While I massively criticize religion anymore, what I will say is that my belief was these religious scripts are possibly holding some truths, but the oral history, telephone game of it all, AND ancient peoples not knowing how to properly explain things results in what we have here, which, if taken literally, is fucking stupid.

It helps to think of the Bible and most religious texts as fables rather than history.

Yeah, this is the only reasonable way to look at it. Once you consider how little sense it makes, and also that all religions have some sort of origin story with the same level of truthiness, but being mutually exclusive, it makes all of them obviously wrong. I’m sure there’s some reason the stories exist. Some event happened in the past, or some people trying to explain things based on their understanding. However, that doesn’t make it true. Some of it can still be useful though as fables with moral lessons.

I’d advise against using any religious text for morals though, or you end up stoning people for someone’s wife doing something wrong, or something like that. They might have been useful at the time, but I feel we have better ways of teaching morality now. Most people don’t need to think there’s some guy in the sky watching them to not be evil.