I really feel like many of the people arguing over whether Christianity is redeemable/terrible to its core really need to focus on the way they approach the topic and see what shit they personally need to fix.

For me as someone who is not Christian and can often be critical of (certain forms of) Christianity, that means taking care that my criticisms are precise and clear and don't use too broad of brushstrokes.

I think one of the things that's really getting to me is that now there are people starting to talk about passages in the "Old Testament" which, I won't deny, make me uncomfortable. But, now we're talking about sacred writing that solely belong to Christians.

And tbh, I'm sure that it would be very interesting to hear how Jews struggle with and understand those texts -- far more interesting than the battle over the merits of Christianity -- but I'm sure as hell not going to inquire in this current atmosphere.

I'll also note that my criticisms of Christianity ultimately aren't the reason I'm not a Christian. All they did was push me to look abroad. At this point, the primary reason I'm not a Christian is that I'm a witch and a devotee of Freyja.

I've just found something that speaks to my soul. I don't really need to prove why the other options I passed over are rotten to the core.

Final thing: I've focused on criticisms of the "critical" side. That's bc I tend toward the "critical" end myself. So that's my mess to clean up. (That was my original point at the start of this thread.) I'll leave others to address the valid criticisms of the "defenses."