It sounds like you are, like me, a former Catholic; however, you're not yet free. I'll try to help. First, note that the Bible's clearly neither historically c

It sounds like you are, like me, a former Catholic; however, you're not yet free. I'll try to help. First, note that the Bible's clearly neither historically correct nor even maximally historical. Books are ghostwritten and backdated, as if stories from the Iron Age were real events in the Bronze Age. All of the Gospels are at least a lifetime after Jesus' actual years. There are basic calendrical errors in the NT. Actually, let me expand on one fun point, because it shows the degree to which science demolishes religious traditions simply by examination. By tradition, the Ten Commandments and the rest of the Law on the stone tablets were written in Biblical Hebrew, tagin and all. (Indeed, tradition is that Jehovah designed the tagin!) However, we know that Biblical Hebrew developed after the Bronze Age Collapse, making it an anachronistic script for a story set in the late Bronze Age; the scripts that would become Phoenician, Aramaic, and Hebrew, just hadn't been developed yet, and would need the Bronze Age Collapse in order to remove the influence of hieroglyphs for long enough to spread. Next, notice that Catholicism, and indeed all Christianity, predicts that Jehovah forgives sins (through Jesus) and that there is an afterlife for believers. This prediction is in total conflict with not just empiricism, which has no evidence to substantiate these predictive claims and plenty of circumstantial evidence against said claims, but also with "natural law theory", AKA scientific principles, such as conservation of energy/matter. Next, notice that homosexuality is natural and occurs in many species. So does necrophilia. So does bestiality, when defined as cross-species pollenation/conception. Therefore there's not much "natural" about any "natural law theory" which demonizes these behaviors in humans. I'm not claiming that these actions are moral or not moral, but I am claiming that you can't say that humans are being wicked when they're gay unless you can account for that one time that a gay duck raped a dead duck's body and explain how that's natural and not wicked at all. (Else you're in the bizarre-but-Puritan situation where animals can sin despite no knowledge of good and evil!) Next, notice that Zoroastrians have been practicing for about as long as Jews, and Buddhists for about as long as Christians (we'll ignore their few centuries of head start). This gives us good examples of comparative religions. Notice that Zoroastrians had the original concepts that became Christian heaven and hell, for example. We also get good examples of "2000 year old institutions" here; the Kung family traces their lineage to Confucius and are still alive today, making their lineage one of the best-attested to stretch into BCE and the Iron Age. Finally, as long as you believe in cultural Marxism, you're going to be blind to the fact that science just keeps marching on. The Catholics have finally accepted evolution, as of a few decades ago, and the acceptance takes the form of saying that evolution is part of God's beautiful plan. Okay, and? Does that somehow give some insight into how evolution works? No, it's just that they got tired of the fact that they had zero evidence with which to refute evolution. Science marched on and dragged religion with it kicking and screaming.