Hi Omar,
the problem is that religion has to go through a difficult process of assessing its inherent values and at the same time learn from outside sources. Of course, you get people like me who say that we must learn to stay with the standards of education and embrace the discoveries of the enlightenment age, but there are enough people who are scared of this and want to board up against influence from outside. It is also difficult because there are so many people warning against the dangers of “mixing” with atheists etc. and you have a lot of people who, instead of moving out, dig themselves in and take up positions that have been overturned for centuries. In doing this, they knowingly ignore what is taught in school, they reject science and reason and accuse humanistic values of being evil.
In a way, it is what I have in the past called the “Grimm Effect”. Grimm’s fairy tales were written down and conserved in a way that we now are horrified by modern standards at the pedagogical methods taught in those fairy tales. Had they not been conserved, many would have adapted to common opinion or fallen by the wayside as time goes on. The Bible is similarly conserved and presents a worldview that is clearly antiquated. I believe that as a historical record of how people developed spirituality, we can learn from the insights and also the mistakes of the Bible. We know now that the Bible was probably put together from various sources at the time of the return from Babylonian captivity, but the Bible suggests it is a narrative from the genesis of the earth. But that was the way people explained their lives in the past. Some civilizations saw themselves as offspring of the gods, or demi-gods, and there was a number of traditions to plagiarise from.
Our biggest problem today is that we have a movement of people trying to overthrow science and evidence-based reason, including politicians like Trump. Hearsay and vague memories of stories from the past, suspicion, and tribalism is what has more bearing on their policies than ever before. The scientific method is criticised as an “opinion” and set alongside other opinions. This means that people are systematically making themselves ignorant in the interest of their religion, and teaching others to do the same. Steven Pinker’s book “Enlightenment now!” is an important reminder of how the Enlightenment has brought us forward in nearly every area of human life, even taking the mistakes into account. It would be a grave mistake to ignore these achievements.