If there were a list of things you need to know before talking about religion, this might be the #1 fact: it's almost never true that you can understand the religion just by looking at the scriptures. At least, it's true of the religions I know things about (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, in that order, with exponential decay in my knowledge as you go down the list...).

The funny thing is that Taleb is making something of the same point, but still makes that mistake when it comes time to talk about theology.