It's not just that religious texts are written in order to indoctrinate, its a lot more insidious than that. It starts off with a series of real events, which are written about over and over for years later, based on elaborations of existing accounts and people's memories. Many of these even include elements of much earlier documents and narratives borrowed from other traditions altogether. In the meantime, these stories evolve, either accidentally as will any multiply-repeated tale, or deliberately as people seek to add their own interpretation. These are translated, copied and retold, combined and edited (remember, this was all before printing).

Somewhere down the line, a priesthood evolves that seeks to standardize the tale, and committees of editors get together and gather up all the extant versions and come up with a canonical version, usually after a lot of debate and compromise, or even violence. In the process, similar versions are reconciled and many of the stories and volumes that have survived up to that point are discarded, in order to cover up contradictions or meet current religious fashions.

In Christianity, this happened at the Council of Nicea, in the third century, a months-long convention representing many factions and special interests that struggled to finally come up with a compromise everyone could live with. It wasn't just a gathering of sedate churchmen, either, there were debates, brawls, even fighting in the streets as different factions argued their positions and jockeyed to get them in the final version.

Many books were discarded or discredited altogether, including several lost Gospels like the one mentioned here, , the Apocrypha, and other documents. Both the Old and New Testaments were severely edited during this time, and even today, there are different versions that have survived and are now embraced by Protestants, Catholics, Jews and Orthodox scriptural authorities.

This has no doubt happened to much of the great literature of antiquity, we know it happened to Homer, for example. Even as late as Roman times scholars were still putting the finishing touches on the "official" versions of the Odyssey and Iliad, and supposedly, other epics which are now lost. The process is similar to how legislation is written in Congress today. Scholars try to reconstruct these events, as the post by Socrates points out, to try and find out what really happened, but of course, we can never know for sure.

What is scary is how modern day fundamentalists pick these documents apart word by word, phrase by phrase, and try to justify their own interpretations based on the placement of punctuation or by the meaning of phrases which have been multiply translated and edited for thousands of years. Their arguments drip with footnotes and scholarly commentary and self-righteous confidence. And they are perfectly ready to justify war and death on the basis of their sycophantic religious ass-kissing and nit picking.

It's amazing how much of the wisdom and poetry and history in these ancient writings has managed to emerge from this tiresome process.