A lot of time can be spent trying to more or less soften or even discredit a piece of literature / history / spiritual treatise, and it's worth asking why it's even that important to people. If the book in question is largely contradictory and incoherent, why are we even talking about it? I mean, nobody really spends much time trying to discredit your average inebriated crackpot on the street, do they? I hear drunken babble all the time from my neighbors - doesn't do much good to try to form any opinions about what they're saying.... and I don't see forum threads addressing such. The difference here is that the Bible is held as less than unique, largely flawed, contradictory or irrelevant to some, while it is held as being coherent, comprehensible, inspired, and true by others. The ramifications of either belief can be considerable practically speaking, so there's a sort of inevitable conflict of ideas.
Personally, I think that at least some people in the first group undertake efforts to uphold their point of view simply because if they were to consider the possibility that the Bible's message (which, while it indeed shares a great deal with other religious literature, is completely unique in a few rather important particulars) actually were true, it would sort of put demands on people which are frankly unpalatable to all humans in their normal state of being: i.e., they'd actually have to submit to some other entity completely, and admit their powerlessness for self-salvation and any facades of self-righteousness, and acknowledge a serious need for a kind of help that no human can provide. These are things that your average "decent human being" cannot naturally palate.
It's hard - or impossible - to be unbiased about these things, and I don't make any exception for myself. Within the Bible itself, you can find predictions of these inevitable and opposite reactions to its message, too, which it recognizes as being, "the fragrance of life" or else "the stench of death". It all depends to a large degree upon where one is coming from, what they believe about life and themselves and God to begin with. To suggest that none of us has any presuppositions influencing the way we perceive something - whether the first time or the tenth, whether a culture, a cuisine, or a work of literature - is kind of unrealistic. We might feel we have good reasons for having arrived at those presuppositions - life experience, observation, etc - but can we be sure that these subjective categories to prove more reliable towards arriving at truth and reality than this particular ancient book?
It creates a bit of an inner battle, but the fact is that approaching any religious / philosophic / historical work - or even a good novel, for that matter - with an open mind and with the willingness to look a little deeper when things don't immediately make sense or when they seem to contradict is a very good idea. In my view, if we aren't willing to spend some time, diligent also towards escaping whatever prejudices we may subconsciously possess, it is almost guaranteed that we'll end up just believing what we want to, and probably not what is actually true.
Seeking some divine help might make all the difference, as well. For true athiests this will not be possible, obviously, since a "faith commitment" - namely, that there is no God (since His existence can be neither proven nor disproven) - precludes the possibility of asking for divine light. Agnostics of a certain stripe can still seek that help - for God might exist after all - unless their own faith commitment has already decided that if He exists, He is unknowable / uninvolved in the lives of people. For the rest of us, a sincere desire to know the truth, however inconvenient or repulsive it may be - is important and worth asking for, though most would probably shy away from it. I think of the two pills in the beginning of The Matrix.
The questions of whether religion promotes strife / war is kind of a side issue. Important, yes, but not really central to the question. That is to say, the message of a book like the Bible could be completely true and accurate, and still be quite easily used in bits and pieces - especially if proclaimed to those only slightly acquainted with its teaching - to justify all sorts of atrocious acts. In that sense I agree that "it's no different from any other book". Any writing, or idea, or cultural distinctive, or whatever can be and will be manipulated by greedy, brutal people towards greedy, brutal purposes, given any chance. That is not the fault of the book's author (or Author), but of those who desperately want it to say what is convenient for the achievement of their own purposes - which brings us back to the main problem I'm trying to highlight... If we treat it a bit summarily / carelessly, or else come to it with any desire to merely discover support for our own pre-existing convictions / ways of thinking, then we are really doing nothing different than they have. But hopefully nobody who's posted here can be rightly accused of that...
Regards,
-Eric
