What makes your faith true?

[Fake Messiah]

somehow survived separately and as a group for thousands of years when virtually all other works of antiquity have either disappeared or are far less well attested to, in terms of authenticity

Not so, especially since mainly Christians were destroying the so called pagan books. Ever heard Library of Alexandria for instance?

The Bible isn’t that different from other types of literature that use similar kinds of language, metaphors, poetry, etc…

Yeah similar to that type of literature like fiction and not like Plato's "Republic". Imagine if let's say if United States Constitution was written in poetry and metaphors and stories, then you would have wars waging for what each of the amendments really means. But it is not. It was written in straight forward crystal language that even when translated doesn't lose it's meaning.

And typically when people are being violent in the name of Christianity, they are violating the long-standing tenets of the faith, not following them.  The prescriptive teachings of Jesus to Christians do not include violence...

So let's see little bit in history and just the popes: Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade in 1095 to wrest the Holy Land from infidels."Deus Vult" (God wills it). In 1208, Pope Innocent III declared a major crusade to destroy the Albigenses. In 1487, Pope Innocent VIII declared an armed crusade against Waldensians in the Savoy region of France. Pope Innocent IV authorized torture in 1252, and the Inquisition chambers became places of terror and even before papal statute of 1231 decreed burning as the standard penalty. In 1478 the pope authorized King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to revive the Inquisition to hunt "secret Jews" and their Muslim counterparts.
In 1200s Pope Gregory IX authorized the killing of witches, then in 1484 Pope Innocent VIII issued a bull declaring the absolute reality of witches—thus it became heresy to doubt their existence. Prosecutions soared.

Or what about St. Thomas Aquinas who declared: "If coiners and other malefactors are justly doomed to death, much more may heretics be justly slain."

So are you telling me that popes and theologian giants don't know the prescriptive teachings of Jesus? Or take it this way: if pope does not know it what makes you think you know it?

The fact that a tiny minority of slaveholders used the Bible in a way that contradicted its basic tenets in order to attempt to support the institution of slavery is far outweighed by the superior number of people who used the Bible and its teachings in concert with the tenets of the Christian faith to argue against slavery.  And in fact, because the anti-slavery movement was in harmony with what the Bible actually teaches, that movement saw far more success than those who had to selectively misinterpret scripture in order to give the appearance of support.  It was largely the religious Christians in the Christian west that put an end to slavery.  

Abolitionists also drew considerable inspiration from the Bible. Of course they did. People have been cherry-picking the Bible for millennia to justify their every impulse, moral and otherwise but they were on the losing side of a theological argument. As the Reverend Richard Fuller put it in 1845: "What God sanctioned in the Old Testament, and permitted in the New, cannot be a sin."
It is remarkably easy for a person to arrive to conclusion that slaves are human beings like himself, enjoying the same capacity for suffering and happiness and yet, it had to be spread at the point of a bayonet throughout the Confederate South, among the most pious Christians in one of the bloodiest wars in history.

There actually is no prescriptive rules or advice for owning slaves, beating servants, or killing people for minor infractions.

Now what do you want me to think of you: That you are a liar or that you have poor knowlidge of the Bible? Let's just tackle some of minor infractions like that you can kill your wife if she can't prove she's a virgin on the wedding night. Or maybe you think this is a big deal and not minor infarction? What about doing any kind of work on the Sabbath, even household chores for no pay, is a capital offense and if you even collect sticks you should get killed. Being gay is still considered to be highly controversial and is disapproved of by many Christians today; thankfully, however, fewer Christians are calling for God’s biblical punishment for it, which is death (Leviticus 20:13). Even blasphemy, the act of merely insulting God, is punishable by death (Leviticus 24:16). Being other religion is also to be punished by death. God also prescribe death penalty for adultery and for cheeking your parents.
Now I could do same with passages on slavery and beating servants but I hope you'll look for them yourself instead.

As our level of moral understanding and the wisdom with which we apply that understanding has increased, so has our understanding of the text.

Exactly! Modern morality, wherever else it comes from, does not come from the Bible. You cannot get away with claiming that religion provides you with some sort of inside track to defining what is good and what is bad. What morality of the Bible proves is that it was written by people of those age - no better and if it was written (or inspired) by supreme being would it not have supreme morality?

Why, if there is evidence of the Christian God, which would be superior to Ganesha, by nature, and makes the claim to be the ONLY God, would you think there would be no evidence to disprove Ganesha?

What makes you think that your god is better then Ganesha? Not to mention there is no evidence.

With regard to your last comment regarding picking and choosing, I really don’t know what you mean?

Well to pick and choose is to degrade the Bible because those are supposed to be moral stories and to pick and choose we must have some independent criterion for deciding which are the moral bits: a criterion which, wherever it comes from, cannot come from scripture itself and is presumably available to all of us whether we are religious or not. Then why not use some other works of fiction like Shakespeare and do the same technique?