@SrRochardBunson @AdmiralFrosty No, I have not read the book youmentioned ("The Sermon on the Mount") and at this point I tend to have a PTSD type reaction whenever I encounter church/Christian type stuff, even seeing church scenes on TV sometimes makes me uncomfortable just because on some level I fear I will be tempted to be dragged back into that mess and I don't want any part of it. I feel like I have experiencerd religion, got my fill of it, and don't need it anymore. Also I do have some beliefs that are totally incompatible with what most "Christian" churches believe today (my belief that Paul was a con artist that brought his Pharisee training and beliefs into the early Christian religion being just one of them).

Speaking of books, though, I will mention one that really helped me understand things a bit better, but it comes with a big caveat. It is "The God of Eden" by William Bramley and often you can find it at a public library, maybe through interlibrary loan. It helped me understand how religion has been used to manipulate peope.

But I said there is a caveat, and it is this: The author believes extraterrestials have interfered in the development of humankind, to serve their own purposes. If you agree with that premise or can overlook it, you may enjoy the book. If you think that's absolutely nonsense and can't even entertain it as a work of fiction, then you won't. I look at it this way, if you can believe some of the fantastical tales in the Bible (especially the old testament) then you are already believing in things that modern science would say in nonsense. On the other hand, a lot of the Bible would be more believeable if you can accept that "sufficiently advanced technologies" may have been at play. If you can believe in angels and demons and heaven and hell, then you already believe in "extraterrestrial" beings (because they are not of this earth) and extraterrestrial locations. It doesn't matter if such beings come from another planet, another reality, another dimension, or some place we don't yet fully understand, all you really need to accept is that we can be visited by beings from elsewhere, some of which simply wish to take our resources and (where possible) enslave us.

Some of Bramley's conclusions are probably incorrect (always a risk when an author writes about something he can't possibly have experienced personally) but still it was another of the things that helped in my #deconstructing process.

My point is that for me the biggest change was realizing that you can't take what they terach you in church at face value. Sometimes they outright lie, but more often they deliberately give you a very incomplete picture of whatever they're preaching or teaching. In many cases they know more than they are telling, but they don't want to say a word that might make someone think they don't need a chuch or religion anymore. After all, that collection plate isn't going to fill itself! (Don't even get me started on the outright lies they tell to support compulsory tithing; if lies could send people to the "hell" that they believe in, then every time a fundamentalist preacher preaches about tithing they would be securing a spot for themselves in the hottest part!).