My father is Presbyterian and my mother’s beliefs are probably best described as Deist. I was baptized Presbyterian and after attending that church for a few years we started going to a Unitarian Universalist congregation. I think the UU upbringing and my parents’ attitudes encouraged me to ask questions and explore different possible beliefs. That led me to learn about a wide variety of religious traditions and made me able to look at them all as an outsider — perhaps under the original pretext of choosing which one best fit me, but it ultimately resulted in me seeing them all as equally warranted (that is, not-at-all warranted) superstitions.

I was never told, “This is true. Believe this or you’ll go to hell,” about any particular religion. I was told, “This is what some people believe,” and asked, “What do you think about that?”

there have been numerous studies which have demonstrated the efficacy of acupuncture, even though the studies admit that more research needs to be done, as it is still not fully understood. just because the principles behind eastern medicine don’t align with our scientific models of understanding the universe, doesn’t necessarily invalidate them as legitimate forms of treatment.

the studies you linked to that claimed that the placebos were more effective than the acupuncture are actually severely flawed and riddled with biases. how can the sham treatment be considered a placebo if it’s being administered in the exact same location as the real treatment?

and even if the placebo did outperform the acupuncture, it seems that you skeptics seem to overlook the fact that the acupuncture and the placebo both outperformed the standard medical treatments. at the end of the day, i think a patient suffering from a certain ailment will gladly take a placebo that outperforms the “scientifically proven” standard medical treatment.

I just wanted to weigh in on one particular paragraph from Z:

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I understand that there are a variety of ways to interpret the Bible. From my point of view, it’s a lose-lose situation — either you believe what is in the Bible word for word, which means you believe God approves of genocide, slavery, infanticide, oppression, and all sorts of other nasty things, or there are some things in the Bible you believe to be definitely true and some things you don’t. If you see some passages as metaphorical, better suited for ancient times than our day, or clearly a relic of the culture that wrote them down, why those parts and not others? Ultimately it is a concession that your own intuition trumps the Bible, which seems a lot more like an atheist position than a Christian one.
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To address this briefly, I would say that just because something is in the Bible, does not mean that it is endorsed by God. The Bible is not just a record of God’s dealings with Man and visa-versa, but also a record of Man’s dealings with Man.
As such, you will find all manner of atrocities detailed in the Bible, but that does not mean that God places his stamp of approval upon them. Indeed, how could He address these things without listing them?
And finally, for having to take every word as literal, there is really no conundrum here at all; context is everything. This may not appear so apparent at first when one simply plucks a verse or two out of a book, but when you place it back in and look at the overall context, it will typically become obvious whether it is intended to be literal, metaphoric, poetic, etc. Of course, sometimes it is obvious immediately, and sometimes it takes some more study. The funny thing is, no one thinks a thing of doing textual criticism of Shakespeare, yet it is not so common with the Bible, which as argument goes, would be infinitely more important and immediately pertinent.
Thank you for your time.