This is going to be a controversial post. This is because it concerns religion and its history. I have always been a skeptical person. I like facts, I like proof, and I love to explore and think about all possibilities that arise from a situation. A good healthy amount of skepticism is encouraged in the sciences, and mentioned in this very psychology course as well. As you can image, this skepticism that I've grown to embrace leaves me questioning everything, and religion is one of those things.
A topic in psychology that I know I will remember in five years is that which concerns strange experiences and mental disorders. Hallucinations, out of body experiences, mystical experiences, schizophrenia and déjà vu are examples of what I am talking about. We know now the kinds of neurological activity that is happening during these events, and while some of it is still unexplained science has done a pretty good job figuring out why these things happen. Now of course more than two thousand years ago nobody had any scientific ability to deduce what was actually going on, so they explained these strange phenomena with the only thing they could; their faith. What if all the prophets throughout the years suffered from variations of schizophrenia, and the voices that they attributed to God were a product of their psychological condition? What if Moses had unknowingly ingested some kind of hallucinogen when he saw the burning bush? What if every important biblical event that roughly 2 billion people base the actions of their entire lives on all resulted from easily explained psychological phenomena?
Of course, this could never be confirmed or resolved, just pondered. What is important about this is not the idea that religion is a bad thing because the stories may be falsifiable. Religion does amazing things for many people today. What is important about this is the idea that skepticism should be a healthy part of any logical person's thought process. New paradigms of thought grow as civilizations grow, and it seems to me that the scientific one is playing an important role.
You make very interesting points in this post. It really does make you wonder about the exact origins of different religious texts like the Bible. However, I agree with the common perception that religion lies outside the realm of science, so it hard to evaluate the whole religion through a scientific lens.