Authority and Rebellion

I don't think that the church's monopoly on literacy during the Middle Ages came about because the church leadership wanted to control it and keep it from others. I think it was more likely that nobody else was interested in literacy at the time. The nobility didn't need it to hack on each other with their swords, and the peasants didn't need it to hack on the ground with their primitive tools. The church people needed it so that they could read the Bible and make copies of it before the originals wore out. The type of paper they had in those days didn't last long, and the only way to make copies was with a quill pen. This kept lots of people busy, and they probably thought it was a pretty good job compared to what the nobility and the peasantry were doing for a living.

I don't think there were many Atheists in those days. I always thought that Atheism was invented in the 1960s by rebellious youths who just wanted to aggravate their parents. I wondered what would happen when all those Atheists grew up and had children of their own. What would their children do to express their rebelliousness? Would they all become holy rollers? I think that some of them did, because the traditional religions have lost membership in our lifetimes, while the holy rollers have prospered and proliferated.

The story about Abraham almost sacrificing his son has been around for a long time. In addition to the Jews and the Muslims, I understand that several Pagan cultures in the Middle East claim Abraham as their patriarch, or at least they did before the Muslims exterminated and/or assimilated them. I think the story is supposed to teach you that you should blindly obey God and, if you do, He won't let you really do anything wrong, but will stop you just in the nick of time. If you think that God was playing games in that one, you should read the book of Job, where God makes a bet with Satan that Job will remain loyal no matter what He does to him. Of course, the god we know would never do something like that, but the gods of the Mesopotamians did stuff like that all the time. This leads me to believe that the Israelites brought stories like that with them from Mesopotamia when they set off in search of the Promised Land.

Yes, most religions are all about authority and telling people what to do, but they also are about rebellion. Christianity started out as the radical fringe group of the Roman establishment. As soon as they became the Roman establishment, they tried to suppress the other radical fringe groups, with varying degree of success. Just about the time they figured they had everybody under control, the Protestant Reformation broke out. Throughout most of human history, the people who rebelled against established religions were people who wanted to establish different religions in their place. I don't think you can find any reference to organized Atheism until about the 20th Century.

I don't think that the Deist beliefs about human nature preclude further discussion or inquiry. We talk about stuff like that all the time. Just saying that something comes from God does not mean we understand what we're supposed to do with it. Since God doesn't talk to us, we have to talk to each other if we want to figure that out.