[quote=@Bishop]
[@Meta] How do you know the bible wasn't written by some fantasy writer some thousands of years ago and was used by a group of people to get themselves in power by manipulating the common folk?
[/quote]

That's a great question. Historians have several techniques for dating and determining authorship/purpose of ancient writings, which have been applied to the Bible. The "book" known as the Bible is actually a collection of 66 smaller books written by about forty authors over a period of roughly 1600 years.

I accidentally hit send so I'm going to continue this in another post.