With that I agree, and have often said as much: Logic can get one to Deism, and, I believe, Theism, but getting from there to Christianity requires faith. But ALL metaphysical systems require faith, in the largest sense. We cannot PROVE identical experiments under identical conditions must always reproduce identical results, and proving that would be moot anyway because separate conditions are NEVER identical, entropy proves they CANNOT be at any two times and even were all that untrue it would STILL be moot because we can not VERIFY identical conditions even were they possible. Even if we ignore all THAT, not only did Kant prove observation metaphysically dubious, Heisenberg proved it physically inadequate. The precise velocity of any particle at any time is not merely “unanswered:” It CANNOT be answered—EVER.

It is not a question of more inspiration, intuition, understanding or equipment, the question is “what is the sound of one hand clapping…?” Yet reproducibility remains self-evidently valid, so verifiability does, so empiricism does.

The bible was a quantum leap from previous Bronze Age morality, not least for regulating the long-standing universal practice of slavery. Hammurabi is considered a moral giant for laws that took surgeons' fingers when cost patients an eye—EXCEPT slave patients; then even DEATHS only penalty was compensation with an equally valuable slave. The Torah, OTOH, mandated manumission by owners who struck any slave hard enough to take an eye or even knock out a tooth, and KILLING a slave meant death. Jews could only be “slaves” seven years, then released with compensation, which is where American colonies got seven-year indentured servitude: PERPETUAL slavery was limited to foreign POWs, and a big step up from the global standard then (i.e. summary mass execution.) Both slaves and indentured servants had to be treated fairly and not overworked, and sanctuary for runaway slaves was mandatory (contrast our Nineteenth Century Fugitive Slave Law.)

The Torah did not force VICTIMS to marry rapists: It forced RAPISTS to marry victims, because they were responsible for supporting them for life since they had destroyed the only Bronze Age asset any woman had. It was the ONLY time divorce was forbidden. So yes, the GIRL is very much considered the victim of rape.

Before dumping on the ignorant savages 3000 years ago when EVERYONE was an ignorant savage, read more than “Yea, rape and slavery!” stuff not actually THERE. Slavery and rape needed no encouragement in the Bronze Age cultures universally practicing both, but the Torah greatly RESTRICTING both and regulating what remained was a huge reform. Banning usury is STILL ahead of most Western nations, and the manslaughter laws (nonexistent in even the most advanced cultures for centuries thereafter) stunningly mature and evolved.

What about banning pork and shellfish 3000 years before any human had even SEEN trichinosis, or knew shellfish is pretty much pure cholesterol with a shelf life measured in hours? They knew no more of germ theory nor heart disease than any other Bronze Age culture, but that is the point: Since the birth of Christian doctrine its official position has been that the Torah (a millennium old THEN) is not moralitys divine DEFINITION, but a DESCRIPTION of the most morality of which Bronze Age nomads were capable. Look what Jesus said when Pharisees asked about divorce: He said people were never SUPPOSED to get divorced at all, but God allowed it in the Torah essentially because Bronze Age Jewish men (and all others) were pigs who treated women like property to be thrown away when no longer desired. Better divorced than stuck with that.

The main thing to understand is that Bronze Age nomads had inherent limitations in how much their mores COULD improve. So did Iron Age urbanites, and Jesus pushed those limits so hard it got Him crucified, while Paul pushed them hard enough to frequently land in prison as a lawless radical: NOW Paul is branded a misogynist homophobic dinosaur. Give him a few hundred million corporate dollars and he would be moral for your vote next year. Jesus Himself said the WHOLE Law consisted of “Love the Lord your God with all your mind, and all your soul and all your heart” and the corollary “love your neighbor as yourself.” As in “loving God is the highest commandment, and impossible without loving your neighbor.” Jesus was also the FIRST EVER to recast the negative “do not do things to others that you would not like done to you” as “DO things to others that you WOULD like done to you.” Some brutally primitive stuff right there.

I get it: Religion hacks you off, except for the fundamentalists running the GOP (or trying when Corporate America lets them.) But let us not pretend irrational dogmata like “questions can only be unanswered, never insoluble” are unique to religious fundamentalist, nor that religious people are any more uniformly irrational than nonreligious people are uniformly rational.

Remember, SCIENCES SOLE NONDECIMAL METRIC UNITS ARE BRONZE AGE CREATIONS: Time is still measured in the same arbitrary ratios as when Babylon invented Western astronomy, so our map of the WHOLE UNIVERSE is graded at 24:60:60:1. Literally everything anyone can see (and cannot) is defined in Bronze Age terms far less convenient than decimals—because it has been so ingrained for so long switching is impractically inconvenient. Not because God said so, or a bunch of power hungry primitives claimed He did: Because modern (and all other) Western astronomy rests on the ADVANCED and CONSTRUCTIVE “fundament” those primitive savages laid.

Our MORAL foundation lies with the same primitive Mideast savages who founded ALL of Western civilization. We should be grateful Abrahams descendants took morality further than the laws he brought from Babylon, yet recognizing they were still designed for and transcribed by human imperfection. Humans are inherently and universally fallible; that may not be a scientific law, but is an empirically verified fact, and not Gods nor religions fault in any sense (though religion excels at accumulating and preserving HUMAN faults.)