Religious belief has been declining in recent decades, and we don't seem to be doing very well without it. People are developing fanatical and intolerant attachments to their political affilations or other cult-like followings, there is a proliferation of conspiracy theories, and there seems to be a decaying of the social fabric -- loneliness, apathy, and dysfunction are rampant, particularly among young men.

But is religious scripture a tolerable source of wisdom?

I have gone through religious phases as an adult, and read a great deal of the Bible.

There are two competing explanations for the origin of the Bible:

1. It was divinely inspired.
2. It was written by relativey primitive people at the dawn of recorded history.

Based on my reading, the evidence is overwhelming for explanation "B". In Genesis, there are many signs of the story having been passed down orally for generations (with embellishment) before being written down:

• There are miracles left and right.
• God talks directly to people frequently (usually while they were alone with no other witnesses).
• People live lifespans of many centuries.

As one proceeds through the book, the Hebrews become a literate society. Things start getting committed to writing soon after the fact, by highly educated (for the time) clergy who make a reasonable effort to fact-check, the miracles fade away, God quits talking so much, people come to live for normal life spans, and the Old Testament just becomes a credible tribal history book.

Then one gets to the New Testament, the four Gospels, and suddenly there is a sudden rash of miracles in a very short time. I think this is because the Gospels were not written by the highly educated clergy, but by the early Christians, who were more common people. The Apostle Paul was high-ranking Jewish clergy before joining Christianity, but did not meet Jesus while Jesus was alive, and was not involved in the writing of the four miracle-packed Gospels that describe Jesus's life.

The Biblical account of creation has been conclusively shown to be completely wrong by science.

Both Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer have written books about how humans have become less brutal over centuries and millennia. We can see this in recent history -- 200 years ago, many countries had slavery, and a free man could be publicly hung for stealing a horse. One thing Pinker said was "What was new in the 20th century was not the occurrence of genocide, but rather, the recognition that genocide was something bad.". And for the most part, the further you go back in time, the more depraved people were. The Bible, particularly the Old Testament, is often morally apalling, like something out of the HBO series "Game of Thrones". The Jews frequently murder innocent Gentiles, including women and children, the narrative of the Bible doesn't condemn it, the perpetrators remain heroes without ever repenting, and God doesn't get upset about it. The New Testament, other than Revelations, is much less violent, but that's only because when it happens, everyone is living in peacetime under the law and order of the Roman Empire.

In Deuteronomy 25, it says that if a man is attacked and his wife, trying to help him, grabs the privates of his attacker, her hand is to be cut off.

Inconsistencies are rife, and a quick Google search will turn up many. When Abraham is ready to kill his son in a human sacrifice, God prevents him, thinks that Abraham's willingness to do so is fabulous, and enthusiastically blesses the whole bloodline. But when the Canaanites sacrifice their children, God lets them, and is so offended that he orders their extermination. In the book of Judges, Jephthah, the leader of Israel, sacrifices his only daughter, a virgin, in a burnt offering, and the narrative of the Bible doesn't say anything was wrong with it.

In the Old Testament, religious tolerance is seen as a grave sin.

The strongest opinion expressed by Jesus in the Gospels -- he goes on and on about it in multiple Gospels, is that there never, ever should be a divorce, no ifs, ands, or buts. Yet when Protestant denominations splinter off from the Catholics, that's one of the first doctrines to get reformed, and even the Catholics have "annulment".

If we are to use the Judeo-Christian Bible as the moral foundation of our modern multi-cultural society, we have to do quite a bit of cherry-picking with respect to what we will follow and what we won't, which is exactly what Western Civilization has been doing for centuries. But looking at the sorry results we've been getting when we cast the whole thing aside, perhaps we should stick with that approach.