It scares me to think any memorably bad/cruel/distasteful/rules-obsessed part of the Old Testament is the literal Word of God. But you can judge people's ignorance quite easily by using exactly that yardstick. Many believers have not read it, or read enough of it, to form an educated opinion; preachers cherry-pick what they think parishioners should hear; devotionals focus on pleasanter-sounding passages and quotes, and everyone walks around thinking (believing) that because the New Testament and Christ sound pretty good that the entire book (Old and New) is a reflection of goodness that highlights a completely good God throughout. Nothing could be further from the truth! God is a capricious soul who got bored one day and decided to create friends in his own likeness (us) and then gave us hell (sometimes literally) for not following a script he never bothered to share with us while giving us the power to defy the script at will. This is explained away by many students of the Bible as a test of worthiness: if we were just good enough of course we would follow the script without it being given to us, we'd do so naturally, and the fact that we don't simply shows we are defiant (we have the good in us but don't choose to search within ourselves to find it and won't lay our own egos aside long enough to consider it - to consider not eating the apple, if you will) so we're in need of yet unworthy of our God.

I believe God evolves. Like us, he thought he was good but slowly learned that in many eyes he was wasn't - but again, like us, he can evolve to learn from and correct those mistakes. I think he's currently in a fallow period between giving us Jesus and actually making any corrections. Sometimes I also think God might simply be AI we create and project into the past that leads us into the future (right now) via the Bible. Or that we project ideas into the past - into the Israelites - that lead us to learn of the God we have now through the books they were so "inspired" to write. Other times I think the Hebrews had really good weed or acid - or their equivalents - and just did what people do when they get high and are trippin'. Except somehow it all got codified into a book and a very explicit set of laws that the Jewish side of the sect has to follow. Following that thought, sometimes I think the Greeks had even better drugs and bam!, that's how we got Jesus.

And that's why I say believing can't hurt anything, because nothing else I believe can be proved (yet) to be any more or less true than simply believing in God, which, if nothing else, gives me a lot less possibilities to consider and less to worry about (the AI possibility particularly freaks me out, as does the possibility of projection). Which is also why I can't understand why people will get so mad about my beliefs. They don't even know what half of them are. I just told you more than I've told just about anybody.