There are definitely those types of passages, in the Bible, but it’s not hard to figure out which is which. “You shall not steal” is something we can agree isn’t allegorical. The commandment against male homosexuality is also quite clear. As is the prohibition on divorce.
People are of course free to change the Bible if they want, but then you’re playing an RPG, not following a religion. “I don’t like the magic rules, so let’s throw them out and use an alternative system that works better for our group.”
Also, what is a religion’s purpose if it just follows the evolution of society? It’s an implication that humanity has more wisdom than God. If society disagrees with God’s word, God’s word must be changed.
I think so too, but there’s a difference between something you can disprove and something you can’t. A Christian or Jew is believing in something without evidence to support that belief. A person who has a custom belief system knows exactly where the beliefs came from: they made it up. At least if you believe in an ancient book you can talk yourself into thinking it’s real. Heck, you don’t know for sure. If you create a belief system in your mind, you’ve built an idol. Invented your own religion. You know it’s just something you made up, often to justify what you already believed beforehand. A lot of the New Age spirituality is just self-affirmation, telling people they are good for just living the way they already do. Things like abstaining from certain meats or not working on Saturdays is actually a little hard.
Only if we don’t know very much about the religious concept of “iconopoesis”, or making an image of a deity. (Would you laugh at a crucifix manufacturer for worshipping Jesus because he built that image of Jesus himself, for example?)
Whether polytheists or monotheists, religious believers who use images of deities in their worship do not think that making an image is the same thing as making the deity itself. That’s a very naive idea.
As is the prohibition on eating shellfish, but somehow many people seem to consider themselves perfectly free to throw that rule out if they want to and still claim that they’re following their religion properly.
Or maybe it’s an implication that humans are capable of learning over the course of time (thanks to God’s guidance, for example), so they can develop more accurate interpretations of God’s word.
The Bible also states quite clearly that the earth has four corners and that the sun moves across the sky daily, instead of the earth being a sphere that rotates to produce the illusion of solar movement. You’re happy to argue nowadays that such allusions were always meant to be merely allegorical, but plenty of believers around the time of Copernicus didn’t think so. Are you being arrogant and thinking you have more wisdom than God by deciding that you can alter the meaning of God’s word just to follow the evolution of what society calls science?
Jews at least know they are in rebellion against God. You won’t see us saying, “Eh, it’s not really a sin. Times change.” It is a sin and we do it anyway. We are a stiff-necked people.
There’s some merit to that. For example, when Genesis refers to the “four corners of the Earth” we now know that this did not mean the Earth was flat. But you can’t reinterpret “don’t lie with other men”.
Now I do think that society should change with the times. Religion shouldn’t dictate our laws. But I don’t think society should change religion. If you assume an all knowing God, then even when everything your human brain tells you about a passage says it’s wrong, it’s actually right. Otherwise, you don’t believe anymore, not really.
That’s what turned me into a nonbeliever. I didn’t demand that religion change, I just stopped believing it. And again, it’s one thing to determine that passages that don’t make any sense in light of what we know are allegorical. It’s another thing entirely to change the meaning of commandments, not based on evidence, but based on changing social norms.