By comparison, Dawkins and Hitchens knowledge of religious history, religious doctrine, and acts and actions done in the name of Christianity is encyclopaedic. In this they are like most atheist critics of religion - more knowledgable than the religious.

Nope. You're right that most Christians don't understand many tenets of their own religion, but Dawkins and Hitchens don't either. All they know, and what they quite properly rail against, is the so-called "theology" of the right-wingers.

I've read both their books. They knock down the straw men of the right, which is easy enough to do, but don't really know much about Christianity as a whole. They understand neither Christian theology nor the current state of Biblical scholarship.

Such is the condition of religion and culture in our country that even middling atheists can write bestsellers.

You mentioned gender equality. One of my issues with my former megachurch (technically Baptist but attempting to appeal to many denominations) was its emphasis the interpretation of the letters of Paul as instructions for marriage as a male-dominated institution.

Why did you ever go to a baptist megachurch in the first place? You were just asking for trouble.

For example, creepy line from a friend's wedding: "Man X, do you promise to love Woman Y, and be her spiritual leader? And Woman Y, do you promise to submit to that love?" This particular church teaches that the man should lead in all areas, even finances (which, for this particular young couple, has already led to some serious credit card debt.) I realize we've already placed Baptist and evangelicals in the 'extreme' category, but do 'soft Christians' just ignore Paul's opinions in this respect?

I don't agree with the appellation "soft Christian." Times change. In Paul's world, he was a liberal on these issues. In the true spirit of both Jesus and Paul, we "soft Christians" believe in gender equality.

Question: In the gospel of John, the New International Version tells us that Jesus was "worshiped" by his followers. In your opinion, does this square with the original Hebrew word? A previous commenter said that Jesus was never meant to be seen as a literal deity. I wonder, then, why the author of John would have included this information; is it because it's true, or because the author wanted to convince people of something that wasn't necessarily true?

Jesus did not go on and on, in any of the four gospels, about being worshipped. He did go on and on about being followed, which is a crucial distinction.

Jesus was leading a mass peasant movement against the corruption of the Temple and the occupation of the Roman Army. He showed a different way of living--non-violence, gender equality, open table fellowship, non-heirarchical living. (These are things most liberals, like us, would support!)

Unfortunately, when Constantine made Christianity legal in the fourth century, Christianity became the "house religion" of the Roman Empire. The interests of the Empire--the very Empire which killed Jesus--came to be seen as the interests of the church.

Christians had been persecuted up until Constantine and you can't blame them for taking the deal. What happened, though, was that Christianity became a religion of worshipping Jesus rather than following him and his new way of living--a catastrophe, as it turned out.

1 Corinthians 6:9 Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind (gays)

How else can I take this but homophobic?

You can understand that the Greek words here are malakoi and arsenokoi, and nobody knows for sure how to translate them. Many of us are not willing to shut out people on the basis of two words nobody knows how to translate.

Granted, some people do use them against homosexuals. They are quite wrong to do so, and they subvert the mission and message of Christ who, on page after page of the NT, welcomed ALL into his kingdom.

I don't want to comment about the texts because that would be a long and complicated discussion. You are quite right, though, that you would want to study the beliefs and context of the times.

For example, I would consider that 2 Peter is written later, around AD 90 or so, and is to be understood in the context of that period. 1 Corinthians was written much earlier, around AD 50. Moreover, 1 Corinthians was genuinely written by Paul. We don't really know who wrote 2 Peter.

There are many, many interpretations about every passage and every issue. These things are widely debated, al beit among a relatively small group, generally graduates of mainline protestant and Roman Catholic seminaries. We know all the stuff you're saying, and we take it seriously.

First the easy one: We study Greek, tobbar, because that is the language in which the NT was originally written--same with Hebrew for the OT.

Second, somerandomguy wrote: To be frank I find it baffling that anyone who's studied the Bible enough to understand nuance of the Greek translations could fail to see it's an opportunistic magpie document plagiarizing from local believes and edited to suit the prevailing dogma of the day, but I suppose that childhood root makes it easier to post-rationalize than accept it's all nonsense.

I'd phrase this some differently, but yeah, you take all that into account. When you look closely, you can see most of those arguments right in the texts themselves.