This was refreshing. I frequent several Quora discussions searching for fruitful discussions between a Christian and Atheist. Ive watched many Frank Turek apologetics sessions as well and the same hecklers seem to follow him around lol. I’ve seen the example you shared above about God allegedly creating evil. Then there’s the others about God being merciless allowing bears to kill children, Jesus saying to hate our father and mother, Jesus with a whip, the list goes on. I see the anger and bitterness from the atheist viewpoint as an opening for further discussion. It’s like you said though, you have to help them realize they had the idea to delve further into the truth. It’s a long winded uphill battle but we were all once gone astray. All our righteous acts like filthy rags. I think it helps sometimes to level the playing field and help an unbeliever know that even the Christian has questions and that we’re not perfect. That no good thing dwells in us apart from Christ and sometimes we may not understand why God did said thing, but in the end we take it on faith, as a child a loving parent, that his commands are good and purposeful. That’s for this, I enjoyed reading it
If I were an atheist, I would not be playing "gotcha" with quotes taken out of context, I would be focused on issues where there have been long-standing disagreements between Christians. The chief issue I'd be focused on would be related to the disagreement over the relationship between the sovereignty of God and free will of man.
I think another cause for atheists identifying the Bible as a significant cause of their rejection of Christianity is due to the truly massive difference between the Scriptural account of history and the secular account. It is not just origins. The entirety of the account up through at least David is viewed as at most legendary retelling of events, and the New Testament was supposedly written ~100 years after the events supposedly occurred.
This was refreshing. I frequent several Quora discussions searching for fruitful discussions between a Christian and Atheist. Ive watched many Frank Turek apologetics sessions as well and the same hecklers seem to follow him around lol. I’ve seen the example you shared above about God allegedly creating evil. Then there’s the others about God being merciless allowing bears to kill children, Jesus saying to hate our father and mother, Jesus with a whip, the list goes on. I see the anger and bitterness from the atheist viewpoint as an opening for further discussion. It’s like you said though, you have to help them realize they had the idea to delve further into the truth. It’s a long winded uphill battle but we were all once gone astray. All our righteous acts like filthy rags. I think it helps sometimes to level the playing field and help an unbeliever know that even the Christian has questions and that we’re not perfect. That no good thing dwells in us apart from Christ and sometimes we may not understand why God did said thing, but in the end we take it on faith, as a child a loving parent, that his commands are good and purposeful. That’s for this, I enjoyed reading it
If I were an atheist, I would not be playing "gotcha" with quotes taken out of context, I would be focused on issues where there have been long-standing disagreements between Christians. The chief issue I'd be focused on would be related to the disagreement over the relationship between the sovereignty of God and free will of man.
I think another cause for atheists identifying the Bible as a significant cause of their rejection of Christianity is due to the truly massive difference between the Scriptural account of history and the secular account. It is not just origins. The entirety of the account up through at least David is viewed as at most legendary retelling of events, and the New Testament was supposedly written ~100 years after the events supposedly occurred.