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I had heard it said, and completely agreed, that if a human father were to treat his children the way the God of the Hebrew Bible treated His children, we would demand that he be arrested and locked up.
This hardly seemed like the sort of fellow whose opinions on morality and appropriate social behavior needed to be taken seriously.
The ethics of the New Testament were admittedly less horrific, but they appeared rather trite and unrealistic.
Anyway, the more I learned about science and history, the more irrelevant the whole thing became.
So as literature the Bible was mildly interesting, but it was not very consequential to my life.
A few years ago this all changed.
I had begun working on a book in which I was exploring historical ideas, and at a certain point it seemed appropriate to include a chapter on the ancient Israelites and to say something about their influence on the history of philosophy.
So I took out a copy of the Bible and began reading a bit of Genesis, with the intention of writing a short chapter, maybe a dozen pages, and then moving on to more important matters.
Several years and hundreds of pages later, I finally stopped writing about all the wonders I was finding in the western Scriptures! What happened was that I discovered a whole new way in which the stories spoke to me.
It wasn't the history that interested me, or the teachings about morality and social justice.
It certainly wasn't the fantastic claims that defied all scientific logic.
What interested me was the symbolism: the symbols, images and metaphors that tell an inner psychological story - not about the journey of a nation, but about the journey of a human soul.
So as you see, even though the stories themselves may not be literally true, the meaning that is revealed by the stories is true.
Among contemporary educated people, myths are typically dismissed as childish fantasies or the unscientific gropings of primitive minds.
But the mythological view of the world has always been, and still remains, an important way of understanding and appreciating our world.
This is not because they explain natural phenomena.
It is because myths bring us face to face with our deepest psychological and spiritual truths.
And in western Scripture, as in all great mythology, they do even more.
Through allegory and symbol they provide psychological instructions for a soul that has descended into material life and must now find its way 'home' again.
This journey of transformation, from inner slavery to spiritual awakening and enlightenment, has been called "The Return to the Promised Land", "The Quest for the Holy Grail", "Muhammad's Journey to the Seven Heavens", and many other names.
In other words, all the sacred Scriptures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have the common aim of teaching us how to raise our level of Being and return to a state of conscious union with Divinity - a process that is universally known as Spiritual Initiation.
The different ways that these stories are told attests to the marvelous range of the human imagination, but the commonality of method and purpose that unites these stories is infinitely more striking than any of the differences.
When this common purpose is understood, the stunning underlying unity of all our Traditions is revealed, and the major motivation for religious hatred and war disappears.
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