why is the atheist obsessed with the Bible

Ignorance is Not BlissSun Tzu, Scroll III (Offensive Strategy):

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31. Therefore I say: "Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles
    you will never be in peril.
    
32. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of
    winning or losing are equal.
    
33. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are certain in every
    battle to be in peril."
    

(Sun Tzu The Art of War, translation by Samuel B. Griffith, Oxford University Press, 1963)

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The Governor of Mississippi explaining why he was campaigning so hard for education reform in his state:

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We know that ignorance doesn't work, because we've already tried it!
(Quoted from memory from a radio newscast circa 1990, give or
take half a decade)

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Archy, we cannot help but notice that you use ignorance almost exclusively. How's that working for you?Or shouldn't you read these quotes and realize that if you are going to fight against evolution or against atheism, you should at least try to learn something about it first? That applies whether you are on the offensive against something as well as when you are having to defend yourself from attack, as is our case. Actually, Christians are not the only ones that applies to. Everybody has the right to practice according to their own beliefs, whatever those beliefs may be. Also, everybody (not just Christians) has the right to raise their families and teach their children their own ideas regarding religion. The only proviso is that those practices do not prevent others from exercises those same rights and that they do no harm to others and do not violate the laws of the state. Public schools are just that, public. They are run by the state for the benefit of allcitizens of all religious persuasions. As such, they cannot impose any one religion's beliefs on all the students. Public schools are for secular and civil education; religious education belongs in the home, in the church, and in their church's religious organizations.Edited by dwise1, : HTML correction

You're claiming that a group, just by being a part of the public, is entitled to having their particular religious teachings taught in the public schools?Jews are part of that public too. So you want all the students schooled in Judaica?Muslims are part of that public too. So you want Islam taught in the public schools?Mormons are part of that public too. So you want Mormonism taught in the public schools?Neo-pagans and Wiccans (AKA "witches") are part of that public too. So you want paganism and Wicca taught in the public schools?Catholics are part of that public too. So you want Catholicism taught in the public schools? BTW, I have it on the authority of Christian co-workers that Catholics are not Christians.And members of myriad other Christian sects and denominations with whom you strongly disagree are also part of that public. You want their errant forms of Christinity too in the public schools?What you want makes absolutely no sense! The entire public wants that! Which is why the entire public has built the public school system. For the entire public, not just for your small minority.But you want each and every religious group to build their own schools. Why? Myriad different schools all teaching the same things, plus an hour or two a week on their own religion. What a stupendously impractical and wasteful idea! Why not instead have one public school system with teaches the subjects that everybody needs to know and that are independent of religion. Like math, reading and writing, languages, geography, history, science, art, music, etc. Then for that specialized religious instruction, each religious group can have its own classes on their own premises, such as Sunday School. And more importantly, that religious instruction can take place where it really belongs, in the home.No, wait, we have that already.

Archae, have you ever stopped to think where atheists come from? Or have you always just assumed that they were created ex nihilo as atheists? Would it surprise you to discover that most atheists used to be theists? That, many atheists, especially in the USA, used to be Christians? Indeed, many of the more fervent atheists I've seen tend to have previously been Christian fundamentalists and creationists.With so many atheists being ex-Christians, why should it puzzle you that so many are familiar with the Bible? Also, several deconversion stories that I've read described the turmoil that the person went through and their desperate efforts to reconcile the problems they saw in their religion, which included deeper and more determined study of the Bible. So why should it puzzle you that those atheists would be so much more familiar with the Bible than are those Christians who complacently accept what their leaders tell them that the Bible says and don't give it a second thought?Archae, how many atheists do you know? How many atheists have you asked for information about what they think and believe and about how they had become atheists? How many of those times have you actually listened to them and then had actually thought about their answers? I am sure that you never have listened to them, given how zealously you embrace ignorance.Think maybe it's high time you started? Just a thought, since I'm sure you weren't listening that time either.Now, should you ever start listening, you would discover that few atheists are exactly the same. Each of their stories are different and each has arrived a slightly different place. Here, you can read a number of them at an ex-Christian forum, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.ex-christian.net/index.php?/forum/5-testimonies-of-former-christians/.Are those stories representative of all atheists? No, not really, because the degree to which an atheist would be motivated to participate in such discussions would be largely determined by his own experience and story. There are many atheists who felt (or even actually were) betrayed by their religious organization and/or leaders -- being lied to is one form of betrayal, one that is most often involved when creationism creates atheists. Those atheists would be very motivated to get involved and to engage, whether to attack that which had betrayed them or to save others from that same trap or maybe just to help others who are going through what they had gone through alone.If a person quit his religion or never got involved because he wasn't interested, then that person would as an atheist continue to be disinterested and would not get involved in discussions about religion, let alone read the Bible.Similarly, there are a number of pretend-atheists, teenage Christians who pretend to be atheists so that they can indulge in forbidden stuff like sex, drugs, liquor, etc -- I corresponded with a creationist activist who claims that he used to be an atheist, but he only pretended in order to give free reign to his bubbling hormones; that he was just pretending, even to himself, was apparent when he insisted that even as an "atheist" he prayed to God every single night. Those pretend atheists would normally not be motivated to get involved in religious discussions and would probably want to avoid confronting themselves, until hedonism had started to lose its glamor and they started to tire of keeping up the pretense.And there are those who decide that religion just does not work or that it's just not for them. Their departure could be peaceful or troubled, depending on the individual and/or the circumstances.And there are also those from the above who would not normally get involved, but who feel threatened by the actions of fundamentalists to seize control of the government, to force their beliefs on others through laws, to force their beliefs to be taught in the schools, etc. Of course, those atheists are not alone, because there are even more theists who likewise feel threatened by the actions of fundamentalists.

