Generally, what I've found is that most helpful introspection books say a lot about getting out of one's own head and focusing on one's relationship with others (and, for the religious, one's relationship with God).
Here's another from them that answers "what exactly _is_ the Bible?" for anyone curious https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_CGP-12AE0
There are definitely parts that are a slog, especially in the Old Testament, and just picking it up and reading it be tough, especially since it's so long.
You might enjoy just starting with a more focused set of books -- as I mentioned, Ecclesiastes is great. Job is another well-loved bit of wisdom literature. Mark is the shortest gospel and a primary source for two of the others (also, because it was written for a gentile audience, it doesn't assume a lot of familiarity with the OT the way something like Matthew does). Esther and Judges are two that I think are good just from a narrative/excitement perspective.
I hope this a not mean response, I just view the Bible as an inherently different document than most Christians, I think, and I want to establish dialogue outside of my little bubble.
I won't claim it's impossible to comport yourself morally without being an adherent of any religion, but the Christian faith offers a more comprehensive framework to think about our relationship to the world and other people that I think is valuable.
For instance, beggar on the street. I can feel morally okay by saying "They might not really be in need, just doing this to get extra money; I'll donate to organizations dedicated to helping homeless instead". But from my Christian perspective it changes, "Why am I judging this person's need? Who knows how much those organizations will help this individual person, who is here now, asking for help. Maybe they don't need it, but maybe they do. Would I rather risk a mouth going hungry, or risk 'wasting' giving a dollar to someone who has enough?", and I give the dollar. Or better yet, say "Wait, why is my time so valuable? Am I really in so much of a hurry? Why don't I see if I can buy this person a meal and talk to them for a bit".
Now, I can certainly see people aligning their basic axioms to arrive at this same decision without an appeal to religion...I just know that for me, I wouldn't. Without a belief in a God who I know values them as much as me, and wants me to help them, I have no reason to push back against my own selfish rationalizations. I might still donate, but then it's just to absolve myself of any guilt I might have (which is also the goal of the rationalizations, really). For me, the belief in God compels me to move past just absolving my guilt, and instead leads me to ask how I can show love.
You might make the case that this is just another form of guilt, and maybe it is (certainly, doing nothing leaves me feeling just as guilty), but it feels qualitatively different. A begrudging giving of a dollar compared with actually engaging with the person leads to two very different feelings, and I know I never choose the latter without an appeal to religion. Again, for me; YMMV.
The fundamental message we can take, in my interpretation, is that every human being is deeply flawed and yet had inherent dignity and worth, regardless of nationality, status, wealth, etc., and that it is the duty of a Christian to keep these things in sight and help his fellow man. Not necessarily in dramatic or obvious ways, but as a general inclination. Of course there are a lot more details but I think this is the core.
Of course you might object that you don't necessarily have to be Christian to believe those things, but looking around you'll see many examples of behavior driven by different axioms (and given the environment Christianity came to exist in, a message about the dignity of the poor would actually have been going seriously against general trends).
This isn't as clear as I'd hoped but I hope it gives some idea of where I'm coming from.
Since you are a scientist, I'll mention I thought this Feynman talk was astute. http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/49/2/Religion.htm
0. Pew paper, no longer available.. so wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20090304020453/http://pewforum.o... There's probably more up to date poll on this somewhere though.
1. http://news.gallup.com/poll/210704/record-few-americans-beli...
Just on the face of it, there are 'books' in the Bible meant as history, books meant as 'self-help', despondent mullings on the meaning of life, a love letter, personal recountings, letters written to others...these are all kinds of authors and approaches here, and so it strikes me as silly to take all of them literally. I mean, Jesus is quoted as saying "Go tell that fox", when speaking of Herod; there is no other mention of Herod being anything other than human. Clearly, if the Christian message is to be taken as truth, it shows that God is able to speak in metaphor (as well as interesting translation differences; for instance, the word for 'day' in the creation story is a word with a number of translations ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom )
So, how do things that seem antiquated apply now? Well, some parts of it -are- antiquated, in that they were meant for a specific time, and not now. Chesterton had a number of beautiful assertions in his book Orthodoxy, to the effect that Christianity is necessarily paradoxical, because -people- are paradoxical. To take that here, from my perspective (and there are many) morality can be both absolute and relativistic; what is 'good' is absolute, but what is treated as 'good' at a given time is relative to that time. You know that slavery is evil, but could you go back 4000 years and convince people of that? No. You would just alienate them, and likely get yourself killed. But you -could- convince them to at least treat their slaves better. You could design a moral code that would in time lead to them stopping slavery, by just introducing the idea that slaves are humans, with rights. If we credit the idea there is a God, and that evolution is a thing that that God uses, then the idea of allowing a moral idea to evolve into a fuller fulfillment of itself, over time, as people think, and talk, and develop, is an unsurprising thing for that God to do.
