectly natural universe, it threw confusion into the human mind. The result was a myriad of warring religions and philosophies all trying like the blind men with the elephant, to explain the whole by something felt (emotional) instead of seen (mental).”

“Let us realize that priests are not revealers of truth but only keepers of traditions, and that the purpose of both the scribes and their later translators was not to reveal the truth but to lay the basis of a theistic religion, based on the supernatural and the terrifying.”

Referring to the Crusades... “There are those who say, it doesn’t matter what men believe; it’s what they do that matters. Yet what they do is but the outer expression of their beliefs.