It’s worse than that. Many who profess belief in what’s written don’t actually know what’s written, only what they’ve been told by their religious leaders that it means. One of the best deconversion tools is the Bible itself, read cover to cover.

Also some of it was progressive then, but then never moving on again. Jesus said a lot of communist, leftish love your neighbour, don’t hoard wealth. Islams wife beating rules were a step in the right direction from just killing/crippling them…trouble is then then lose the context. Even likily some of Paul’s anti gay stuff was more about young boys not becoming a peadophile play thing of an older man in cross between frat hazing and rent boy.

And believed as not just any truth but a special highest-level-possible truth!

In the 20th and 21st centries religious ministries no longer could rely on mandatory adherence or even sufficient peer pressure, and hence had to adjust their sermons to draw in a congregation, hence sins were for other people. Material support of the community and needy (wars against poverty and hunger) were replaced with campaign of sin calling (wars against women and gays). Even the Roman Catholic Church has veered away from charity efforts to condemn the marginalized, since that is more palatable to a dwindling parish.

Also evangelists in the 1960s like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, having recently taken a pounding regarding interracial marriage and segregation, willfully developed their ministries to form a vloc of single-issue-voters (abortion was the issue) which turned them into GOP loyalists and propelled Reagan’s 1980 landslide. From there, the rise of the corporate hegemony and the white Christian nationalist takeover of the US was inevitable.

It’s difficult to navigate the world when most people you meet have a mental illness that characterizes everything they do. Like, how can I respect my boss when she has a Bible quote on her wall?

That sounds right!