A Former Atheist

[robvalue]

When we talk about "what God does" we are assuming for the sake of argument that your claims are true, that the God of the bible exists. We then show what the consequences of that are, such as God endorsing and regulating slavery rather than simply demanding it stop like he did with other stuff.

It is a standard logical argument. To say it's invalid because we don't believe the premise is irrelevant. It's a form of reductio ad absurdum. We're saying how do you explain the consequences of your belief? And it seems by the same way most Christians do, by making massive excuses and allowances for what it says.

You say it's a factual historical account. It's not, as has been scientifically demonstrated time and again, but let's assume that's what it is meant to be for the moment. The point at which facts being recorded in a book about history start to become absolutely ridiculous and actually impossible to verify is when they start making supernatural/fantastical claims. All we have to "verify" them is the witnesses' own argument from ignorance or assertion about them and their causation.

Why do you believe all the magical stuff in the bible, but discard all the magical stuff in every other religious text? Except for special pleading, how can you justify this?

I assume you do believe the magical stuff. If you don't, that's cool, but I don't see how you get to Yahweh, or any god, without doing so.

I get the feeling there is more to your story, but I may be wrong. I imagine you have always been immersed in Christian mythology even if you weren't indoctrinated, most of us have been. This gives rather an internal bias to believe one set of fantastical claims over another. Again, correct me if I am wrong.