It wasn’t open to interpretation.

And yet, 2000 years later, here we are.

The problem is that you actually read the Bible. These "Christians" never have. They interpret all right but read....nah.

You know how the Romans collected taxes in there less "Roman" providences? They have rich guys a contract to basically raise taxes and the rich guys payed up front what was owed for their division of it. Then they were allowed to collect taxes beyond what they paid the Romans to make a profit. This is mainly why they were hated so much. Many people might imagine some official going around and collecting taxes fairly, but the reality was they were operating much more like a Mafia extorting protection money out of people, and taking more then most people owed, often to peoples ruin or near ruin. You can also imagine how nepotic this becomes. People who have loyalty to the dominant ruling class would often catch a break, while those disfavored by the dominant faction would often be harassed.

It was open to interpretation from the very beginning. Exemplified in the fact that the four canonically approved gospels (we will ignore all the non-canon gospels) are contradicting each other in various ways.

Fine if you choose the interpretation in your comment, but perhaps it would be even better not to let your life be ruled by what random persons made up in their fan fiction 2000 years ago?

That's not just Americans that do that... That's pretty much anywhere with any religion.

And don't forget, those are the people who tell us atheists that "without the Bible, where do you get your morals from?"

Well, we can see what these biblical morals are - you mentioned it: homophobia, racism etcetera. It makes people hateful, while claiming it is charity and compassion.

Religion poisons everything.

“If God created everything, then who created God?”

There's a lot of places where one can poke holes into faith/the concept of a God, but I don't think this is one.

The reason being that God's existence doesn't actually change anything about the question or the answer. You can rephrase it as "If everything came from the Big Bang, what came before the Big Bang and what created the preconditions of the Big Bang?"

So you could use the same argument to "disprove" literally any world view, including science, or even hypothetical scenarios like the simulation theory ("If we live in a simulation, who is running the simulation?").

But you can not only "disprove" every potential answer to "where does everything come from", but you can also rephrase the question to "If atoms are made of quarks, what are quarks made of, and what are their components made of?" or to "If there's an end to the universe, what is outside of it?"

If you are smart enough though, you will see that none of that is actually disproving anything, because if you rephrase the question further it becomes "Why don't we know everything?" and that's a rather simple-minded question to ask. One befitting of a 7 or 8 year old, but not really of an adult.

Before the circumnavigation and the discovery and charting of all of the world, people also didn't know what was on the other side of the planet and still it would have been dumb to doubt what we knew (e.g. that the British Isles existed) only because there were large white spots on the map elsewhere.

The answer that any person who has thought about it and not rejected the idea is: If a being that has created and shaped our universe exists, it exists (at least partly) outside of our universe. Like a programmer doesn't have to follow in his life the limitations of his code in programming, such an entity's existence would be so far outside our modes of thinking that "who created him?" would simply fall flat as a question.

To begin to answer such a question one would have to have some knowledge of the plane of existence where the divine resides, and as that is outside the realm of what we can understand through physics and the natural world we live in, the question becomes unanswerable.

The question then becomes, can something exist on another plane of existence? The answer is of course, we can't examine anything outside our universe, so, the answer must be, we don't or can't know.

I suppose then, the next question becomes, do you want to believe that there is something /someone outside the natural universe that gives meaning to our existence?

'Its all part of gods plan sweetie'. Had my mom feed me this line when I wanted to help a homeless person

Sometimes I wish I could do that, just ignore all logic and believe what you want.

So those people starving in Africa? Oh no God's plan.

People getting killed in Gaza? Also God's plan

That Kirk guy getting shot? Evil left, nothing to do with God.

Immigrants trying to find a better life in a different country? The worst people, nothing to do with God.

Aunt Marget died of cancer? Poor Marget, she was just unlucky,

It did not help she had no health insurance? No thats not it, that's communism

Buddhism has a more Christian example of Christ-like behavior concerning a "living being Satan". That is to say, if "living being Jesus" was real, he would be a Bodhisattva, perhaps akin to Kṣitigarbha.

In the story, Bodhisattva Kṣitigarbha vowed:

“Until the hells are empty, I will not become a Buddha.

Only when all sentient beings are saved will I attain enlightenment.”

It is a vow to never abandon any being regardless of their state.

I like that idea. Boundless love and compassion doesn't stop at the bounds of some hell. It is boundless. It has boundless time, so it will spend an eternity reaching out to even cyclic hells.

Lucifer/Satan never even actually kills anyone in the Bible, whereas Yahweh commits literal genocide on multiple occasions.

It should also be noted that the serpent never even told Eve that she should eat the fruit, just that she COULD.

Side note that always puzzled me... 1) why would God create a tree that has fruit that teaches you the difference between good and evil? 2) why would god put this tree in the garden in the first place? 3) why would anyone (particularly an omniscient) ever think that the people who have no concept of right and wrong (before eating the fruit) are going to be able to resist it? And finally, 4) WHY IS KNOWING THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL A BAD THING??

It's all just so fucking idiotic that it hurts my brain.

I've never understood things like pervasive distrust of Jews, but blanket approval of all things done by Israel because Jewish people are "God's chosen people." It's so much mental gymnastics to selectively justify hating Muslims and any Jew living in a large city, and completely ignores the point of the NT, which was to not make the religion tied to blood lines.

If they identified as Christian but never read the book or rarely go to church, what connection do they have to the religion and why do you feel they wished to impart it on you?

Grew up in the south before social media existed. It's the cause of a lot of problems, but this one predates it by a wide margin. It definitely made it worse, but there is no greater hate than Christian love.