Abrahamic Religions and their Holy Books

[abaris]

However, once you slow down and let the words mean what they say, you have only two options. I saw that the Old Testament God was supposedly commanding the Israelites to invade the homelands of other peoples and to give them the choice between slavery if they surrendered or extermination if they fought. Once I understood that, I could not believe in the Bible as the Word of God. Some people would choose to twist their mind into a pretzel in order to go on believing.

God isn't even that merciful. There is at least one passage where he outright commands the Israelites to commit wholesale genocide, complete with ripping open the bellies of pregnant women, down to even slaughtering their cattle. Only the virgins were allowed to live and be taken away as sex slaves. OK, that's my interpretation. He only says, take them for yourselves, but I highly doubt, they were taken for housekeeping.

As for Islam. My understanding is, that the Quran is meant to be read only in Arabic. Translations somehow aren't the word of god anymore. So I guess that even less muslims have even read the whole thing than christians having read the bible.