As to stoning adulterers, and a number of similar things; don't misunderstand what was a legal code with a moral one. Yes, it was influenced by morals (same as our own law is), but the punishment was a legal code to be adopted by a people, and was a symptom of the time. No Christian but the most fundamental would say we, now, should adopt stoning as the appropriate punishment for adultery. Interestingly, the Bible makes it clear "the wages of sin (is) death", but that that's a moral issue between man and God. Any actual judgement indicated to be carried out between men is toward a legal system, and its rationale is much the same as our own, to prevent people from doing it and/or to allow for carrying out some semblance of imperfect justice (since flawed man judging flawed man will necessarily be imperfect).
Similarly, many of the Old Testament rules were particular to the context of the time, and can only be understood in understanding the culture at that time. For why not wearing a diverse set of fabrics, have a look here - https://www.gotquestions.org/different-types-of-fabric.html
It was basically in response to the above poster saying the Old Testament proscribed stoning for adultery; yes, but that isn't a moral statement that that -should- be, forevermore, the punishment for it, and being a Christian doesn't mean you have to believe adulterers should be stoned. Rather, it was a legal statement for that time, that that was the punishment to be carried out.
24% of the US believes the bible is the literal word of god[0].
Knowing some evangelicals personally... they would say Herod literally told the fox. Through god Herod was able to speak to the fox.
Remember, in adam and eve, the snake and eve have a conversation. So clearly it is possible that animals can talk. Many christians believe adam and eve is a literal telling of what happened.
0. http://news.gallup.com/poll/210704/record-few-americans-beli...
The passage is -
At that time some Pharisees came to Jesus and said to him, "Leave this place and go somewhere else. Herod wants to kill you." He replied, "Go tell that fox, 'I will keep on driving out demons and healing people today and tomorrow, and on the third day I will reach my goal.'
There's basically three ways to take that passage (across translations, I might add, though I don't know the aramaic); either Herod was a literal fox, there was a random fox that Jesus in a complete non-sequitor pointed to and told the Pharisees to talk to ("Talk to the fox because the Lord isn't listening" I guess?), or Jesus showed that metaphor is totes a thing the Christian God understands and uses (which would make sense given all the parables and whatnot).
I believe in inerrancy, which sometimes means literalism, but sometimes doesn't, because it comes down to intent. The Bible isn't a science textbook, so there's room for allegory and hyperbole, but it can only go so far, so some issues, like "was there a real Adam and Eve", or "was there a flood that wiped out all of humanity except Noah and friends" would, in my view, cross that boundary, and so I do believe they happened.
Underneath this worldview are presuppositions about the nature of reality. Christians believe in a natural order - that the world works in a certain way - and that God created it that way and sustains it. But that doesn't rule out God's ability to interfere with his creation. Since, in the Christian understanding, such events are unusual, they aren't discoverable via Science.
So Christianity is anti-scientific only if you believe the only real knowledge is scientific knowledge (logical positivism). There are serious philosophical problems when it comes to this worldview, even if you're not religious. (It doesn't do a particularly good job of explaining science itself for example)
I highly recommend "Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism" by Alvin Plantinga for a serious philosophical approach to this problem.
As to your second point about morality. I actually agree with you. In my view the Bible is not really about morality, in the sense of a bunch of rules and guidance for life, but rather the Bible presents a grand narrative about the nature of the world we live in:
- We were born good and free but Adam and Eve through their sin brought ruin and death to all creation and drove a wedge between us and God. - Not satisfied to see us destroyed, God came up with a plan to save us instead. - That plan starts with Abraham and the nation of Israel, but is all intended as a foretaste of the ultimate fulfillment to be found in Christ. - Christ, as the second Adam, pays the penalty for Sin, thus allowing the severed relationship with God to be re-established, and freeing humanity from the power of sin and death - Christians live near the end of this story, in the "already" and "not yet" before Christ comes again
So morality is important, but not so much for the rules, but for what it tells us about God. In the Protestant tradition, the purpose of the law is in 3 parts: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_and_Gospel)
1. "[W]hile it shows God's righteousness . . . , it warns, informs, convicts, and lastly condemns, every man of his own unrighteousness" (2.7.6). 2. It functions "by fear of punishment to restrain certain men who are untouched by any care for what is just and right unless compelled by hearing the dire threats in the law" (2.7.10). 3. "It admonishes believers and urges them on in well-doing" (2.7.12-13).
