The question in the title is sincere, and if you are a thoughtful, believing Christian, I hope you will answer it in the comments. But to get better answers, I want to give some context for the question, and hopefully challenge you a bit in the process.

I’m not entirely clueless about Christianity. I am not a believer myself, and don’t think I ever really was.

But I was baptized, and I grew up in an at least nominally Lutheran family, going to church on Christmas and important occasions. I went to a kindergarten run by a church, and had Christianity as a subject throughout elementary school. When I was 14, I was even confirmed in the Lutheran tradition, after weeks of classes and preparation.

(Though, I didn’t quite realize I was supposed to believe in more than just the tradition and symbolism of it. Instead, my relationship with the Bible was more like my relationship with Greek mythology: They were just collections of stories from our cultural heritage.)

All this is to say that I know the highlights. I know the most famous stories and I recognize some iconic Bible verses. Maybe I can even recite some, if pressed. In short, I have a pretty good, general overview of what Christianity is all about – in theory.

My questions, then, are not really about the religion, but about its believers — like you, presumably.

I’d like to better understand what you believe, and why. But I’m not looking for a Wikipedia article about Christianity. Rather, I am hoping to understand how and where you personally find answers to your own questions about your faith, and — importantly — how you know you can trust those answers.

Now, I don’t expect that any particular answer will convert me. The reason I am asking is not because I want to believe, but because I want to understand, and I want to be able to represent reasonable, modern Christians’ faith fairly if I ever talk or write about it.

To that end, I have some specific questions …

How do you know what to believe?

Where does one start? What is the most reliable way to find out what it even means to be a Christian?

The quick and easy answer may simply be to read the Bible. But as far as I can tell, most Christians, even devout ones, don’t believe or follow everything in the Bible. So if that is the answer, how do you know which parts to believe?

Some people may be unsure what I even mean by this. To me, the challenge of how to read and believe the Bible has three different aspects: Internal contradictions, factual errors, and horrible moral examples.

How do you resolve the internal contradictions?

First, there are hundreds of contradictions in the Bible that I would think you need to resolve if you want to rely on it as a source of truth.

In some cases, the books in the Bible seem to contradict themselves (e.g. compare the timeline in the first and second chapters of Genesis), in others they contradict each other (e.g. compare the gospels), and in yet other cases, older manuscripts are different from the canonical versions (e.g. compare fragments from the Dead Sea scrolls to their counterparts in the Bible), and different translations of the same passages seem to mean different things.

I expect this can be explained and excused if we accept that the Bible is written and edited by fallible humans over centuries. But it worries me a bit that an important and authoritative text, believed by many to be the infallible word of God, isn’t internally consistent, so I would still like to learn more about how believers resolve this to their own satisfaction.

How do you deal with factual errors?

Personally, I find it harder to get past the many claims in the Bible that are simply incorrect, and the ones that are highly implausible, if taken literally.

I’m not referring to miracles. If there is an all-powerful God, miracles aren’t all that implausible. Rather, I mean things the Bible treat as historical fact, but that modern historians, archeologists and scientists can’t find much evidence for where they would expect to find it.

Things like the story of Noah’s Ark, or Moses and the Exodus from Egypt.

As mentioned, I used to think the stories and passages were supposed to be understood symbolically–that the Bible was about our spiritual, not material, history. But I realized that others don’t read them that way, and that raised the problem: How can anyone tell where the symbolism ends and literal truth begins?

It matters whether the words of the Bible are meant to be taken at face value or not. And if they are metaphors, how can we tell what they’re supposed to mean? How do we know when people get it wrong?

I used to be willing to read a lot between the lines, but at a certain point it felt as though I was doing a lot more work than the stories themselves. If I had put the same amount of good will into reading the IKEA catalog, I would have had several holidays devoted to buying furniture.

To me, having a book that is so wide open to interpretation becomes a problem, because anyone–even the most evil and hateful people around–can read support for their views into it. How do we solve a problem like that?

Nowhere does that get put to the test more than in the moral laws and examples the Bible contains.

How do you choose which moral guidance to accept?

How do you, as a modern Christian, find moral guidance in your religion?

There may be good moral examples in the Bible, but there are also things in there that are obviously morally reprehensible. There are sections of the Bible where God gives help or advice to his followers in enslaving people, performing genocide and rape, and brutally executing people for things we wouldn’t even think twice about today.

The ten commandments are often held up as a good moral code, but coming quickly on their heels are many more commandments that virtually nobody follows anymore.

Obviously, and fortunately, most Christians would never endorse many of the violent and oppressive practices that are endorsed in the Bible. They would reject even the premise of some of the commandments. (“When a man sells his daughter as a slave …” begins Exodus 21:7 matter-of-factly, going on to explain how that should work.)

I’m sure you agree that many of God’s rules and punishments are too cruel, such as putting someone to death for gathering sticks on the sabbath (Numbers 15:32–36). Even among Christians who think the death penalty is at least occasionally appropriate, I suspect most would not consider public stoning an acceptable method of execution.

And that, in my opinion, is a good thing. It goes to show that most Christians are fundamentally good – not because of anything the Bible says, but despite it.

How can you trust faith?

My impression, then, is that the reader of the Bible has to rely more on their own sense of morals than on the actual text of the book. And so it seems that knowing what to think and what to do does not come from any particular guidance from God, but from within ourselves, as well as from other people in our community.

People sometimes throw the ball back to God, and call that inner knowledge that guides us Faith. It is stronger than a mere belief, and considered a virtue: Confidence, often certainty, without solid evidence.

But can you trust faith? It has clearly misled many others.

The terrorists who crashed planes into the World Trade Center on 9–11; the inquisitors who tortured people during the Spanish inquisition; the Vikings who would rather die on the battlefield, fighting and killing, than from old age and illness; the Aztecs who sacrificed their neighbors or themselves to their gods; the Hamas fighters who butchered civilians on October 7; Jewish settlers who have killed innocent Palestinians and burned down their families’ farms for another acre of promised land… They were all driven by deeply held faith that they knew what their God or gods want.

Presumably you agree that at least most of those people, if not all of them, were horribly misguided.

They were wrong, yet their faith was as strong, if not stronger, than your own. (It would have to be, for them to be able to perform such acts and die for what they believed.) To them, their faith probably felt very similar to what your faith feels to you.

To me, then, it doesn’t seem like faith necessarily leads to truth or good things. In fact, this makes me think that faith is not so great, after all. Maybe humility is the greater virtue?

How do we reconcile all this?

One of the most humbling thoughts, in my opinion, is the fact that most people are wrong about these things.

There are simply not enough people who share beliefs to make it otherwise – perhaps because there is so little incontrovertible evidence for any religion’s large claims. So regardless of what is actually true, most people who have ever lived and followed a religion — maybe all of them — have been wrong. Was that really God’s plan?

All of this may read as confrontational. It is not meant to be. But as I said at the top, it is meant to be challenging, because these are the questions that I find it hardest to understand how you answer for yourself.

However, I expect that many thoughtful Christians have struggled with these questions before, and I hope the challenge might bring out answers that apply to the toughest cases.