Today I wanted to share a post made by another armchair loving friend of mine – the Armchair Theologian. He made a post a while ago responding to a claim made by some atheists that rape is only punishable by a fine in the Bible. I don’t have much to add to it, except that I share his frustrations that too often Bible verses are cherry picked or taken wildly out of context when the whole of Scripture is criticized as archaic lunacy.
Hope you enjoy!
The Armchair Apologist 
“Sometimes I wish atheists would ask a christian for help in finding better verses to object to in scripture. They tend to be very bad theologians.”
That’s exactly why we don’t ask Christians for “better verses” because that’s how we were taught this nonsense to begin with: spoon fed, pericope at a time, then told the explanation. That’s the only way Christianity would be able to grow to 2 + billion people; get them in early and young, then tell them what it says, then explain what it means; whether it’s correct or not!
Do you lead with the contradictions and various errors in scripture? Do you lead with the lack of knowledge of the authors of scripture? Do you describe the endless additions, deletions, interpolations, doublets, etc. built into scripture? No, never. If it weren’t for secular scholars we’d never have heard any of it.
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Friend, with all due respect, it’s just common courtesy to seek the other sides perspective in any debate. You don’t necessarily have to ask a Christian, “hey, what are some Bible verses you think I should object to?” (And keep in mind, the comment you’re replying to was on ACTheologians post, not mine) but asking one of your Christian friends, “what are some Bible verses you wrestle with?” is a good starting point. It would give you an opportunity to steelman your own position, and most Christians if they’re being honest would admit to one or two verses they have a hard time with.
Christianity growing to over 2 billion adherents worldwide isn’t just because we teach kids, there are a plethora of adult converts that converted after witnessing the truth of the Gospel for themselves. From ancient figures like St Paul, Constantine, Augustine, and Cyprian of Carthage to more modern people like Francis Collins, Dorothy Day, CS Lewis, Alistar McGrath and Peter Hitchens. These individuals didn’t need to be “spoon fed” as kids. And these are just the famous examples. Now granted, it might be true that most Christians believe because they were raised in a Christian household, but as I demonstrated in my post Addressing Three Common Atheist Arguments, that doesn’t discredit their beliefs at all. You’d probably raise your kids in a secular household, but does that mean they’d be wrong if they grew up atheist?
As for your second point, no, we don’t lead with the “contradictions” of Scripture. We don’t preach the Gospel and lead with, “but there are some verses in the Bible that, on a cursory glance, might appear to contradict each other.” But I can flip that around. Do you lead with the various evidences for the resurrection of Jesus Christ? Or the moral nihilism that a secular worldview naturally leads to? Or the fact that atheism gives no answer to how the universe can be so finely tuned to allow for the existence of any life at all? If it wasn’t for Christian apologists you wouldn’t hear any of these arguments at all.
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