AF friends, an opinion on Bible debate, please

[robvalue]

I find debating the bible to be useful only when you have very specific goals, such as:

-Demonstrating contradictions which undermine claims about inerrancy

-Demonstrating the immorality of the whole belief system as a reason to not join the cult, regardless of whether it's true

-Demonstrating how little a Christian knows about their own bible, undermining their claims about getting their morality from it etc.

Otherwise, just requesting a good reason to think anything in the bible is true (further to what can be independently confirmed) is all you need, and details just cloud the issue. In my opinion there is no valid answer. This is more than sufficient, and so it's certainly not un-atheist not to have a detailed knowledge of the bible, any more than not having a detailed knowledge of Noddy Goes To Town. It's up to the people making the claims to present the evidence (the burden of proof).

Being (sceptically) atheist is more about the lack of evidence in general for any kind of God, or perhaps the incoherence or unknowable nature of the concept itself. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and a story book is anything but extraordinary.