"Arny Krueger" wrote

Stick to audio, David. You do far better there! There's already been a
very large book written about what you don't get about the Bible. It is
called the Bible...

I've read it, even the bits that believers prefer not to. So, are you
denying that the OT depicts a God who is irascible, blood-thirsty and with
an ego problem? If you are I suggest you go back and re-read it.

What the OT actually is, is a lengthy origin myth for the Jewish people. If
you look at the early books particularly you will see that Yahweh is not the
universal God of today, but the partisan tribal god of the Israelites. Even
then there is a lot of historical revisionism involved, the Bible suggests
that the Israelites were monotheistic from the beginning, whereas we know
from archaeology that other gods, such as Baal continued to be worshipped by
the Israelites until after the Babylonian exile. The Israelites were far
more similar to other peoples of the time than they tried to pretend, like
most other races they believed that misfortunes were the result of the gods
being angry with them for imagined failures to follow correct rituals or to
obey religious rules. Unfortunately this way of thinking is not dead, only
the other day I read that a Muslim Imam was claiming that earthquakes were
caused by divine displeasure at "immodest women".

David.