Religion? Nah, I'll pass...:(

Religion. There, I have started, and so I'll finish. What is this 'religion' thing? Point by point, if anyone would ever look at it, it fails, miserably. You are not born a Christian person, anymore than you are born an Islamic person or a Jewish person, or any one of the hundreds of other flavours of Religion. You are, most likely, someone who is born with complete innocence, a total lack of understanding of hatred, bigotry, and Religion. What are these things to you, when you have just been born? They are nothing. Unfortunately, whatever household you are born into will have its own history of 'sheeple' - no-one really analyses it, or gives it any kind of rational explore. Your father may well be Christian, as his father was before him, and so on, for as long as the records will show. You are then exposed to the Church, and effectively brainwashed for the next few years. You will be told that this is the right way to do things. In fact, you will be told that this is the only way to do things! The exposure to the Bible will be selective - you will not get to see the Dark Side of the Bible, unless you actually sit down, and read it through, cover to cover. You will certainly not be told of the many inconsistencies within those pages - how one book tells you one thing, and then that is contradicted by somewhere else. Back when I was growing up, we only had Christianity, and in the sleepy suburbia that I got to know there was virtually no exposure to anything other than Christianity. We had school assembly, all sang lahdida, said the prayers, etc, etc, much as we did in Church. So, what is this Bible? The version we have - version! That's a good start. The word of God, and we are looking at a particular version of the word of God! Anyway, the version we mainly use is this King James one - http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/. This is where we get into muddy waters. Point number one - the Bible was most definitely NOT written in English! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Version. The Bible is a collection of various texts, all from various sources. Whatever happened to this, then? Talk about selective editing! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_apocrypha I really doubt that the translators would have been impartial, as they were all (I don't doubt) extremely intelligent people, obviously capable of dealing with more than just English, but they were of the Church! Since they were all Clergy, how accurate and impartial would their translations have been? Seriously, if you think for a moment that they would have done a good professional job of translating, then you are a fool! So we have a Bible that has been translated from previous translations, possibly quite a few times, by different people, in different centuries, each with different ‘reasons’, so how accurate is this Word of God? Since we have some of the history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vetus_Latina is shocking reading, as it outlines some of the starting points which eventually lead up to the current Bible. Then came http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgate and along the way http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexapla, and http://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/11765-origen#374 and http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Encyclopedia_%281913%29/Hexapla We clearly have a Bible which has grown over centuries, been changed, added to (and one must assume deleted from?) by many, many people. How can you truly say that the modern interpretation of the writings that amount to the current Bible can be even remotely the Word of God?