Hellfire? and fundamentalist, fear-based religious doctrines

[Monica]

As if the dude would write us a letter and be incapable to make it something we can understand.

I often say something like, "Rather than limit myself to a single book, written by humans thousands of years ago, I prefer to marvel at the wisdom found in numerous books and traditions from all over the world. I just don't believe that the Creator of this vast and magnificent UniVerse would have entrusted all knowledge to a single primitive tribe and expect everyone in the world to be smart enough to figure out that this book contains all the secrets to eternity, when there are so many other sources of knowledge that make more sense."

They then say, "God is so powerful he made sure that the Bible got recorded, passed down, and translated properly."

Which is basically saying that God's infinite power is being expressed in his ability to make something confusing, but we're supposed to trust it's from God anyway, no matter how confusing and nonsensical it is.

(For the record, I acknowledge that there is much beauty and STO teaching in the Bible, in particular the teachings of Jesus. It's the rigid belief that every word in the Bible is the 'word of God' while other lost books and scriptures from other traditions are 'satanic' that I have an issue with.)

I think the real value in the Bible is one of discernment: To realize that we needn't believe some authority (believe in the Bible as authoritative just because we were taught to), and to be able to discern which parts of the Bible are STO and which are STS.