Steven Pinker. The best in us (№ 411777)

Needless to say, the vast majority of strictly religious Jews and Christians are exceptionally decent people who do not condone genocide, rape and slavery or stoning for minor offenses. They treat the Bible more like a talisman. In recent centuries and millennia, the Bible has been revised, allegorically interpreted, replaced with less violent texts, or carefully ignored. And the main thing is just this. The sensitivity to violence has changed so much that religious people make a distinction in their attitude to the Bible: they extol it as a symbol of morality, but base their own morality on more modern principles.