I’m so glad for your helpful comment. You and I would probably disagree on several things, but perhaps not as much as it would first seem.

I’m sorry for not being clear in the beginning of the article. I intended to write only about people who claim to follow the Bible’s teachings. Not everyone does . . . and that’s just fine. My purpose was to help people think through their hypocrisy. Nobody believes the Bible, not even the people who say they do. All Christians are hypocrites (including me, for sure). That’s my basic point.

I did not intend to address other religious texts or their validity.

I would certainly agree with you that other religions (and texts) of the world have produced amazing good for the world. I don’t really see a moral difference between Christianity and other religions.

I’m sorry I was unclear . . . I don’t mind if someone disagrees, especially if I can be corrected, but I think your specific points in your comments are things that we actually agree on! Thanks for clarifying these things.

“Liberal Christians commonly struggle (or at least ought to) with elitism. One can hardly get more arrogant than to suggest that he can determine which parts of the Bible are divinely inspired and which are not.”

It is amazingly arrogant to criticize liberal Christians as elites who think they can pick and choose from the Bible. It is inarguably insanely self-righteous to know that there are dozens of venerated religious texts and systems which have existed as long/longer as Christianity with as many adherents, and to deny their possible validity. To establish if they have any validity, I would say first: know them by their fruits. Good people like Gandhi and certain Buddhists and the Sufis have repeatedly shown us a world in which other faiths have produced beautiful saints. Though they too have their flaws, I will cut you off there: it was the empire endorsed by Christianity which is choking the world, which killed and raped in so many deceitful names. Christianity did not cause all those flaws, but a good many believers certainly did.

If it is arrogant to examine the Bible historically, how much more arrogant is it to ignore nearly all of history, of other cultures and religions. I don’t believe all religions are created equally, and Christianity in and of itself is a miracle. What I cannot permit is for such feeble-minded nasty simpletons to use it as a weapon to attack those who would pursue truth with humility, and not egoism. I know I cannot change a person in a heartbeat, I have not that gift. But I must tell you that this is a wrong post, it is an arrogant post, it is un-Christian. You must not judge other interpretations so harshly, you must not ignore the rest of humanity. Truth does not stop being truth because someone else sees it differently (in all humility, this could be applied to my own response as a retort. I know this. But I’ll risk the hypocrisy, because you do not).