Howard, the Bible says that the universe was created in seven days. It says woman was created from a man's rib. It says homosexuals should be put to death, for they are an abomination unto the Lord. It says a lot of things that most of us - those of us who are not fundamentalists - reject. It is possible to reject these things and not reject the good things in Judaism, in Christianity, in Islam. The central beliefs of the great faiths are not shaken by the discovery that the Sun doesn't actually go around the Earth.

The belief that Jesus was the son of God, the belief in the Immaculate Conception, the belief that Jesus was the Messiah, the belief that Jesus rose on the 3rd day - these beliefs are un-Jewish, but not anti-Jewish. I don't accept those beliefs, but I don't find them offensive, and I have no wish to censor them, or the hymns based on them. The belief that some or all of the Jews of the day were responsible for the death of Jesus is a different matter. It's not for me to tell you what is and what isn't central to your faith, but I'll speculate that Christianity could still get along quite well if it were confronted with documented evidence that the crucifixion was a Roman affair from go to whoa, one in which no Jews (except Jesus, of course) played any significant role. And if the only documentation for your view of things is the Bible, the same Bible that insists that people used to live for 900 years, and that the origin of different languages is explained by God's anger at the Tower of Babel, then I think you have to explain why you accept the literal truth of one part of the document, when (presumably) you're content to go for other interpretations of other parts of it.