Though apologists frequently insist that sacred scriptures must be interpreted rather than taken literally, such defenses often mask a more troubling evasion: the refusal to confront the weight of words and the lasting imprint they leave on the human psyche. Theologians and self-anointed exegetes habitually assert an interpretive dominion—one that cloaks their dogmas in the guise of intellectual sophistication—yet they rarely acknowledge that their authority rests upon texts authored in epochs steeped in superstition, tribalism, and epistemic naiveté. To suggest that modern hermeneutics can retroactively refine Bronze Age cosmologies into timeless wisdom is less an act of scholarship than of hubris. These sacred texts, far from transcendent, are reflections of their era’s crude approximations of reality, inscribed by men whose understanding of the universe was bounded by ignorance now long surpassed. That scholars continue to venerate these narratives as moral or metaphysical foundations reveals more about their institutional allegiances than about any universal truths. In truth, evolution—social, cognitive, and ethical—has moved on, while theology clings to relics, polishing them into illusions of profundity.

Indeed, many of these sacred “relics” contain narratives that, if encountered outside of religious context, would be promptly dismissed as preposterous or symptomatic of cognitive disorder. Tales of virginal conception, of the dead rising from the grave, or of celestial beings dictating moral law through burning shrubbery or whispered voices in the dark—these are not the hallmarks of transcendent insight, but of phenomena modern psychiatry might classify as hallucination, delusion, or, in some instances, drug-induced psychosis.

Most disturbing among these accounts is the celebrated tale in which a man, upon hearing the voice of a presumed supernatural entity, prepares to slaughter his own child in an act of blind obedience. In any secular context, this would be deemed a psychotic break or evidence of profound moral confusion. Yet, enshrined in scripture, it becomes a revered example of faith.

To treat such texts as morally instructive, rather than as artifacts of their time, is not only intellectually negligent—it is ethically fraught. It suggests a civilization still enthralled by its ancestral shadows, unable or unwilling to disentangle spiritual yearning from superstition. Evolution—biological, ethical, and epistemological—has moved forward. Theology, by contrast, continues to polish the relics of Bronze Age mysticism, elevating hallucination to revelation and moral aberration to divine command.

Joe