Atheist Memes

I believe it was originally intended to be a literal account of history and set of rules, but as society's knowledge evolved and literacy increased the number of people who could read it, the contradictions it contained both with itself and with the world it was trying to describe forced their hand. Some decided to defy logic and reject what their eyes and experiences told them, some decided to adjust how they interpreted the bible from literal to metaphorical (which just seems to me like an attempt to save the scam by those who were in on it or an attempt to keep the sense of security it gave without needing to worry about it clearly being wrong about many things by those who were true believers), and some rejected the premise of the bible (that the whole point of these lives is to serve the will of some mysterious being that chose to communicate with characters in the stories but otherwise only "shows up" via outcomes which show favour or disfavour).

And the people who pull out bible verses to support their hatred seem to prefer the literal set of rules interpretation, so why just treat that one as gospel and not the rest of it?

And the all or nothing bit comes from either this is the word of an all powerful being with absolute control over what happens to you over eternity, written by humans inspired by that being, who should know how to inspire accuracy, or it wasn't written for accuracy in the first place (either deliberately by the absolute being or because it was made up by humans writing what they thought made the most sense/would give them the most influence), at which point quoting verses is useless because any given verse could be "made up" rather than "inspired". Being able to say, "oh this part is real but this other part is just a metaphor" just seems either too arrogant or too convenient.

There is wisdom in it, as the other commenter said, but that wisdom is just human wisdom, not some infallible divine wisdom. That's what I meant by the "nothing" part, it's either a special book that should all be treated as special knowledge, or it should just be treated as any other book. This in-between where it's special but also contains stuff to not worry about is nonsensical to me.