I hear you. I was raised in a very strict Catholic family. My main gripes with Paul:
The doctrine of proxy salvation is the teaching that the only way a person can become acceptable to God is by belief in a human sacrifice by a perfect human. If a person is not a believer, their "righteousness is filthy rags." However, if a person is a believer, they can lie, cheat, steal, abuse their families, etc, and it's all covered in the Blood of Christ. This allows Christians to disregard the teachings of Christ in favor of an obscure dogma based on pagan beliefs. Now they focus on cultural issues such as abortion and transgender bathrooms -- which the Bible says little to nothing about -- while ignoring Christ's universal teachings of Justice and Compassion.
The doctrine of proxy salvation has pagan roots. Jesus was a Jew, and -- from what I understand -- the idea of proxy salvation is total nonsense to Judaism. But it would have made perfect sense to Paul's original audience. In ancient Rome, most people were not citizens and had no rights. However, a wealthy person could buy citizenship by making suitable offerings to the government-sponsored temples. Paul's letter to the Romans expands on this idea: You may feel like nobody now, living in occupied Rome, but Christ has made the perfect offering to make you citizens of God's kingdom!
The promotion of the patriarchy in his restrictions on women is another problematic area in Paul's teachings. Yet, on the one hand, Paul says he forbids women to teach or have any authority over men, and in other places, he sends greetings to prominent women of the various churches he addressed.
Paul's writings are a real mixed bag, with some great Gnostic teachings scattered among the pagan nonsense and patriarchal bigotry. An educated reader can readily come to the conclusion that the Epistles attributed to Paul are likely a composite of several writers from different times and places. But those who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible reject such a perspective, struggle with the obvious contradictions in those writings, and conclude that it's all a mystery that we'll understand when we get to Heaven.
And now we see the sort of intellectual laziness that led to their support of a con artist who plans to dismantle our government and sell it off to the highest bidders. This happens when people are trained from an early age to have faith in mythical stories and "lean not to their own understanding."
