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God “cutting Rahab to pieces” illustrates that anything we take pride in will come to nothing and nothing can stand against the supremacy of God.

Take out the pride part, and I would agree with that. The point of the story within the fictitious tale is that Yahweh is so powerful that he and only he - not all the other competing gods - was strong and cunning enough to defeat the chaotic sea monster.

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Order from chaos has nothing to do with Ex nihilo.

Agreed. They represent two competing models of creation.

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The earth was “formless and void” aka chaotic.

Yes, that was the state of the pre-existent universe and earth when Elohim (Yahweh) began to bring form forth from the chaos. The genesis 1 author(s) used the Babylonian creation from chaos myth (or a common source), not a creation from nothing account.

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He still created it…from nothing.

You’ll have to pick from competing ideas. Genesis is not creation from nothing.

Genesis 1:1-2, to make it easier for you to understand, could be:

“When God (Elohim) began to shape the heavens and the earth, the earth was formless/chaotic (Tohu) and waste (Bohu).”

It describes the state of matter at the time Elohim began to give it form. It goes on to say he separated light from darkness and that was the end of the first day. He didn’t create the firmament (which he named “Heaven”) until the second day along with dry land.

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It is now widely known the universe had a beginning. So what’s your explanation of choice?

Widely known by who? Religious apologists? William Lane Craig? Those guys don’t actually know anything about the universe or the scientific method. The consensus of scientists is that the universe had no beginning and no end, and that matter and energy cannot be created nor destroyed.

Did you know that there are some stars that our Webb space telescope can see today but won’t be able to see tomorrow? It’s crazy to think about but there are some stars that are still accelerating away from us and that at some point they begin to move away from us at faster than the speed of light, and so from that point in time forward we will never be able to see the light emitted from it. William Lane Craig didn’t figure that out.

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As far as martyrs…Peter, Paul, James, James, Andrew, Thomas (and many others with less agreement among scholars)

Kudos for admitting this.

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Sources are Acts,

Even though that’s a work of fiction, it is possible that there could be a kernel of historical evidence in there. But that’s just one of Jesus’ disciples.

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Josephus (non Christian), and many of the first church fathers, clement, Ignatius, polycarp, etc

So here-say and rumors from generations later. The truth is most of the deaths of Jesus’ disciples that Christians like to tout are mostly from non-canonical gospels that Christian churches today overwhelmingly reject except for the verses about how some of them died. There were about 50 gospels of Jesus Christ and only 4 made it into your Bible. For instance there are three apocryphal Christian sources stating Bartholomew died in Armenia, Albania, and India.