I have never been a 'believer'. I am instead a thinker and a searcher after provable truth. As such I've read the Bible from cover to cover, including the incomprehensible Revelations, which sounded like an acid trip to me. In the Old Testament I find a truncated version of the Torah and what looks like an attempt to explain the world as a thought process of one omniscient being. At the time it was written it would have made sense. People were less scientists then and more naturists. It's also much easier to believe in one god than a whole pantheon (god of my big toe, god of my son's elbow, god of the apple tree). Now we have the scientific method and though we do not know everything, we know a lot about how the world works. It certainly wasn't made in six days. But the Old Testament is also a history of a people, how they saw themselves anyway, and as such is no different from histories written today. There is a lack of texts from other viewpoints of that time period in the world but we are discovering things all the time. These things both corroborate and refute what is written in the Bible, again no different from other histories. The New Testament is the story of one man and how he moved those that heard him. Jesus was one of many and some of the events associated with him may be collected from a number of the preachers and prophets of the era. It was a time rife with change, Jerusalem was occupied by the Romans, life was hard. But here was this man who preached love. Oh, and he was a man, if he existed. That does not make him less great or rather the ideas he introduced. But in the Nicene Conferences much of what was Jesus got subsumed by the myth (written mostly by Luke who never met him). We do it all the time to famous people of all sorts. We make them greater than they were to take charge of the narrative and the motive is also always the same. Power. So myth is made because it must all fit, certain uncomfortable truths are eliminated because they detract from or challenge the myth, such as Jesus' wife. He would never have been call 'Rabbi' if he weren't married. But to get back to the 'real' Jesus, there was a man who gave us great ideas to follow. Be kind, seek to love people, take care of the poor, be a good person and don't get so caught up in the 'must haves' of rampant consumerism because money and all its trappings is a false god. Finally, respect and welcome women. Jesus loved women, invited them into positions of power, respected them and clearly understood how hard it was to be a woman then, just as it is still hard to be a woman now. If only we could have that kind of religion, the religion of goodness then maybe we will have truly grown as a species. One can only hope.