Unbelievers love quoting Scripture at Christians—usually out of context, like a club to swing—precisely because they don’t believe it. If the Bible were just another ancient text, they’d ignore it. But they sense its weight, its authority, even as they reject it. It’s the same instinct that makes a child yell “I hate you!” to the parent whose rules still govern the house. C.S. Lewis nailed this in The Screwtape Letters. The senior demon Screwtape advises his nephew:

“The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy’s own ground… By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream.”

Translation: the moment an unbeliever quotes Scripture to argue, they’ve already stepped onto God’s turf. They’re treating the text as if it matters—as if it has the power to settle a dispute. That’s a backhanded confession. Lewis again, in Mere Christianity:

“A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic… or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice.”

And on the specific habit of skeptics cherry-picking Scripture, G.K. Chesterton wrote in The Everlasting Man:“The skeptics will quote the Bible to prove it is not true… They treat the Bible as a dead thing to be dissected, but it is a living thing that dissects them.”

The unbeliever quoting “judge not” while ignoring the next verse (“first take the plank out of your own eye”) isn’t engaging in exegesis. They’re performing. But every performance betrays the script’s authority. So the next time someone slaps a verse on you like a gotcha, smile and say:
“Interesting. You quote the Bible like it’s true. Why bother if it’s just fairy tales?” Watch the squirming begin.

And every time a progressive slaps “judge not” on you while ignoring the plank in their own eye—or the clear biblical teaching on marriage, life, or justice—they’re not debunking Christianity. They’re raiding its moral capital to fund their revolution. That’s not rejection; that’s parasitism.