historical merits of the bible?

[FatAndFaithless]

Guys, I really enjoy reading posts which dissect contents of the bible and analyse , scrutinize and find discrepancies.

Let's take away the sky daddy bits and all the morality and parables, etc.

What is left?
As a historical body of text, has it provided any historical or scientific information which is generally considered "fact" due to the empirical evidence noted in it, which cannot be validated by other writings of the time.

Eg: social migration, spread of ethnicities, topological accuracies, technologies of the period, etc.

This alone should give the bible "some" merit, albeit for all the wrong reasons for those who consider it sacred.

Thoughts?

if we dont take it literal The bible is fine. Only fundamentalist, which is a personality defect not belief, need it "all true" or "all false"

My guess is that most of us in the middle don't care that much what self help book people read. What bothers us is the notion of pushing "your" belief onto someone else by some type of force.

Well the problem there is that people disagree widely on what parts of the Bible to take literally and which parts are just metaphor. Also, I wouldn't say the Bible is "fine" if we don't take any of it literally, because there are still some pretty immoral statements in there.