Biblical Literacy for Atheists and How NOT to aruge with an intelligent Christian

The above is a nice response to a fundie who

1. Believes in the Bible literally and
2. Believes that their deity is a loving, personal deity that still does miracles.

It won’t have any effect on most intelligent and/or educated Christians.

This is how I would have answered this video:

1. God’s miracle is more that life got here at all; just think: our bodies not only reproduce themselves, but, within limits, can repair itself. What human engineered thing can do that? But no, God isn’t going to change physics and chemistry on my behalf.

2. Yes, those starving kids are a major tragedy. But this is what happens when we live our lives in a greedy manner and don’t plan ahead; God’s morality is for our own good. Think of what we do as parents: we don’t let our kids play in the street because it can cause harm, even if the kid doesn’t see this. And yes, though those kids are suffering and we should do what we can to help feed them, remember that all human suffering is temporal; we’ll all be happy in heaven (I was from the Universalist wing of the church).

3. About all of those things in the Bible: the horrific (see the book of Joshua where the Israelites ruthlessly murdered thousands), the comical (Jacob affecting the spots an stripes on sheep by exposing them to striped wood while they ate and mated; see Genesis Chapter 30, 33-43) and the bizarre (the fearsome sky god was able to slaughter whole populations but was unable to deal with iron chariots (Judges chapter1, verse 19); one wonders what this god would have done against Abrams tanks and B-1’s.

But as the priests taught me: these books were written by bronze age people who knew nothing about omnipotent deities or science; they were doing the best that they could. See that as a “sacred scrap book” of the thoughts at that time.

The same goes for those weird and often abusive laws.

Hence, such arguments (as in this video) would have little effect.

Here is my recommendation for those atheists who want to learn something about the Bible:

Get a good translation (New Revised Standard Edition, New American (Catholic), or for the Hebrew Bible (aka “Old Testament”) the TANAKH put out by the Jewish Publication Society. The New American has excellent footnotes which explains why some translations were made in the way that they were and they also point out factual errors.

Next get a good book on the Bible (Rogerson: Introduction to the Bible is inexpensive but very readable and scholarly)

One might also get a commentary such as the Interpreter’s Commentary and perhaps Rabbi Teluskin’s Biblical Literacy.

This might sound strange, but I find such exercises to be fun.