An excellent piece, thanks, Guy, and I'm an atheist. Insightful and balanced articles like yours make it clear that so many ostensible Christians are hypocrites by cherry-picking the parts of the Bible they like and ignoring other parts or the parts that conflict with their preferred views. As you observe, they can't believe both A and B if A and B are mutually exclusive.

Of course, people can believe whatever they want to believe. My problem comes when people, like those in positions of power, strive mightily to impose their (not necessarily accurate) interpretation of just one of many holy books upon the rest of society. I find that atheism completely solves all those problems for me. I just try to treat other people as I would like to be treated. That seems fair and equitable; no book had to tell me that.