It’s difficult to know where to begin when talking to people who live in an alternate reality. In order to have a rational conversation about anything, there has to be a minimal set of common facts to which you can appeal. But what if you can’t even agree on what the facts are in the first place?
When I first started writing and speaking to groups about my departure from the faith, I spent the bulk of my time trying to make still-believers realize how dehumanizing and insulting are the ways in which they view those of us who left. I talked about the many ways Christians misunderstand us, putting words into our mouths and motives into our hearts that we are not willing to own.

But these are all highly subjective discussions and, while they serve a useful social purpose, they carefully avoid any offense of the believer’s sensitive faith. A noble restraint on my part, I suppose, demonstrating a respect for differences of belief that I submit isn’t ordinarily reciprocated.

But the fact of the matter is that Christians accept certain things as true that are demonstrably false, and it does no one any good to tiptoe around these beliefs as if they are sacrosanct merely because people take the discussion so personally.

And I’m not talking about things we cannot entirely disprove like miracles, or the afterlife, or the power of prayer. We could argue about these things until we are blue in the face, and in the end very few people would ever change their minds. The church has had two thousand years to develop excuses for why these things fail to materialize (they usually involve faulting the believer rather than the beliefs themselves).

No, I’m talking about clearly demonstrable historical facts—facts for which we can apply reliable tools of scientific inquiry in order to ascertain what is real and what is not, what is fact and what is fiction. For today, I will zero in on one particular portion of the Bible because it is so unarguably false that I no longer want to have any of these discussions until the other party is willing to spend some time wrestling with it…