It contains great insights and gross ignorance, sound ethics and vile propaganda.
It's a book from primitive times, a valuable record of man's early struggles to grapple with the big questions.
But what if we consider consider the possibility that the Bible never claimed such "high and mighty" things about itself, especially since it's not aware of its own existence. It was only a record of a people's experience of God and own aim should be to honour the memory of those people by trying to rediscover their world and their experience. It's just like you said. It was a "valuable record" of "man's early struggles" to "grapple with the big questions."
Some will think of the Bible as "promoting good" while others will thinking of it as "promoting evil" but my position is a neutral one as the Bible being just a piece of literature, has only as much value as the reader himself is capable of extracting from it. Great insights vs. gross ignorance? Hey if the Bible never claims to be "high and mighty" it can be seen as neither insightful nor ignorant. Sound ethics and vile propaganda? Same thing again. Does it really claim to "promote the highest good" or is it the vilest tool of deception ever formed? The stronger its own claims of virtue, the stronger the vice if those claims of virtue are overshadowed by arrogance, narcissism and control-freakiness (if that's a word). The "Bigger" the Bible claims to be, the "Bigger" its vices. The stronger its claims of insight and ethics, the stronger the ignorance and vileness if such insight and ethics is driven by arrogance and ethical/spiritual narcissism.
If the Bible doesn't claim to be Big then we don't have to judge, criticise or condemn it as a "Big Evil Scourge" because it has never sought out that status in the world. I suppose it's a kind of Tall Poppy Syndrome. The more Christians promote it, the more you have to oppose it.
To me it's not a question of whether the Bible is "wrong." It just never claimed to be right about certain things. Does the Bible say anything about stem-cell research and abortion? Is it "ignorant" of stem-cell research and abortion? No the authors of the Bible never knew the phenomenon, but can they be seen as "ignorant?"
To me ignorance isn't just lack of knowledge or experience. It's where you assert your views to a person or group of people and "assume," "act" and "believe" as if you are professionally, emotionally, mentally and intellectually qualified to tell them what to think and believe. Here I'm not talking just about the "definition" of "ignorance" but also what it means in a social context. Words are not limited to dictionary definitions, but also what they mean in a culture and society. So ignorance is more than just "lack of knowledge or experience."
Ignorance can be rude and offensive. When we go on a path toward such offensive behaviour, if we don't want to be offensive we can apologise or excuse ourselves.
So the Bible can be "ignorant" in the sense of making claims that are rude and offensive because they are wrong, and because the Bible is too stubborn to retract its view, but it depends a lot on how you interpret and apply its contents to the contemporary culture/reality/life experience. The Bible is only as "rude," "stubborn," "arrogant" or "ignorant" as it projects or promotes itself to be. The Bible is like a "virtual personality" that is maintained by beings that really do have "attitude" and "personality" and an image that can only exist because of the attitudes and behaviours of such entities (us, you and me).
The Bible doesn't claim to be able to dictate to us about stem-cell research and abortion, and most of it, from my impression, doesn't dictate at all. It expresses. It affirms. It promotes. But it doesn't dictate all the time. Often it's just Christians making it into something dictatorial. It's Christians being pompous about their Text. When that happens, they provoke the Tall Poppy Syndrome and bring it on themselves. The conflict between Christians and non-Christians is this Tall Poppy Syndrome thing. It's the knight-in-shining armour routine.
