Why the "There are so many interpretations of the Bible" claim is confused

[Esquilax]

To put these accusations towards God, that he will punish you just for not believing at face value a story book that is really popular, is about the most disgusting insult I can think of towards any potential actual God.

I am assuming that you are talking about Christianity.  Just so you know, that is not what Scripture teaches.

You think you're the only person to tell us that? Every christian tells us that whenever what we say about the bible deviates even slightly from their (often unspoken) beliefs. Even the ones that actually believe what Rob said here; both you and the people that believe the precise reverse will tell us that the scripture doesn't teach anything other than what they believe, so somebody has to be wrong there and curiously enough, not a one of you seems interested in actually justifying why they think the scripture does or does not teach a thing, just in fiat commanding that it does or does not.

Equally interestingly, none of you are willing to be accurate with your words either; I've never heard a christian tell me "just so you know, that is not what my interpretation of the scripture teaches," despite that literally being the truth. No, you all just say "that is not what the scripture teaches," because only your interpretation of the scripture could ever possibly be what's really in the text, right? And we've all just gotta presuppose that because you said so, don't we? Because you're certainly not going to do more than just say it, are you?

It's a bit of a losing battle for us atheists, you see. We're facing demands that we take the scripture to teach strictly what a series of individual christians believe, one after the other, and more often than not those demands are mutually exclusive. You'll command that the scripture teaches one thing, Drich another, GC yet another and so on, and if we fail to pretend the bible teaches only what the christian we're talking to believes, we get haughty little asides telling us what to pretend is in the bible now, because none of you are capable of separating your interpretation from the actual body of the text, only other people's interpretations get that treatment.

But when we've got multiple christians each demanding that we pretend the bible only contains their specific beliefs when from the outside it looks as though it contains none of those sets in their entirety, the best way to proceed is not to pretend anything and to wait for you guys to actually demonstrate your damned positions, rather than just command that we ascribe to them.