Spiritual truth, if there is any, lies beyond religion and scripture.

I think religions are cultural inflections. If there is a spiritual dimension to life, if there is, then I think the various religions of the world are only ways in which a person might wish to express their experience and understanding of it, but the religion is secondary to that reality--if there is such a reality--and the experience of that reality.

I think people make a mistake when they try to concretize their belief system when they aim to have a deeper appreciation for something that transcends our world.

You can spend a lot of time trying to figure out what exactly Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, and Paul thought of God and Jesus. But I believe that what Annie Dillard said is true: Whatever you say about God is untrue, for we can only know creaturely attributes which do not apply to God. So I think that whatever worth we give to the words of these ancient men, it's important to remember that we will never know exactly what they meant, and I believe if there is a spiritual dimension to life, it lies somewhere beyond their words anyway.

Study of the Bible, and trying to find out exactly what ancient people meant when they wrote it can be interesting in an academic sense, but for me, if the Bible has any worth in regards to revealing spiritual truth, it comes from reading it as poetry, not prose, and as something that is open to interpretation, just like any other piece of literature. Only a fool would claim there is one and only one way of reading a novel. How we read a novel, and the reasons certain novels are important to us are deeply personal. Trying to find someone to tell us the "correct" way of reading a novel would kill the experience.

I have no idea what the "correct" way of interpreting the crucificition is, but for me it is a mythological tale about a god who chose to show love toward humanity by being born into the world as a man and experiencing life and death as a human being. The death is brutal because the world this god gave us is brutal, and to have an easy death when so many die painful deaths would have been an easy out. I think this mythological god was telling us even though life can be very harsh, and even though we may not know the reasosn as to why it has to be so harsh, it has value, so much value that the god who created it wanted to experience it right along side us.