Do you unbelievers sit up nights trying to find the worst possible motive for everything a believer says?
No, we don't have to. All we do is read and listen to what believers write and say and watch what they do and receive the clear message that is being expressed so plainly. In contrast, believers must be carefully training in what to think and how to interpret and how to decide what they must
infer the Bible to be saying. In sharp contrast, non-believers simply read what the Bible actually says.
It's the believers who have to spend many hours of study and training, including sitting up nights trying to figure out how to keep their story straight and how to re-interpret everything, even their own founders' writings, to fit their current theology. Non-believers simply read and listen and see what's actually there.
Slight tangent here that is still somewhat pertinent. Some years ago, I stumbled upon a British atheist site that carried a wonderful story; I really wish I had saved that URL, but alas I had not. The story involved a village whose inhabitants were atheists by default, since they had never any contact at all with any religions, including Christianity. Into this village walks a Christian missionary. As he starts conversing with the first inhabitant he meets, he learns of the village's great ignorance, so he starts to tell that person about Christianity. The fellow is very interested to hear this great message and he calls over everybody nearby, who in turn call over others, so that the entire village is soon standing there eager to hear what this stranger has to say. Before this group, the missionary began to preach the Gospel. The village listened attentively and with great interest, but they had questions. In fact, everything the missionary said raised a question, so they had to interrupt him repeatedly with their questions. They were puzzled about the things that the missionary had long taken for granted and, when they asked for explanations, the missionary's answers just raised even more questions. Faced with having to provide answers about the most basic tenets of his faith, questions that he himself had never asked and hence could not answer, the missionary simply turned and left the town despite the cries and pleas from the villagers to remain and teach them. As I recall, the villagers finally simply shrugged their shoulders, forgot all that foolishness, and went about their lives happily and prosperously.
Of course, the author of that story had a lesson he was wanting to impart, which I believe was that an honest and direct examination of Christian doctrine would reveal its faults which believers cannot see because of their indoctrination and conditioning. The application I can see for it here is in how you and other "true Christians" have to be carefully trained and thoroughly indoctrinated in order to view everything as being consistent with your particular narrow theology, whereas someone without all that careful training and indoctrination, someone viewing these things through the eyes of someone seeing and hearing these things for the first time, would see something completely different.
Another way of viewing that may come from what a creationist had told me a bit over a decade ago on a Google forum. He had just used a weak old PRATT (sodium residence time in oceans, as I recall) and I had demolished his claim with the truth about residence times. Then I asked him why he had to depend on such unconvincing arguments such as that and the other PRATTs he would use and which were all shown to be false. He told me,
{EPIPHANY!!!}"The only reason you don't find them convincing is because you are not yet convinced yourself."{/EPIPHANY!!!} That one response answered so many questions I had had about creationist behavior.
You are already convinced, so you are able and obligated to twist and distort everything to continue to support your narrow theology. We are not already convinced, so we simply read what has actually been written. It's kind of like when we write something. We "know what we have written", so every time we look at our own writing see what we "know is there". That is why we need to have somebody else look at what we've written, someone who does not know "what we know we have written", but rather who will see what we have actually written.
To take another approach, I've encountered two types of teachers of a skill: 1) those who have practiced the skill for so long that it comes naturally to them, and 2) those who still remember what it's like to be a beginner. My Russian professor described that situation in foreign language instruction. His opinion was that, while you should have a native speaker as a teacher later in your instruction, in the first year you should have a non-native speaker. Beginning students make a fairly consistent set of mistakes when starting to learn a particular foreign language; those sets of mistakes are also contingent on the students' original language -- our French text in my French phonology class, in describing each sound in French would also list the problems normally encountered by native speakers of various other languages. A teacher who had also been a beginning student of the language would understand why a student had made a particular mistake and would be able to explain that mistake and correct it, whereas a native speaker would only know that the student had made a mistake and would not know why.
Faith, you should remember what it was like to be a beginner. You should try to draw on that experience.
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