I haven't encountered a single religion that would teach what you just described. Can you name some?

I can't imagine such religion staying around for long, as presenting things this way leads to obvious question: what makes $holyBook special over, say, Harry Potter? Or Star Trek? Or your national fiction writer of yore that wrote stories to cheer up their readers in difficult times[0]?

This is not a joke question, by any means. I grew up as a Jehovah's Witness, so I had (my religion's interpretation of) the Bible down pat. And yet, looking back, even when I still believed I already realized my moral compass was built 50% on the Bible, and 50% on Star Trek: The Next Generation. It's probably the latter that kept me from becoming a fundamentalist believer :). Alas, while I could easily find a community of people willing to wait for Jesus with me, I have a hard time finding people who want to work towards the utopian ideals of the United Federation of Planets with me.

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[0] - E.g. Henryk Sienkiewicz in my country.

Universalists, Reconstructionist Judaism, Quakers with unprogrammed worship, virtually any panentheist religion which asserts that the concept of God is universal and inherent in every element we can perceive. Even early Christian Gnosticism had echoes of this style of thought.

You're missing:

- These myths are the only ones we believe. The other ones are false and harmful.

- There is an invisible man who created everything and sits in judgment of all of us for the purposes of what happens to us in an afterlife that nobody has been able to observe.

- Follow us so that he does not judge you unfavorably.

The problem with the Bible is that the main character is God, and so everything that happens in the book affects him. The lessons do not give proper ethical cause and effect reasons for why you should do or not do something except that God is displeased with your humanity. Churches can add to these lessons and actually teach ethics, but they originate with the idea that a perfect being is really bad at creating perfect beings.

Despite how many churches start having pastors with spiked hair and jeans and sneakers and tattoos, THAT does not change, and it's fundamentally ridiculous and harmful.

This is a strawman for what you believe all religious organizations to be. In fact, you don't even need to be a religious organization to hold such beliefs. See: Alcoholics Anonymous.

The problem that religious doctrine seeks to address is one of how to preserve our sanity when we're inexplicably stuck on this rock together. Science doesn't seem to have any good explanation for why we're here either -- just that we exist and the universe has for a long time too. There a multiple colliding personal beliefs of individuals on things like: fairness, justice, or whatever a favorable outcome socially even might be. I think it's fine that people might seriously study the mythos of Greek, Abrahamic, and Eastern religion together.

People are born without a purpose other than survival and it is perfectly normal, if not recommended, that they maintain a healthy curiosity about the meaning of their existence. The alternative, unless I'm mistaken, is nihilism.

> In fact, you don't even need to be a religious organization to hold such beliefs. See: Alcoholics Anonymous.

Alcoholics Anonymous is an explicitly religious organization is it not? To me they certainly cast themselves so strongly in that manner that to claim they are a not is to make a distinction without a difference.

Note: I have not attended ?A itself but spent time with adjacent ?anon groups designed to support people whose friends and family members are struggling with addiction. The messages I received were, to me, pretty hard core religious, and one specific kind of religion in particular.

But you don't need religion for that. The ancients already knew this by creating the arts as an expression of humanity looking for its meaning. My opinion is that modern humans debased art and nowadays have difficulty finding things that are meaningful. Religion and superstition, on the other hand, have maintained their focus.

It isn't a strawman. It is a fundamentally accurate description of the major Western religions. The kind you would go to a church to.

I’ve met a handful of Jewish rabbis who teach exactly this btw.

However their comment is not the stories are “myths”. But instead are verbal stories that likely greatly exaggerate the situation to teach us a lesson and keep us engaged.

They didn't keep the Bible around for thousands of years because they compared it with other myths and thought it was the best, they did it because they thought it was true. The "natural selection" argument for the Bible leaves out the fact that reading it as a myth is not its "habitat," to keep up the analogy. On a comparative mythology basis, the winner will probably be a work of fiction written after the printing press.

Who is "they"? This seems like an argument against organized religion because of religious hegemony in certain cultures.

Certainly people _do_ gravitate towards moral mythology whether they like to admit it or not. The popularity of superheroes in North American culture speaks to this in modern times, most of which appear to be stories about defeating evil in ways that parallel those of ancient myths.

The argument is that the Bible is a really great myth because it survived for so long. The fallacy in that argument is that the Bible did not survive as a myth, it survived as a written record of events.

The Catholic approach, at least, is that the Bible contains a variety of literary styles, and so it's both. Some books are records of events, some are letters, some are myths in the Joseph Campbell sense of stories that are meant relate deeper truths about human nature and mankind's relationship with God. Most of the people who did this preserving over the centuries didn't subscribe so much to literal-minded fundamentalism.

The Catholic approach doesn't allow for swapping out biblical myths for other myths, which means that the Bible wasn't competing as a myth in their cannon either. If there was a form of "natural selection" operating on it, it was not operating on it as a myth. However I grant that "they thought it was true" is a vast oversimplification of the many motivations that people have had for printing copies of the Bible - which can include purely financial ones!

Ah, I think I see what you mean. Yes, most of the curation of the biblical canon was settled by the 4th century or so, and after that it came along with the religion as a fixed entity. But that doesn't mean there wasn't some natural selection of myths before that, especially those that had already been around for a long time before they were written down. Some weren't exclusive to Judaism; compare Noah to Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

I don't think 3rd century Christians were comparing different accounts and selecting them on the basis of how well they would function as allegorical myths. I could be wrong, but as far as I know that is a modern invention, developed to reconcile the supernatural elements of scriptures with the naturalistic worldview that developed during the enlightenment. To understand the setting of early canonization, you have got to picture a world of persecution, faith and martyrdom that is hard for us to imagine in our liberal, secular and comfortable world.

I understand that the view of the Bible as a product of natural selection is a way to transpose the belief that it was not made through purely human forces to a philosophical system where all nonhuman forces are natural. However, the argument for relevance to modernity is severely weakened by this rebasing. It is not the present environment that determines the shape of the animal, but the historical environment, and while the survival of a species is a testament to its adaptation for the historical environment, it is not a testament to its adaptation for the present environment. Since the historical environment was a combination of true faith, and later illiberality, there is no reason to think that it should be adapted for the modern environment of the allegorical view and religious freedom. That is why I do not think the naturalistic view works as a justification for the providence of the scriptures.