Somehow, I managed to miss this entry when it was first posted. (Maybe it was just before I started reading Anthropik.) In it, Jason Godesky chronicles the development of his own religious faith, and how reading Quinn's Ishmael triggered an entire cascade resulting in a new understanding of the Bible. Choice quote:

I can no longer understand how a civilized person can read the Bible and consider it "their" book. Civilization and agriculture is G-d's curse. He calls Abraham to leave civilization behind and found twelve tribes to be his chosen people. He must constantly rescue them from civilization -- the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, every successive, great civilization is G-d's implacable enemy. The Torah creates a subversive system that undercuts civilization at every turn; the prophets advance an incredibly liberal agenda that assaults the most fundamental tenets of civilization -- the concentration of wealth and power. The Hebrews demand a king, a state -- a civilization -- despite G-d's warnings, and their suffering for that mistake has yet to end.

The Gospels only underline this unremitting, brutal assault on civilization. Jesus incites his disciples to leave it all behind, move beyond civilization into small, cooperative tribes, for lack of a better word. The Romans kill him for it, and Paul inverts it for his own power (see John Dominic Crossan's The Historical Jesus). After all that, the Bible ends with a stark prophecy of a final battle between east and west, the emergence of a single, global empire, and how G-d will destroy civilization and return us to the idyllic, utopian existence of Eden, where we began, where G-d meant us to be -- in tribes.