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

[TheRocketSurgeon]

There's a slightly larger issue influencing many of the smaller issues we're discussing, and I appreciate you thinking hard about this, because your reflections are worth reading.

The larger issue I'll call the "hyperdiversity fallacy". People given to this fallacy believe that Christianity, unqualified, is enormously diverse and variegated. Like totally, so diverse, bro!

This is usually the result of defining Christianity via contemporary cultural Christian Americana. The focus here is not on the claims of religion, but on the cultural expressions of religion. I think that's a mistake.  It's a mistake because the diversity of Christian religious (cultural) expression doesn't rule out the uniformity (or truth) of Christian theology.

So I think this is what intellectually rigorous atheism needs to aim for: An analysis and critique of Christian claims, not the cultures that Christians are a part of. If you can disprove Christian claims, you've refuted Christianity.

And I'm glad you're going that route by questioning the moral character of God in creating hell. I mean, I think you're wrong there, but at least you're not trying to judge the truth of a claim by the behavior of its proponents. 

I can't imagine judging the field of medicine by the actions of Mengele or Gosnell.

I concur. The questions of Christian theology and Christian culture are unrelated, and one does not reflect upon the other except in the sense that it's trivial to demonstrate that the latter rarely has much to do with the former.

The reason we deal primarily with the latter is because we don't honestly care what you believe in, on any serious level, except where your beliefs begin to influence our cultures, and thereby our lives. In other cases, the bigotry (culture) of Christians impacts us much more directly and personally. Small surprise that we tend to focus upon it.

This issue of like diversity, dude emerges because you are not the only Christian with whom we debate, dude, and the next one will likely make different claims about anything other than the "core claims" you meantion. It's also worth pointing out that those "core claims" are actually the result of an internal conflict between Orthodoxy (as it's now called), which came to dominate the religion utterly (often by force), and the other theologies within the groups of people who thought that Jesus was the Annointed One.

You tend to ignore these factors; we do not, and cannot. You prefer to speak of your settled theology as if it is the only point that was ever made, and your particular denomination's view as if it is settled theology. It is not, in either case.

If you wish to set such parameters, it is as simple as saying, "For the purposes of this debate, here are my positions on theology (followed by a list thereof), and I would appreciate it if we stay within these parameters during the debate, rather than dealing with unrelated versions of Christianity, which are not under examination in this particular debate." Most of us would be okay with that.

Except that, almost without fail, a debate about a specific brand of Christian theology tends to venture into the realm of, "And that's why it's unquestionably Not Okay According to God, for you to ________", at which point the fact that many others disagree with you on what God's claims on that subject (especially others within your own religion) may become relevant, as a way of showing that your claim to unequivocal knowledge of the Will of God is contestable, from the point of view of anyone not in your particular faith (including other Christians, other religions, and deniers of both... us).

In other words, we are not claiming the fault in the field medicine lies with Mengele, but the moment you repeat one of Mengele's claims, or you claim that doctors never did something like that, we are likely to point out to you that not only is it within the realm of medicine for such things to occur, we know historically that they did occur, as in the example of Mengele. A related point would be to show how Communism twisted the ideas of naturalism/materialism into a system which caused untold suffering, if atheists claimed in a debate that only Secular Humanist ideas were valid views of atheists (I am a S.H., so I used my own philosophy as an example, here). If I were to claim that only Humanism was a valid atheist point of view, you would be quite right to point out that others have disagreed strongly with the meaning of materialist outlooks, and that in historically-known examples, we have atheism leading to terrible outcomes completely different from the ones I am presenting. Of course, that's when I'd counter by pointing out that it was his demi-religious views on Communism, not his atheism, that led to those abuses, but the point about "all atheists believe ____" would have been debunked successfully.

As long as Christians continue to disagree about what, exactly, constitutes your theology, we're going to point to differences when you claim you have the right one. If you think we are presenting a version of your theology that is inaccurate, say so and say why, specifically, that you think it is so, and you will find us more amenable to your suggestions of inaccuracy.

Simply saying "you atheists don't get it" is just being an asshole, as far as we can tell, a blanket form of bigotry that accomplishes nothing other than telling us that you're dismissing our arguments without serious consideration, simply because you feel they do not agree with your (still hidden to me) exact ideas about theology.