Earlier quoted context omitted.
The challenge with books like The God Delusion is that it's barely one step above strawman arguments. It attacks claims made by some simple lay people, based on their half-baked understanding of their own faiths (which they never really dug into). However, people well versed in the religion don't actually make any such claims. The arguments being debunked are ones that religious scholars themselves would have disagre…
My experience with religion in the public sphere is that ~all of the religious arguments that are actually advanced in that sphere have nothing to do with ones made by religious scholars. Attacking a strawman is perfectly appropriate in this case, because the strawman is what actually drives policy.
I've wondered whether it is possible to be both, say, a Christian and an atheist simultaneously (e.g., not believing that Christ existed physically, but at the same time believing that following the tenets in the religion is the right thing to do for the greater good, or perhaps interpreting the Bible completely metaphorically).
I imagine that scholars can have serious disagreements over the meaning of the Bible or even its provenance without necessarily leaving the religion.