Let me describe one to you. For a number of years before my provider abruptly left the web-hosting business, I had a creation/evolution site. Its main theme, where I repeated clearly so that there could be no doubt, was that Christians should not use the false claims of "creation science", but rather they should use truthful claims and statements if they choose to oppose evolution. The only real mention of the Bible that I had on my site was this:

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Book of Job 13:7-12 (King James Version):

7. Will ye speak wickedly for God? and talk deceitfully for him?
   
8. Will ye accept his person? will ye contend for God?
   
9. Is it good that he should search you out? or as one man mocketh another, do ye [so] mock him?
   
10. He will surely reprove you, if ye do secretly accept persons.
    
11. Shall not his excellency make you afraid? and his dread fall upon you?
    
12. Your remembrances [are] like unto ashes, your bodies to bodies of clay.
    

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The same passages as quoted from the Living Bible:

"Must you go on 'speaking for God' when He never once has said the things that you are putting in His mouth?
Does God want your help if you are going to twist the truth for Him?
Be careful that He doesn't find out what you are doing! Or do you think you can fool God as well as men?
No, you will be in serious trouble with Him if you use lies to try to help Him out.
Doesn't His majesty strike terror to your heart? How can you do this thing?
These tremendous statements you have made have about as much value as ashes. Your defense of God is as fragile as a clay vase!"

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I received several extremely hateful emails from Christians thoroughly incensed at my calls for truthfulness, all of them viciously denouncing me for "hating God and the Bible" and assuring me of eternal damnation. I would respond to each one, reitering my call for upholding the truth and truthfulness and asking them to point out specifically where and how I had expressed the hatred for God and the Bible that they accused me of. No replies to my responses, since almost all of them were run-by flamers. The few replies I did get were equally as vicious as the first and still accused me of hating God and the Bible, and when I responded to this as well, there was no reply from the "good Christians".Yes, there was much ugliness there, but it was entirely from the Christian camp.Back to the original question that had started this exchange. This forum is here for all of us, atheist, Christian, anything else alike, for discussion. archaeology, the originator of this topic, would never engage in discussion, but rather would just rant on, making unfounded accusations and preaching to us. This forum is for discussion, not for preaching. That would not disallow forwarding the message that you would desire to preach, but you would need to do it through discussion, which would include entertaining questions about your message and responding constructively to those questions, as well as hearing comments and critiques and responding to those. None of which archae would do.Instead, archae was almost exactly like those "good Christian" run-by flamers who took almost everything said as expressing extreme hatred towards God and the Bible or as a campaign to teach atheism. Except that he was sticking around a lot longer than those run-by flamers would.

It is inherent in the nature of theology, which is the Word of Man, the fallible attempt by fallible humans to understand their own fallible ideas about God. Everybody builds their own theology, based upon their own imperfect and flawed understanding and misunderstanding of what their teachers have tried to teach them, which in turn is based upon those teachers' own imperfect and flawed understanding and misunderstanding of their teachers, and so on back through all generations of teachers.But the real problem is when believers mistake their own flawed theology for the Word of God. For example, in another forum a creationist had presented a standard PRATT claim and I not only informed him that his claim was false, but also explained to him precisely why it was false and yet again suggested that Christians should not use false claims but rather truthful claims. He responded by denouncing me vehemently for my "vicious attack against Christianity." Huh? Simply being truthful and pointing out that false claim is false constitutes a "vicious attack against Christianity"? Well, in his Christian mind it did, since (I must surmise, since he was not very coherent and besides creationists are loathe to discuss their claims) he apparently believed that his faith depended upon those creationist PRATT claims being true -- many times we see creationists, even high-ranking ones (eg, John Morris of the ICR), proclaim that if their claims are not true then "Scripture has no meaning" and God is nothing be a liar. I'm sure that the run-by flamers I encountered were of the same mentality, that any mention of flaws in their theology was nothing short of an attack against God Himself.All of which just boggles the minds of us normals. If your theology is found to be in error about certain things, then what does that mean? Well, that means that your theology is in error about certain things. Does it automatically mean that God is a liar? Of course not! That is just plain foolishness, but that is the position that we keep seeing creationists/evangelicals/fundamentalists take. They have elevated their own imperfect Word-of-Man theologies to the level of "Word of God".This goes not only for you personally, but for everybody: not everything you believe happens to be true. Your theology contains errors. Some parts are true, but some parts are not. When you find a part that is not true, what should you do? What we see creationists do is to deny that fact and hide it from themselves, often by attacking those who can plainly see the flaw. Instead, shouldn't they recognize that they had gotten something wrong and try to correct it? That would be the reasonable thing to do, but they don't. Shame, since that would actually allow them to learn.Your theology is the Word of Man, of one man in particular, not the Word of God. Do not confuse the two.