all literalists and curators of any religious tomes, definitely including me, are in violation of the first and/or second commandment (including this paragraph!), unless it is not intended to be taken seriously. total masterpiece! it’s a great book either way! but who came up with these rules, anyway, and why are half of them lifted straight from earlier cults?
given that they are ordered from most to least important, going to church, in its current form (idolizing the bible) is technically worse than murder, according to itself ??? strangely enough! but this also applies to any religion/tradition. dogma is probably the reason for the first and second commandments, because any tradition that develops around any given authoritative source for long enough will eventually stop making sense and become destructive. so the book actually describes and warns of its own inevitable demise! so it must have happened before!
the good news is that there is no actual standard for how to worship other than custom, which by above definition actually must constantly change in order to not become a grave sin. i vote for rave chuch. except that’s what raves/clubs already are, and are often in a church! either way, it is most likely right and good and necessary to worship, sing, and give praise, in whichever form you prefer! but to have any particular book override or exclude any other external information is what makes a cult, it’s inherently incorrect or even deceptive, and is probably the reason doing so is forbidden. either everything is from God or nothing is!
so then the answer is to treat the book(s) as just a book, and the useful manual and fascinating ancient almanac of even-more ancient stories that it is, and it’s fine, as long as you consider each component separately and the old/new separation and formation (Jesus didn’t have anything to do with the New Testament, which is a spontaneously curated assortment of letters never really intended to be the religion (which are mostly very good, but not complete or entirely authentic) with a kinda random but at least historically important bad acid trip tacked on the end, as opposed to the Old, which was written, collected, and curated over a much longer period of time and I think mostly intends to tell a history and maybe demonstrate a divine pattern and/or retell older myths about human behavior patterns, what is good, what is harmful, and certainly to cultivate and inspire a spirit of holiness, kindness, forgiveness, and a bunch of probably-generally-good wisdom, and a bunch of weird stuff that maybe nobody even really understands)! so, other than the Gospels, it’s sort of the same thing as the zen bookshelf that you just spin instead of reading it to gain maximum wisdom. hilarious.
everybody is great! what are we doing? does anybody know?