And its that first part which is so vital. The laws exist to show how sinful we are and why we need a savior.
- subtleties in language that don't translate well
- not catching hyperbole or idioms (like know=sex or foot=penis)
- genre confusion (is revelation apocalyptic poetry or literal history)
- expecting too much precision from a text (is 40 days actually 40 days?)
- similar, bringing my cultural assumptions about the nature of the text... graphocentrism applied to an oral culture, reading into it guilt instead of seeing honor and shame, expecting word-for-word quotes, when in the ancient world historians had different standards, etc
- not paying close attention to the literary quality of the text (information is carefully chosen and presented by the author, not haphazardly thrown together, and to really understand the text you have to dig deep)
- one that's really hit home for me recently: there are typological dimensions to the text... events are shaped by what the author is trying to tell you. For example the beginning of John is full of temple imagery and language which is arguing for a deeper meaning to the purpose of the Old Testament and how its fulfilled in Christ. Events would likely look very different from how they're presented if you were a casual observer.
It might look like adding all these things together doesn't look an awful lot like inerrancy, but at least my goal is to try and find out what the text is really saying, and once I feel like I figured that out, then I'll take it quite seriously, even if its hard...
Did you have a particular story in mind?
In my opinion, it's a mistake to think of biblical stories or any other stories for that matter as literal truth. For example, God created the world in six days and on the seventh He rested. But what is six days? Is it six 24-hour, Earth-space days? Is it six undefined periods called "days" so readers can digest it? There are so many details one can pick out and focus on, and we as humans are excellent at fixating on minute details that aren't important.
The problem with this of course is that any organized religion will have misconceptions that are true-ish. What I mean by that is best explained by a phrase tossed around a lot in the LDS church: "Christ is perfect but His servants are not," and topics such as personal modesty are often conflated with being righteous. What I'm getting at with all this is that if you truly dive into Christ's teachings and the rules he strictly taught are few and far between; most teachings are the parables that are good life lessons on serving others.
The parable of the ten virgins is an excellent example. Basically, it's a metaphor that suggests that half of God's people will be unprepared for His coming. Okay, that's easy, but what does unprepared mean? Well, Christ taught that we need to be baptized. Alright, but what else do I need to do? Well, he taught that rich man he should give up everything and follow Christ. Uh, but I have a family to support and feed, and I'm pretty sure I can't do that. I'll figure out what I can do to serve my spouse and children and family and neighbors and do that.
That's what I find being a disciple of Christ is about. The Gospel is essentially 1) faith in Christ, 2) repentance, and 3) baptism. Everything else is about you figuring out what it is for you to be a better person for those around you, and that makes you a servant of God.
The moral side of the Bible is a side affect of growing closer to, and following the teachings of, Jesus.
I'd also say that one of the things that non-fundamentalist Christians have done particularly poorly in popular culture in the last 30 years is discuss how the Bible we have was written to a different culture than ours, and taking it 'literally' means stripping it from much of the intended meaning. You asked about creationism and the big bang, here's a book you could possibly be interested in, by a scholar of Genesis, discussing how the text of Genesis is not intended as a scientific document. It's called The Lost World of Genesis One, by John Walton (https://www.amazon.com/Lost-World-Genesis-One-Cosmology/dp/0...).
Now, as you work through the Bible, Old and New, attempt to see if pictures in the old testament portray this one message, using Jesus as a lens. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typology_(theology) for some examples.
There are Bibles with the references to Jesus in the Old Testament highlighted, which will help you do this. The Jesus-Centered Bible [0] has allusions made to Jesus in the Old Testament printed in blue text and is probably the most useful for doing this. The Gospel Transformation Bible: Christ in all of Scripture [1] has extensive footnotes showing the message of Jesus in the narrative and poetry that precedes him by hundreds of years.
[0]: https://www.christianbook.com/nlt-jesus-centered-bible-leath... [1]: https://www.amazon.com/ESV-Gospel-Transformation-Bible-Black...