I am trying to be kind; in an ideal world we would challenge every assertion and throw out those that cannot be proven or disproven along with those that are patently false, keeping only what we actually know. We did this in medicine about a century ago, throwing out bleeding and purgatives and tinctures of opiate and creating a much thinner compendium of evidence-based treatments on which we have building since then. When Semmelweiss, an Austrian physician, pointed out his colleagues were killing their patients by not washing their hands, he was dismissed as a quack - tradition dictated that he was wrong even if carefully controlled trials showed he was right. Which do you think prevailed at the time? Even in medicine (perhaps particularly in medicine) mindless adherence to tradition trumps truth but for the past couple centuries at least, truth has been winning most rounds.
It seems to me that people are wired in such a way that most of them cannot live in a world in which they do not have some sense of connection to some force or power beyond themselves. Religious traditions, even ones that are patently wrong about some matters and absurdly so about others, give a sense of comfort that makes it very hard for its followers to test them critically. Since most have been lied to that their religion has a monopoly on truth or faith and that putting on other faith glasses will only make the world appear black, the impulse to just keep doing what mom and dad did, passing this relatively unexamined package of beliefs and moral dictates onto our children is made only stronger.
In an ideal world, we would all be rational, compassionate, and fearlessly self-critical, but we don't live in that world and perhaps never will (although 150 years ago, it would have been hard to imagine a world without de jure slavery and we got there). Religion seems to be dying a natural death as people evolve away from its less useful teachings - slavery and stoning of women come to mind, along with circumcision and absurd dietary restrictions (avoidance of rabbit and pork) come to mind - and realize the world does not end as Leviticus intoned it would.
It was while under attack, the Catholic church launched the Crusades and the Inquisition. Fearing for its life, Protestant faiths in the New World saw witches behind every tree. But left alone, these faiths mellowed out and became marginalized. We no longer burn people alive in the public square not only because brave men and women of conscience stood up to the religious bullies and hypocrites of their time (I number Jesus as one of those men of conscience) but because men and women who had jobs and families and real problems to solve slowly woke up to the idea that the teachings of a group of unelected men were not very helpful in running a government or guiding scientific research. We can even celebrate Christmas in Massachusetts, something that you could have been fined for (Christmas is not mentioned in the Bible) until the early 19th century, thanks to the quiet marginalization of the religious extremists who tried to create a theocracy but ended up founding a much more pluralistic and diverse place than they ever imagined.
Osama bin Laden and Jerry Falwell were both responding to the same perceived threat: a modernizing world that was largely marginalizing them and making them appear increasingly absurd and anachronistic. The religious conservatives who embraced monarchy over Republican democracy, then fascism over socialism, then more restrictive, gender-based suffrage over universal suffrage and the anti-Biblical notion that a woman's testimony should count as much as man's in court, for example, have been fighting a rear guard action for the past 200 years. The shrinking territory and now only titular power of the Vatican in an Italy that is nominally Catholic but largely ignores the teachings of Pope (Italy now enjoys a negative population growth thanks to its embrace of family planning practices condemned by the Church) is emblematic of this erosion. American Catholics are slightly more likely than their non-Catholic counterparts to get an abortion, and a majority use and believe in science-based contraception.
Yes, the religious fundamentalists of the Abrahamic faiths can be dangerous at times but I doubt many women will relinquish the right to vote, nor will we give our local religious leaders the power to break a perceived nonbeliever on the rack anytime soon.
What we have to do is continue to work within the framework of these traditions, emphasizing those parts that are good (and many are) while marginalizing or ignoring those parts that are morally and logically offensive. Yes, we have a Disneyfied view of Jesus and certainly of the bloody jihads and genocides purportedly condoned by Yahweh in the Old Testament. So we can remind people that the idea of trumpets causing walls to collapse is as ridiculous as the idea that god advocates genocide and the slaughter of innocent animals (the Battle of Jericho, if it can be called a battle, should be remembered with the same horror that we think of the much less bloody "cleansing" of the Warsaw Ghetto, not made into the stuff of children's songs).
Maybe one day someone will do for the entire Bible what Jefferson did for the New Testament and excise all those parts that are almost certainly false or that do not have any moral instruction anyway (memorizing a long list of names of descendants of David is about as helpful in raising my children or deciding optimal tax rates as memorizing the cast of Gilligan's Island). It would be a thinner, better book, perhaps with an appendix apologizing for all those killed in its name and all those murdered for stating what most of us agree to be not just true, but trite: that it was written by angry, vengeful, occasionally murderous men who wanted us to believe that they were created in the image of an equally angry, vengeful and occasionally murderous god.
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