Are all atheists this ill-informed about religion?

[Exian]

I may not know the bible forwards and back, but I can smell an inflammatory shit-and-run poster from a mile away.

One of the benefits of being an atheist is chewing up religious trolls. They say don't feed the them, but what they don't know is that troll is a delicacy around here.

DON'T FEED THE ATHEISTS! We'll only come back.

[JesusHChrist]

Yes, the main criticism offered is show your claims are true. Which is never done btw...

So inadequate! /sarc

[Foxaèr]

But we're just supposed to rely on faith that their claims are accurate.

[Cinjin]

I suppose any theist who has read this part of the forum has to chuckle at how terrible atheist critiques of theism are.

But when the laughter dies down, you're left with a troubling realization: There actually is a huge pool of people on this planet who call themselves atheists and post on the internet, but are less familiar with theism than toddlers with the inside of a quantum mechanics textbook.

Where does one go for actually informed atheistic critiques of religion? I'm feeling my brain atrophy after reading some of the threads here.

Delicate

[robvalue]

So what if some atheists make bad arguments? Not all arguments against religion are good. That doesn't mean there aren't good arguments.

What exactly are we meant to do about it? We're not the atheist police.

If there's a problem with a particular argument, rather than vague slurs, then please be specific.

When you say religion, you mean Christianity I suppose. How familiar are you with every other religion I wonder?

[TheRocketSurgeon]

I do think that some of these things are explained within the Gospel story, and also would have immediately been questioned by the local audience, if they where not at least plausible (ie... Pilates odd actions surrounding the Trial).  I don't think that darkness or earthquakes are all that odd, and we even see an explanation later by a non-biblical source.  The Saints being raised, however does provide some difficulty for me, and I would say, that I leave it in tension.  It is odd, that it is not mentioned anywhere else in scripture or ever mentioned as evidence.  Historically, it's my understanding that there is early and universal scriptural support in the manuscripts (it is unlikely that it was added later)  We also have references by the Early Church to this passage.  I do think that the passage can support that Saints may have only appeared to certain people and where not seen again. 

You're making an assumption, still, that what is in the stories written down 10-20 years after-the-fact are in any way descriptive of what actually happened, historically. You base this conclusion on how well-crafted (or well-knitted-together) the sources are overall, forgetting that they come from the same small clique of people, who had two decades to embellish their stories as they retold and retold it in their convert-winning attempts, before finally it was "finalized" by the writing process.

For instance, when you say "Pilate's odd actions surrounding the Trial", which would have according to your interpretation been questioned by the local audience had they not actually happened, presumes that the story was ever told to the local audience.  Yes, according to the scriptures, the claim is made that they tried to form a church in Jerusalem but were expelled from there, but even if we accept that as factual on its face, there is no reason to believe that the part of the story involving the magical events surrounding the crucifixion were being told to that audience in the initial rounds of the storytelling. In other words, if I'm telling a story about the time I caught a big fish on a Texas lake-vacation, you can assume that if I added the embellishment of "and Pro Fisherman Kevin Van Dam was there, and I beat his best catch of the day" at the time, then people who were at the lake that day would know I was lying. But if I went back to Missouri after that, and kept telling taller versions of my Big Fish story, where after twenty years of retelling it among my group of friends, it had grown to the point that I said I beat Van Dam and caught the biggest fish of the day, there would be nobody who could really disprove me, and with the weight of all my friends telling the same story, I could easy convince a congregation that I had actually done so. (Assuming a first century-level lack of records, photos, and communications.) Even if my friends had been there, it would not be hard to have the story grow bigger among us, if we all benefited somehow from telling the story that way.

It is quite plausible that these men we call the Disciples followed a Messianic-cult rabbi around for three years, while he made claims to the Davidic prophecies of reunification and liberation of the Hebrew peoples (hardly surprising, given the Roman occupation at the time), and that he was summarily crucified for doing so, like a lot of people were. But if those disciples, rather than admit they had been foolishly following a con artist, decided to embellish the story a bit in order to say he claimed he would return in glory, in order to combat Rome's power and to enhance their own claims to divine insight, it would not be hard to picture how the story could expand like the Big Fish. So the claim grows from simply being crucified in the common way, nailed up on a roadside cross by a Centurion's orders, to Pilate the hated Roman Prefect (and symbol of all the oppression) having convened a special Trial and execution... because he was just THAT important, you see! You're right; if they told that version of the story to the people of Jerusalem, they'd go "what trial?", but it is not necessarily the case that they told that version in the initial tellings. It is clear they were not well-received in Jerusalem (and we must ask why this was so, if the miracles claimed later by the Gospels actually happened... surely a public trial immediately followed by an earthquake, eclipse, torn veil, and zombie plague would have gone a long way to convincing a lot of people in Jerusalem that there was something to the Jesus-story, had it happened!), so the message may have grown from the time they were tossed out of Jerusalem to the time they began to preach in Gentile lands.

Before you say I cannot know that the story was embellished, let me say that it is clear to anyone reading with an open mind that the story grew over time, from the earliest writings by Paul (in which no miracles or wondrous signs are even mentioned) to the progression of increasingly-miraculous claims in Mark->Matthew->Luke->John, in order of publication, but in the Gnostic gospels we have since recovered despite the Church's attempts to wipe them from the face of the earth. It is clear that the story was being added to and embellished, especially after the destruction of Jerusalem (when we have placed the writings of John). The earlist possible date for a New Testament book is James, written around the year 40 CE, though this date is disputed and most scholars consider it written in the mid-50s, and not one mention of a miracle is contained in that book, unless you count healing-by-praying. So the question is not "was it embellished?", the question is how much.

I'm not sure what you mean by "an explanation later by a non-biblical source", so I'll just ask for clarification on that one.

[robvalue]

Right. People need to drop this assumption that anything in the bible happened just as it is written, apart from what we can properly verify independently. Referring to one part of the story to back up another is like proving the One Ring is real by analysing Frodo's motivations and actions. Any sensible person can see that would be ridiculous; but they can't always see that they are doing the same thing. It's this drilled-in idea that there is some automatic truth to any of it. There isn't. At least, not to anyone assessing it objectively. At the very best, it offers an extremely vague and warped view of history. That's if the authors weren't simply making stuff up. I think it's quite clear that they were, at least some of the time.

[Alex K]

Trinity  1+1+1 = 1

Not even good math.

It's correct in fields of rank 2. Just sayin...

[ignoramus]

Here's a dumb argument from an ignoramus.
I know bugger all about religion but know as much as anybody else about God.
That's why I enjoy being here. Whether you believe in God or not doesn't make it any more real...
Except the angry religious trolls... they're real. The irony.

[robvalue]

Trinity  1+1+1 = 1

Not even good math.

It's correct in fields of rank 2. Just sayin...

Oh yeah! God does arithmetic modulo 2. I'm surprised no one has tried to use that defence, it's better than the ones I have heard so far.