Okay, this is directed more towards atheists who take the position I'm about to describe (though feel free to answer if you're not). Said atheists claim that that [the more humanistic] theists ignore the parts of the bible that are anti-humanist (prejudices against homosexuals, etc.) and only hold regard for the parts that are humanistic (brotherhood of man). Anyway, said atheists claim the latter position (the theistic one) is irrational, and I can understand that. However, when you look deeper into the history of the Bible, and at what it's components are, you can see that the latter position actually does makes sense. My reasoning is, that first of all, only up until the last few decades, in the western world, things such as homosexuality were seen as taboo, while things like racism, chauvinism, and intolerance of other beliefs were the norm and this system of society goes back to the dawn of man. So, it's obvious that this [primitive] way of thinking, as the social norm, would influence religion. So basically, unless God sat down and wrote every single word in the Torah, It's needless to say that when it was written, It could have corrupted by it's authors, or, it could have been corrupted by the jewish religious hierarchs over time (in fact, I think that it is extremely unlikely that such an enormous influence to thinking was never corrupted), the former and the latter holding those primitive ways of thinking. Meanwhile, the New Testament (the core of christianity) is composed of three parts. The gospel, the letters from the disciples, and Revelations. Now, the gospel is nearly flawless when it comes to brotherhood and peace, and if there are any exceptions, they may have been corrupted (one case, though not an actual change to the Bible, was the myth that the prostitute who washed Jesus' feet was Mary Magdalene, a deliberate chauvanist move by the Pope, made without any evidence whatsoever in the Bible that it was true (it was a rumor, and it persists even today)). I'm sure the letters contained some unreasonable things, but, the disciples themselves were jews, who followed the teachings of the Old Testament, and so their thoughts would have been corrupted by it. And finally, Revelations, possibly the most contrevesial book in the Bible, has some rediculous things in it, but lets not forget, that the early church, when putting the Christian Bible together, had to make some tough descisions about wich end times prophetic work was the correct one (there was more than one after all), and they chose the one that made the most sense to themselves, so basically since Revelations can not be confirmed as the true word of God, it need not be mentioned as what is religous truth and what is not. Well, that sums up the prelude to my question, my actual question is- does the high rate of corruption of the Bible, perticulary the Old Testement, as a result of religous hierarchs' own moral corruption rationalize the system of "picking and choosing" wich parts of the Bible make sense and wich don't based on the perticular beleiver's own conceptions? And, do you think that this theory (that the word of God has been corrupted enough for all of it's anti-humanistic teachings to be questionable for authenticity) is likely, or not?
