2) Some might think that atheists would be content with simply not believing in God and leave the theists to themselves. After all, if God doesn't exist, then what's the big deal? Why not let the theists believe in God the way a child believes in the tooth fairy? To the atheist, neither exists. So why bother?
What does atheists have to do with what I had last posted?
My last post had to do with the earliest literary evidences of the any Old Testament writings.
The scroll fragments (ie Priestly Blessings Of Numbers 6) at Ketef Hinnom is the earliest copy in which we have been dated to some where between the later half of King Josiah’s reign and just before the fall of Jerusalem.
There are no other evidences that are than the late 7th century BCE. There are no contemporary original sources from the Bronze Age, especially of Moses from Mount Sinai.
The people who wrote the Bible (secular writers according to you) claim Moses wrote the Law while on Mt. Sinai. Since theirs is the oldest documentation extant, you have the burden of proof to show counter-documents contemporaneous to the period, not to cite modern secular scholars judging Moses while sitting in leather armchairs.
Your words “Since theirs is the oldest documentation extant”.
In order to claim that the “oldest documentation extant”, you would need to present evidence(s) of clay or stone tablets, or scrolls, or parchments, or texts inscribed on pottery, coffins, doorframe, walls, etc, that quoted some passages from the Torah (Moses’ Law), that are dated to between 1600 to 1300 BCE (hence Late Bronze Age).
You have no such extant documentation to the Late Bronze Age, not in hieroglyphs, in cuneiform or in early Proto-Canaanite (or paleo-Hebrew) alphabet, containing any passages from the books attributed to Moses.
1) It WOULD be dishonest to claim the Dead Sea Scrolls, Septuagint, etc. lack probative value.
Clearly neither texts are the earliest (oldest) documentation extant to Moses’ Law.
The Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls, all began in the early Hellenistic period, not in the Bronze Age, therefore not contemporary to Moses, if he existed at all.
I am no way discounting the values of Qumran or the Septuagint texts, but they are certainly not as old as anyone can hope for. And their values are immeasurable.
I am not the one who would destroy or burn book, even if I don’t believe or disagree with them. I actually love books, and that include the Bible (translations, of course) sitting on my bookshelf. But my small collection of books would also include Egyptian Pyramid Texts, Coffin Texts, Book of the Dead, the Sumerian-Akkadian epics (eg Of Gilgamesh, of Atrahasis and the Enûma Eliš) and hymns, the Ugaritic-Canaanite tales of Ba’al, Anat and El, the Greek Iliad, Odyssey, Pindar’s odes, the Athenian tragedies, the Argonautica, the Roman Aeneid and Metamorphoses, the Norse sagas and the Edda, and so on.
All of the stories, that love to read, but not necessary requiring my belief. My favorite book in the entire Bible is the Genesis, in particular the Creation and the Flood, but it doesn’t mean I have to believe them to be true in order to enjoy the stories.
I enjoyed looking at artwork, painting and sculptures, but does that mean I have to be a painter or sculptor to love arts?
I enjoyed learning fields in physics and astronomy that I have never study before when I was in high school or universities, but that doesn’t mean I cannot learn stuff on my own.
I am agnostic, not atheist. What I choose to read and what I believe in, are my own. And they are not the same things.
As to atheists you are talking about, you have a very narrow and biased view of what they choose to read.
And you are also forgetting that some atheists here have religious background in their past, so some of them do have understanding of the Bible, some even better than you.
You are stereotyping atheists as if they all don’t have past, as if they don’t have understanding of the Bible.