Had to come back because one of your comments is annoying, which is to use the abuse my mother took from my father and you apparently think this is what made me rebel. That wasn't it at all. It was the fact that the story itself is preposterous beyond belief. Rising humans, a sacrifice that isn't, heaven, hell, the devil, the church as a go between, robes, incense, candles, statuary and the fact that Christianity plagiarized all religions before it to make a god badder and more powerful and then commanded people to not believe in any other god before him.
To me, it's a very bad and contrived novel written by controlling white males to keep women and the populace under their collective thumbs. My parents were just following the edicts of the church which you now ignore because now after centuries they say "Oh, just forget all that stuff about slavery, homosexuals, women are inferior and property. We reached a deeper understanding now that we are losing people right and left. The beliefs and morals of secular people are cool with us now.
The God of the Bible should be credited with stopping human sacrifice.
The more archeologists discover the remains of ancient religions, the more they realize just how common human sacrifice was in ancient times to pagan gods. Many, like probably yourself, are appalled at the story of God telling Abraham to sacrifice his son to him on an alter. However, for Abraham, this would not have seemed odd considering all of the pagan religions around him did the same. God then stopping Abraham from going through with it, sent a message to future followers of the God of the Bible, which was that the God of the Bible was not like other pagan gods that required a human sacrifice. In fact, God thought of it as an abomination. God then removed all of the peoples in the Holy Land that did sacrifice their children to pagan gods like Molech. I realize you find the command to only worship the one true God as trivial and arrogant, but the reality is when they did not this is the sort of behavior they devolved into. Unfortunately, when we disconnect from God this is the sort of behavior we all tend to devolve into.
As for slavery, the slavery of the Bible was in no way like the slavery of the Deep South in the US back in the 1800's. The slavery in the US was a con game of convincing the populace that the slaves were nothing more than glorified apes, all so they could have indefinite free labor along with their offspring. It was a never-ending supply of free labor and oppression. That was the purpose. However, the slavery in the Bible that was allowed was not like this. First of all, they rested on the Sabbath. Secondly, they could only be slaves for about 7 years at which time they were given their freedom to get a new start on life. Thirdly, there was no underlying notion of them being racially or intellectually inferior to the rest of the populace. It was merely a way for them to survive when they were having hard economic times. Moses freeing the Hebrews from Egyptian slavery, which was more in line with the US slavery in the 1800's, is message enough from the God of the Bible that slavery was not the ideal goal from man. Christ even mentioned that people became a slave to sin, which was what he came to set us free from. So, I think you are not being intellectually honest in your harsh assessment regarding the Bible and slavery.
As for women, women were treated very well in ancient times from a Biblical perspective. Back then, women had zero rights as it was survival of the fittest and the strongest. However, in the Biblical narrative we have women for the first time being held in high regard, whether it be Miriam who was the sister of Moses who was a prophetess, or Debrah who was a military commander of the Hebrew people, or two holy books that were exclusively about women of the Hebrew people, one of which ended up saving the entire Jewish race in the books of Ruth and Ester. And as Jesus mentioned when we die there will be no distinction between men and women, thus being equals.
