Plus, we always must remember that the choice of books to be included was determined according to the political realities of the time. I mean, they ignored the whole set of gnostic gospels because they spoke of reincarnation and demiurges, Archons and so on. Are these then irrelevant? Or did the people in the councils fear them because they were about spiritual ascent, not the growing economic power of the newly 'official' Christian church.
This is why the dogmatic concept of inerrancy is a bad idea.
Like the Bhagavad Gita, the Avadhuta Gita, the Dao De Jing, the Hermetica, the Tipitaka, if you take it literally you miss the point.
Spiritual truth tends to hide until you're ready for it, you know?
If we take the bible, for example, you can take three chapters from the Gospel of Matthew (5-7), the parables, and for a Kabbalistic cosmology, the first chapter of the Gospel of John and have the 'how to live' text. But again, creating dogma from a literal interpretation even of these texts is not wise, and definitely leads to oppression, wars, and other horrible things.
I contend, respectfully, that the evils perpetrated on humanity by various religions are not the fault of the creative force. The fault lies squarely with us - our fear, greed, envy, pride, wrath, gluttony, lust, and escapist behaviors - are the architects of religious, economic, gender, LGBTQ+, racial and ethnic oppression. It is a great truth that if the species of sapiens is to leave adolescence and grow up, we must shed our ego-attachments to the wrong things, and rather become conscious of the sacredness of all life on this earth.
There is a video I just watched by an astronaut who spoke of his change of mindset when he saw our planet from space. This is called the 'Overview Effect.' He states in the video that this planetary mindset is the necessary step for our species of sapiens to grow up. Right now we are children, pounding our chests with imperial style nationalism. But when I reflect that the West allows eleven people PER MINUTE to die of starvation on this planet, and our earth loses over six species per hour, we simply must grow up.
A last thought - when Jesus was asked what is the greatest commandment, the first word out of his mouth was 'love.' Love God and your neighbor. That's it. It is all about what used to be called the Golden Rule - to do to others only what we would want them to do to us. All of the major religions have some version of this, and you must ask yourself what single factor keeps us here in the US from practicing this great truth? Oh, that's right. Wall Street and its bronze bull, which is actually the God this country worships. Profits-over-people is actually a legal doctrine - it is how we roll.
This doctrine is called 'shareholder primacy,' and the pseudo-religious worship of shareholder profits over all else encourages sociopathic corporate behaviors that are literally killing all life on this earth.
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