'The vast majority of religious believers hold on to scriptures as sacred, as profound revelations, as precious guides to the mysteries of life and death. Believers believe that their stories are true -- for instance, that Moses was a real person who led the Hebrews out of slavery and received the Torah directly from God on Mount Sinai or that there really was a Prince Siddhartha Gautama who searched for and found enlightenment in the sixth century B.C.E. Moreover, they believe that contained in these ancient stories is information vital to contemporary humans.
The truth is, we really don't know much about the historical Moses or the historical Buddha. The evidence for these persons from the ancient past is quite sparse and filtered largely through centuries of oral history, mythological elaborations and sectarian biases, before they were even recorded in written form by religious partisans.'
Read more: The Sciences of Sacred Scriptures
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