I find myself in disagreement with some here.
The Bible (that you have today) is a heavily edited, heavily censored, carefully constructed collection of separate works. It is a work of man, or rather of men. As a collective work taken as some kind of literal truth it fails at almost every corner being as it is, filled with contradictions, statements in one place that completely say the opposite in another place. Even on a most basic level, the Old Testament speaks of a rash, angry God who murders at will, including women and children, who engages in ethnic cleansing, global cleansing and a whole raft of pretty awful atrocities. The New Testament then talks of a God of compassion, love and mercy. The whole, simply doesn't stack up and any rational mind can see that and finds it inherently difficult to reconcile.
There is a reason for all of this which is that the Bible and many other religious tomes were written by men to record great secrets at a time in history when people would be hunted down and murdered for those secrets. The secrets were recorded cryptically and in code which is why much of the general content just seems either strange or odd or silly.
Over the years, unscrupulous men have recognised that the human condition is one of high vulnerability. A human can, from an early age, be programmed with almost any kind of information to the extent that the human will believe it, not question it and then adjust their life behaviours around it. The Bible you have today is as much a weapon as an historical work.
Our chances or ever seeing the true original works is zero. We will only ever see translations and publications which have been so heavily censored by groups of men self-appointing themselves as the only ones able to make judgements on what is and what is not worthy, that the whole thing is rather pointless. Religion robs you of your freedom and inherent right to see the truth. To look at the real true source documents, all of them, and make your own judgement of what the truth actually is.
In short, the secrets that were recorded have been taken from us, and are jealously guarded by a select elite and in their place we have a mish mash of individual works with much key content removed. We could talk about the numerous Gospels that are missing from the Bible, above the basic 4 (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John), the Gospels of Philip, Mary Magdelene, Judas and Thomas which present an entirely different "story" to what we have in today's Bibles.
However the truth goes far deeper than this. There remain some of the secrets in what we have today, but it is nigh on impossible to see and understand them unless you have first had explained to you certain truths, certain physical processes, experiments, scientific methods. Once you have been told those and know how those processes operate, you then see how they appear in the Bible in cryptic prose. The words leap out of the pages instantly and you see them for what they are. Everything starts to make sense and you see how you have been duped by the mainstream Biblical teaching for years.
When you talk to someone about the Bible, about whether it should be taken literally, about whether it is the word of God or not, I need only ask them one question which is:
"What do the opening passages of Genesis talk about?"
If the person says the creation of the universe by God, then I know they haven't a clue what the text is truly saying. They are as duped as we all have been, as I was before my eyes were opened.
Genesis is laying out a simple alchemical process, a process that makes complete sense, a process that can be undertaken by any one of us, with just a little basic equipment. It is telling us that because it is one of the greatest secrets of life. That same secret is mentioned in numerous other places of the Bible. The Bible even has Jesus talking about it. Yet millions of Christians the world over have absolutely no clue about it and continue to try and take the Bible literally. They are caught in the trap of social conditioning, religious conditioning and many will never come to the truth.
