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this, of course, requires that one believes that the stories recounted in the Bible are true. and of course, there's no way to empirically know that any of them are. and as Michael Hudson has pointed out in his exhaustive book, "...and forgive them their debts," the very word "sin" upon which so much of the religious tenets hang is an utterly mis-translated word. the original Greek opheilēma / opheiletēs meant literally financial "debt." the Bible, as it turns out, is actually preoccupied with debt and debt forgiveness. that corrected translation leads to a very different religion if you ask me.
from the book's publishing notes:
"Jesus's first sermon announced that he had come to proclaim a Clean Slate debt cancellation (the Jubilee Year), as was first described in the Bible (Leviticus 25), and had been used in Babylonia since Hammurabi's dynasty. This message - more than any other religious claim - is what threatened his enemies, and is why he was put to death. This interpretation has been all but expunged from our contemporary understanding of the phrase, "...and forgive them their debts," in The Lord's Prayer. It has been changed to "...and forgive them their trespasses (or sins)," depending on the particular Christian tradition that influenced the translation from the Greek opheilēma/opheiletēs (debts/debtors). ...
"Perhaps most striking is that - according to a nearly complete consensus of Assyriologists and biblical scholars - the Bible is preoccupied with debt forgiveness more than with sin."