harp music vs a crumb of an Italian beef sandwich.

I don't mind talking about the bible in the sense that this is what the bible says and it has influenced religion in such and such a way, but i do object to using it as history, probably most things in the good book never happened. 

I've been consistent in saying that most, probably all, religions in their writings ask their followers to be nice to everybody.  Love your enemies is a phrase whose absence you used in some little piece of doggerel that I dug up on the internet about the golden rule, to assert that they didn't believe in loving their enemies.  I just objected to the phrase, which they may or may not have used, but whether they used it or not, I think they did teach them to love their enemies.  I'm not saying the people behaved that way, just that that is the way they were taught.

I think you have an odd idea in thinking that anybody of a different religion is an enemy and anybody of the same religion is a friend.  The latter is certainly not true, certainly not Christianity which has spent way more time persecuting other Christians than it has persecuting people of other religions.

Isaac Asimov, Asimov, was indeed a hero of my youth.  I felt so proud of my two volume set of The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science.  I went to college intending to become a biochemist, but that came a bit a cropper when I discovered that I could buy beer with a university ID, and later when I became a hippie.  Hippies didn't have much use for science, and I don't think I came back to science until maybe my early thirties.

Adler was a psychologist, which is to say, in those days especially, a philosopher.  Philosophers are always suspect.

The early Hebrews, or the early early Hebrews were Canaanites, just ones who got religion, or that religion, as opposed to the golden calf religion.  The Hebrews didn't bust out of Egypt.  The Hebrews were never taken there, the way the Babylonians took them into captivity.  Some Hebrews ventured down to Egypt to seek their fortunes in that more civilized land, but they were never hauled out there en masse.  And by the way the Red Sea was never parted.

I don't know about life after death, originating among the Christians, a little internet research indicates it was around.  But it always seemed to me like a powerful motivator.  Do you want to believe in this religion where you go to dust and stay dust, or do you want to believe in this other one where all you have to do is avoid sin (harder than it sounds apparently), and you can live forever?  They were always pretty vague about the nature of this afterlife.  What if after a few million years you get tired of harp music, and there is still an eternity to go?

Seems there was a lot of reincarnation going on.  That doesn't sound too bad, a way to see the world and the animal kingdom.  I was never with the part that said once you get it right you are out of the loop.  I think I would always want to stay in the loop, even if it meant being a cockroach.  You never know when you are going to come across a crumb of an Italian beef sandwich.