Another point worth mentioning is that many uncompromising critics of Christianity are so conditioned by how conservative Christianity understands faith that the critics have a hard time viewing faith the way many liberal and progressive Christians do.
Maybe I can illustrate this by talking about a discussion I once had with a (gay, as it happens) classics professor. A student suggested to him that the ancient Greeks as a class must have lacked modern reasoning ability — because of how they uncritically accepted elements of their religion, based on stories about the gods that mostly contradict themselves, not just a little bit but wildly.
The professor tried to explain that god stories in most polytheistic religions are just that ....stories. They are meant to provide a peek at truth, whether those truths be metaphorical or numinous.
The ancient Greeks didn’t care that the stories contradicted themselves, because they treated them as stories that might or might not contain historical truth. What mattered the most is what the storytellers were trying to say about deeper truths.
This way of faith thinking is alien to people brought up in traditionalist Christianity, who presume stories in the Bible mostly have to be historical accounts truthful in every detail.
As an aside, Jewish people – who arguably have the most at stake in group identity for reading the Bible as history – don’t put nearly as much religious emphasis on doing so as conservative Christians do.
Sometimes, liberal and progressive Christians flounder when asked to defend their faith in the face of malignant passages from the Bible. Traditionalist Christians denounce them as heretics. But worse, some other liberal and progressive people tell them they don’t understand their own faith. "Obviously, the Bible says what it says, and you liberal Christians are just trying to pretend otherwise."
These liberal critics are blinded by their own uncritical thinking, their mistaken understanding of how liberal and progressive Christians read the Bible and think about stories.
