Atheists & Agnostics

Along comes the concept of monothesim with a somewhat higher moral order ... Abraham, the patriarch of Judaism is commanded to sacrifice his son by the One Diety.....then at the last minute ordered to stop and use the goat instead.

Many scholars believe this was how the religious leaders turned the Jewish people away from human sacrifice .. makes sense to me

My Old Testament Professor referred to Genesis as the Mythology of the Hebrews, and defined mythology as the attempt of a primitive people to explain the things they can not understand. Weather, earthquakes, volcanos, etc were due to humans displeasing the god/gods who controlled them, not the naturally occuring things we know them to be.

Every mythology has a sacrificial hero of some sort, and stories of resurrection some of which seem to be a way of explaining seasonal changes. Every mythology has some sort of miraculous birth story too. One could posit that the virgin birth and the death and resurrection were absolutely necessary in order to move the populace from the old religions to the new.