Gnostic Atheism? WTF?

[DeistPaladin]

Yeah, the Bible makes many testable claims that have been proven false. Now, a Christian can start to morph their god into something sufficiently different and nonfalsifiable to make it impossible to disprove, but they also have to move away from the Bible to do so.

More frequently, they'll morph what the Bible "really means" to do so.

I started my political activism in free-thought about 10 years ago quoting the Bible and showing how absurd it is. I can't believe I actually thought it might be an effective tactic, seeing as how I was hardly the first to do so. My whole "Skeptic Bible Study" channel on You Tube was devoted to this.

I've now grown uneasy with the topic because I familiar with the run-around that will ensue. Recently, when Bill Maher confronted Ralph Reed on Real Time with what the Bible said, I groaned and face palmed before Ralph could even respond. "Oh fuck, here we go..."

What always ensues is the same. "When the Bible says... it really means..." Fill in the specifics with working backward to the desired belief tortured obtuse interpretations based on confirmation bias, ad hoc hypothesis, claims about cultural context and translation issues (as if translation errors weren't still errors), cherry picking, and when all else fails, just shamelessly make stuff up like a fan fic author.

The dance continues as you try to pin them down on what the words written on the page actually say. Maybe you actually spend the energy to do the legwork needed to debunk their claims about cultural context or translation issues. They brush you off with psychological projection that you are reading the text in a "biased" way and that you have an "agenda" to disprove the Lord's Word (as if skepticism was an agenda and not the consistent application of critical thinking to all claims and not giving your own beliefs special protection from scrutiny).

To give you an example, they'll read Moses' command to his troops to "kill all the women that have known a man and kill all the boys but leave the virgin girls for yourselves" (paraphrased, but I'm sure you know the verse). To any normal person, this sounds like an order for genocide and sex slavery of the virgin girls. In any war crimes court, a recorded order of this nature would be damning.

But no, you see, Moses never said "have sex with the virgin girls". He just said, "keep them for yourselves". That could mean keep them as house maids. Why did they need to be virgins then? Well, they needed only the pure to be taken into their tribes and stuff or something.

And then to support your conclusion about what the passage means, you point out the rules for war, detailed in the OT, where if you take a captured woman and desire her, you must give her six months to mourn her family, after which point you may have sex with her. If she doesn't please you, you must let her go and can't sell her. To a normal person, this sounds like instructions for how to rape your sex slaves, though certain "niceties" apply, like giving her 6 months to mourn her family which you had ruthlessly slaughtered.

But no, to the Christian, the woman is courted and married. The verses say nothing about her wishes or consent regarding the "marriage". This is sexual slavery with the marriage label slapped upon it to try to sanitize it. But yet, they still think that her consent to be married to her captor is somehow implied.

It amazes me how well they can intellectually contort themselves and perform mental gymnastics to arrive at the conclusions they already made. People read what they want to read in the Bible. The god they revere is always a glorified self-image.

These debates are so frustrating. It's ironic that being around atheists is when I feel most comfortable in my deism, for I see the rationality and morality that I expect from God's Gift of Reason. Talking with Christian apologists makes me think perhaps we were lucky to get this far in the first place.