Thanks so much for the comment, Joseph! I completely agree with you that some of the common threads between religions offer valuable frameworks to live by. At the same time, though, I think there's a curtailing of critical thought that goes into the literal beliefs that these figures described in these ancient texts were all real, and that the supernatural acts attributed to them actually took place.

Religion lends itself to misinterpretation in a way that I think makes faith as a whole very dangerous. The people who go around condemning Hindus to hellfire find the same rationalizations for their actions as the people who see in Christianity a reason to be Christ-like and nothing more.

I think there are valuable stories and metaphors in the holy texts, but they're spread throughout books that are rife with archaic thinking. To consider the Ten Commandments as what the creator of the universe would have come up with, for example, is absurd to me. They're values reflected by the times in which they were written. I think we would be in a far better place as a world if we'd been guided all along by the more modern ideas of morality that have emerged in the last few centuries.