I think most are caught in the mind-trap of not thinking outside the box. Most cannot release themselves from the shackles of theological/ creedal thinking just for a moment to try to look at things from the other side without the religious glasses.
Of course the same can be said about secular glasses (or atheistic glasses). People who refuse to look at history other than completely worldly events, without the possibility of believing there might be some supernatural point to all this, could be accused of not thinking outside the box.
Therefore, when you do that you see things through colored lenses. I looked at things taking off the eyes of faith and realized I had been looking at religious teaching with preconceived presumptions and programed answers to everything. The unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates.
Indeed. It may be the case, that those certain preconceived presumptions are not intrinsic to the faith but have been customarily associated with the faith (either just by you, or by many individuals). One random example seems to be the belief in extraterrestrials … many Christians think that it would be un-Christian to even accept the possibility of aliens … and yet, there is no reason (as far as I’ve thoroughly investigated) that they should automatically assume this. But another big one is evolution, of course. Many Evangelicals, when seeing that evolution is likely to be true, oftentimes apostatize from the faith, because they assume the two can’t go together.
- I have identified that the new atheists’ critique of the horrors in the Old Testament (they all do that). They like to talk about the butchering of the Amalekite children, etc.
for example listen to these Mike Earl - Bible Stories Your Parents Never Taught You
reasonworks.com/ . Note he is an ex-Mormon who seems to have been disgruntled by that.
A brief and probably infinitely unsatisfying note on this:
The reason why a human can’t take human life will-nilly is that he wasn’t the one to give human life (God creates the human soul at conception … so not even the parents can kill their children willy-nilly). God, however, has to right to take away life whenever He wants. He can do this either by natural means (disease, heart failure, etc.), or He can employ a human agent. For the second possibility, the human agent could kill the person without being told by God but because of evil intention (but God could allow it nonetheless), or God could, in special circumstances, directly tell someone to kill somebody else. He told Abraham to kill Isaac, for example. Abraham thus gained the right to kill an innocent person, for He was permitted by the only one who could take innocent life justly. Hence, if God even told you to kill children, technically it would not be a sin.
This sounds very sketchy and blasphemous and jarring, but it’s completely without any contradiction (unless, of course, I’m completely wrong … if so, correction is requested).
"This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is the fact that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom.
Much of the arguments I read in that link was based on “There is no evidence for these things. Hence, they did not happen.” To a very cogent line of reasoning. Just because there has not been archeological evidence discovered about something, certainly doesn’t mean it never existed. Empiricists seems to have the same thinking: if I can’t see it, it doesn’t exist (which is silly … and I suppose and hope that not all empiricists think that way absolutely).
There were arguments for quite some time that Pontius Pilate never existed because there was absolutely no non-Christian writings or anything about him. Turns out, an archeologist uncovered something (a stone engraving I think it was) with Pilate’s name on it. The myth of Pilate’s nonexistence was then put to rest.
And it will come as an unpleasant shock to many that the God of Israel, Jehovah, had a female consort and that the early Israelite religion adopted monotheism only in the waning period of the monarchy and not at Mount Sinai.
It seems pretty reasonable that monotheism didn’t catch on very much until later in Jewish history … because polytheism was constantly popular among the Jews. Nonetheless, monotheism was pronounced on Sinai, yet it only very slowly took effect, as the Bible seems to suggest (but perhaps I’m wrong).
I’ll continue to pray for you. God loves you whether you know it or not (agnostic; simply without knowledge).
I just emphasized that God loves you whether you KNOW Him or not…Peace…teachccd 
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