Too bad that you had such a negative introduction to religion. I think your parents sent you to Elsdon believing that it would be good for you. "Suffer the little children...." My parents sent me to Elsdon too at first, but before long they joined me there. "....And a little child shall lead them."
I have always been interested in historical stuff, and I learned at an early age to check things out for myself rather than relying on the pronouncements of other people. It's not that I don't trust people, it's just that sometimes they just don't get it right. I used to get into arguments with the guys at the paper mill about things like our union contract and the Michigan hunting and fishing laws. I would haul out the document in question and challenge my opponent to show me where it says that. The response was usually something like, "I don't have to read it, I know what it says." Well, that's never been good enough for me.
They were using that King James Bible when I first started at Elsdon, but before long they switched to the Revised Standard Version, which I thought was a big improvement. Since then there have been numerous modern English translations published, but I still prefer the RSV. It's a lot easier to read than the KJV, but it still sounds like the Bible. I understand that a lot of people still prefer the KJV, I suppose it's just what you get used to at an early age. Even though I don't exactly believe the Bible anymore, I still believe that it's a great work of literature. Shakespeare is even older than the KJV, and I never could make any sense out of his stuff, but some people still thing that he was the greatest writer who ever lived. Go figure!
I seem to remember that St. Augustine was the bridge between early Christianity and the more modern version. See, the early Christians believed that the Apocalypse was coming any day now, maybe because Jesus said that it would happen in "this generation." After a few hundred years, it was becoming obvious that there something was wrong with that prophesy. I think Augustine believed that what was wrong was people's interpretation of the prophesy, and he was looking for some other way to spin it. At some point he decided that Plato and the other dead Greeks were on to something, even if they themselves didn't know what it was at the time. What I think he did was combine some of those old Greek ideas with the Christian tradition, morphing into the concept that it's not about the End of the World, it's about the end of your individual world, which comes when you die. This is kind of what the mainline denominations latched onto, while the fundamentalists continue to insist that, when Jesus said "this generation", He meant the current generation of today. The fact that they have been saying this for 2,000 years, and it hasn't happened yet, doesn't seem to bother them.
Forgiveness of sins is a little more complicated than that. First of all, there is a difference between sins and Sin with a capital "S". Sin is defined as living apart from God, while sins are individual acts that are committed by individual people. Baptism used to represent the conversion experience, when you renounced Sin and accepted the saving grace of Jesus Christ. Any sins you might have previously committed were forgiven, which is why some of the early Christians waited till the last minute to do it. At some point, though, people started baptizing their newborn babies, which kind of defeated the whole purpose. Since then, different churches have dealt with the problem in various ways, but they all still revolve around the concept of forgiveness. Generally, forgiveness is conditional on confession and repentance, you have to tell somebody what you did and feel sorry about it. I understand that the Catholics no longer use those little phone booths for this purpose, but I think they still have to go through the priest to get forgiven. Protestants generally cut out the middle man and confess their sins directly to God. They usually invoke the name of Jesus as an intermediary, but I'm not sure how important that is, since Jesus and God are technically the same person, but most Christians won't say anything to God without bringing Jesus into it. The Jews, of course, won't have anything to do with Jesus. Like I said, they used to atone for their sins by sacrificing animals, but they haven't done that since their temple was destroyed in 70A.D. I don't know what they do about it nowadays, or if they do anything. I know it's the job of Jewish mothers to lay guilt trips on their kids, but I don't know what they have to do to get out of it.
"There is nothing new under the sun" is a quote from the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes, which means "The Preacher". I think that King Solomon wrote it one day when he was in a bad mood because it's pretty negative. Nevertheless, it's kind of pretty in a poetic sort of way, and people like to quote it. Do you remember that song put out by The Byrds back in the 60s, "For every thing there is a season, and a time for every matter under Heaven"? Well that's straight out of Ecclesiastes, except for the "turn, turn, turn" part. I don't know why they put that in there.
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