Religion, why?

The insanity that comes with those religious fanatics can strangely enough unnerve even me. Not their passion for it or belief system, that’s all fine. What gets me is that there isn’t something in them that says ‘hey, it’s really just my belief but I get it’s most likely not real, just something to get me through the hard days and an excuse to put responsibility on someone else’. I’ve sat through a New Testament as Literature class for the last couple months with a genuine interest in reading the bible as the work of fiction that it is. It’s a story written down long after the supposed events took place and even then its contradictions are everywhere. I enjoy reading the bible. I don’t hate the people that believe in it, in fact I envy them. I don’t have that childlike wonder anymore that allows me to actually believe in something so completely without ever asking questions. In this class I attend I find more often than not that everyone in there is unable separate themselves from their beliefs long enough to look at that bible as a story. Every answer to discussion is God’s love, or because of the devil. Nothing grates on me more than hearing these child-like answers to questions that could actually help them to understand the bible as a tool for living a good life according to some of its philosophies. Just reading the bible I’ve discovered that there is no “devil”. Satan, as he is portrayed within the text, is part of God’s “angels” or soldiers. In the book of Job, the Satan is testing Job’s faith in God for God’s sake. Think of it as looking for flaws within the faith of man. The ironic part of it is that God allowed it to happen. Instead of the omniscient God of lore, this one has to see physical evidence, and Job has more than his share. He is mentally and physically tortured for God’s edification, Satan was just doing his job. When Satan shows up in the New Testament to tempt Jesus he is again doing his job to test his faith. More than anything that points to Jesus not actually being who he claims because one of God’s own would know if God had a son. Lucifer is mentioned once in the Old Testament and all evidence points to this name referring to the King of Babylon. Nowhere in the surrounding text does this name find a connection to “the devil”. In Genesis a serpent is responsible for tempting Eve (in one of the two versions of creation) and God cursed the serpent but never associated it with “the devil”. Most people’s idea about Satan comes from Dante and Milton, not their actual readings of it just the mythos that has come to be associated with it.