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Need the bible for what? If you wanted to use it as an easy answer manual, yeah, you'd have to edit it a ton, and probably throw a lot of it out. But that's not the point of it. There is a ancient midrash that in the debate of who the most rightious man of the Old Testament was, several rabbis came down to Noah and Abraham. They chose Abraham since he had bargained and arguerd with God to try to save mankind from God's wrath. The point of believing in God is relationship, not passive acceptance of a litany of rules and maxims. The point of the Bible is engagement, not simple responses or ease of understanding. To sort out what the texts mean, i choose to take my part in the tradition of interpretation and exegesis that seeks to honor God, much the same as the human authors of our texts sought to honor God.
Just seems to me that you're taking a very apocolpytical world view, a legacy from the time of Christ. Most of the mediteranean world believed in the degredation of the world, and that things were not the way they used to be. From this came the notion that prophets had ceased to come, and that the revelations of God were drawing to a close. This shows up in a lot of Paul's writings, specifically 1 Corinthians. Anyhoo, the point is that the whole idea of the Bible as a fixed and immutable thing is human idol, and not reflective of its true gift.
You can tell me that the whole of it ought to be one nice moral fairy tale, but it isn't. It is a complicated, contradictory and difficult book. And that isn't bad. If you want to read it as the word of God, dictated from Heaven, that might be a little tough, but the point is that there were human authors. This is not a stone tablet, this an evolving tradition. And you can say that it's evolving soley by human minds, and not by the power of God. But that assumes that God has ceased to operate, and that we can learn nothing more of God through experience. I'd say that's a pretty gaping assumption.
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