Christianity is heading for a full allegorization

[vulcanlogician]

By "decent religion" I just meant that it is a good collection of symbols. Like Greek Mythology. How many of us have referred to "the fates" or "the muses" to describe various things? Are any of us under the impression that these immortal entities exist? No. That's what full allegorization would entail. To allow us to simply refer to the symbol... "crown of thorns"... "prodigal son" etc. without the baggage of literal belief.

Without literal belief, it's hard for any religion to be noxious at all.

In that case, you would have to remove the "commands" from judaism, christianity, islam, mormonism.
Lines such as "You must stone person X if he does X" need to be removed from the unholy text (Bible).
Some of the lines are of the form of "You must do X or else you will go to hell, you will be destroyed, element 16 will rain down upon you." These must be
removed as well.

Another example:
"When 2 men are having sex, it is abominable. They have forfeited their lives."

^^^^^There is a lot of violent language in the Bible.

If you remove all that, you would be left with stories of the form
"Jesus did this and that. Peter came over here and took a bread."

But it is still risky. Jesus and the prophets are like heroes for these guys. They might try to emulate them, sort of how some kids emulate Superman and put on a cape and jump out the window.

Example:
There is a large number of priest claiming to be able to cure people and remove devils from them.
I think there was a case where someone threw his heart medication onto the stage of Peter Popoff. I don't know if the guy lived.

A priest playing doctor like that is very dangerous. You are playing with people's lives.

Yeah that's what I'm talking about. Don't take any of it to be an inerrant truth. Ignore the commands. Treat it like Lord of the Rings or any other fictional work.

THEN see if there is any value in it. Like I said... just like we do with Greek mythology.

If a moral commandment is listed somewhere, think about it for yourself whether it's a good moral rule to live by. A lot of moral teachings in the Bible were borrowed from the Greeks anyway. (Even in the OT, via Hellenism.) The Golden Rule was discovered independently by several different thinkers... including Confucius. I happen to like the Golden Rule. And it just so happens, it's included in Christianity.

What people normally do with religion (follow it without question) is where most problems arise. Really, it's a problem with ideology in general. Not just religion. Religions are just a specific kind of ideology. I'm not too big on having an ideology. I think every belief ought to be questioned. Every idea ought to stand on its own two legs... not be propped up by some institution or ethos.

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"Infallible" is the real problem here. It tends to suggest "can not be questioned"... "is perfect"... "is better than anything you might think."

I have long thought that Christianity would be much less poisonous and evil without the concept of biblical inerrancy. It's a kind of decent religion without all that. But alas....

Nit pick here...in the Roman church and the Lutherans, at least, "infalibilty" refers to purpose (scripture achieves its purpose), not content.
I do not agree with this evasion, btw.

You're right. The modern Catholic position is what you say. But the world ain't all Catholics and Lutherans either. I'm not criticizing a boogeyman here. Certain believers really buy into inerrancy. My criticism was aimed at them.