For christians I’d recommend the Bart Ehrman books, like “Why we Suffer”. His books are short, readable and quote the bible liberally where needed. He explains how the bible turned him into an atheist.

To make the medicine go down – he’s respectful to the faithful and their book. He’s an expert bible scholar, he even reads the original Greek manuscripts, he has a Ph.D and Masters in Divinity. He used to be a strong christian evangelical.

Could you please give a cultural situation where the most moral thing to do is to go into a town and slaughter all the women and children in it? Also, if you were one of the soldiers, and you went into one of the rooms and saw two girls in the corner hiding from you and trembling in fear, how would you kill them?

And what difference does “the historical and cultural context of the passage” make? The passages still promote bigotry and violence, as evidence by the church’s stance on living out of wedlock, homosexuality, women as lesser beings, you name it.

It is quite easy to quote Bible passages out of context and without understanding the culture and context it is written in and make it look ridiculous. Yet, it is much more intellectually honest to engage what the Bible and Christianity teaches by understanding the broader picture rather than pick verses here and there that you don’t agree with, which you can’t even know unless you have studied the historical and cultural context of the passage.

Matt