The myths in the bible and other religions are mostly based upon hallucinogenic mushrooms and cannabis. Many of the characters and gods are on one level personifications of the sun, planets and stars and on an even higher level personifications of the magical plants. The forbidden fruit of the Old Testament becomes the Jesus of the New Testament, put his magic mushroom spirit in your body/temple and take a trip to heaven/outer space, so easy even the cavemen could do it. The truth is something you take and really that's all it takes, you don't need any religion, god, etc.
This is the biggest secret of the various religions and esoteric groups, what the ancients were doing were using hallucinogenic mushrooms and marijuana to induce an out of body, transcendental mystical experience. Inside your brain is a gland called the pineal gland which produces and regulates the drug DMT. Normally we only get a big dose of the DMT when we're born and when we die and a bit when we sleep, but if you trick it into releasing it while you're alive you'll experience what people who die experience, then you'll see the truth for yourself and you'll really be "born again." The first time I achieved this I understood the end goal of all religions and was a little sick to my stomach afterwards but felt like I had just won the lottery. Then I knew how to do it again too, and for a few years I lived like a monk or a reclusive rock star and went further and further, to infinity and beyond. I consider this one of the most important periods in my life and man it showed me so much.
The only Christian group I've seen practicing anything close to what's found in the bible is the Native American church who eat Peyote as the holy sacrament, the flesh of Christ.
Anyways, inducing the big quantum leap is not something to be taken lightly, because once the DMT is released and your consciousness separates from your mind and body anything can happen but it's not something that should be feared either. One must respect the "Jesus" and I don't consider hallucinogens or even marijuana party drugs but holy sacraments, the gods themselves.
In the bible myths though it seems like the mushroom they're using is the Fly Agaric, which can be toxic if not dried and even slightly toxic if dried. So what they would do is the village shaman/medicine man would eat the hallucinogenic mushrooms, then the villagers would drink his psychedelic piss after the shaman's liver and kidney's had filtered out the toxins... This kind of stuff is key to understanding the myths of Jesus, Dionysus, Bacchus etc. Now go read the story about where Jesus gives the lady at the well a drink of his "living waters" that show her what life is all about. lmao
Also these myths were never about worshiping anything but about realizing one's own divinity mainly via psychedelic enlightenment, which throughout history institutions like Churches and Governments have been totally against. If you realize that you are a god, a divine being in your own right, you'll realize that they are no god over you and they don't want the commoners thinking they're as godly as they think they are. What the plants showed me was that this world is an illusion that we're subconsciously manifesting and our subconscious mind is an extraterrestrial entity and though we're all individuals on a conscious level, we all share the same subconscious. This is the mystery of I AM, there are no gods where I AM.
If you're interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls, check out the work of Dr. John Marco Allegro who was the only agnostic on the team that deciphered them. It has been awhile since I've looked into the Essenes but they were basically a mushroom based belief system too, their name I believe is where we end up with the word Essence... the same thing as soul/sol, the leader of the Essenes, Philos I believe his name was (likely a mythological figure as well) held the secrets of the enlightening medicine, which like the Jesus Juice and the Soma of the Rg Veda was made out of hallucinogenic mushrooms. These religions have hidden the real knowledge/gnosis from the masses and have portrayed them to be the opposite of what they really are.
The Catholic (and probably the Protestant churches as well) have destroyed, hidden and locked the truth away for the last 1,700 years but there's still more than enough knowledge out there to figure this stuff out on your own. It's all right in their own myths (that they mostly borrowed,) their artwork (borrowed the themes of a lot of this too!,) their traditions, etc. If you really want to understand myths like those found in the bible I'd suggest studying the arcane subjects that they originated from like Astrotheology, shamanism, the ancient Egyptian and Greek mysteries, Gnosticism, esoteric symbolism, Zoroastrianism, numerology and gematria, Kaballah, Greek philosophy, Rg Veda Hinduism, etc. etc. I also like the work of Carl Jung, Mark Twain, Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson and most of the great acid rock bands and bands like Tool that still put this knowledge out there often in a subtle manner.
Also when I say it's a myth I don't mean that in a bad way, there's great knowledge to be found within the myth if one can apply it but religions are what keep people from finding this knowledge rather than dispensing it. The first step though is probably admitting to yourself that it's all a myth and there's really no big boogey man up in the sky that's going to send us to hell... in fact if you look at every other spiritual system and even the old testament, hell is this world, the god people worship is the god of hell, the creator of this material prison which is really nothing more than a personification of an authoritarian type government figure which in the old days were the churches. The witch hunts were all about killing off the people using the magical plants, when they came to the Americas and found people using the holy mushroom they instituted a death penalty for anyone caught using it. The church, governments, the united nations have been trying to keep the power from the people since their inception.
I've already written a book but could go on for weeks about this stuff, like I said, I spent a few years tripping and studying spirituality. I can also show you that this is the type of spirituality that this country itself was founded upon, the freedom for every man and woman (at least white people back then) to be able to eat from the tree of knowledge/gnosis and realize their full potential. But that sure didn't last long!
Here's a great link too... enjoy...
http://thelostword.dk/index2.htm
And don't think I'm down on you for being a Christian either, I'm not, I was once a Christian too, I was brought up going to Sunday School every week with my grandma, baptized, the whole deal. I really don't care what anyone's religion is, I've got my own
Peace out...