christian looking to understand athiests

[robvalue]

Why would God allow things like cancer to be inflicted on people in the first place, to make them have to pray to take it away?

[Excited Penguin]

I'm an atheist because I met another atheist as a teenager, who upon my arrogantly bugging her about her 'stupid' atheism was kind enough to invite me to a civil debate about it. I wrote to her and while making one of my arguments I noticed that the idea of god is not so much a matter of epistemology as it is a classic example of the elusiveness of language.

We evolved this ability(i.e. language) so we could better express concepts and ideas to ourselves and to each others-- the availability and feasibility of linguistic constructs is crucial to describing differing takes on reality. A lot of the things described though are not phenomena of the outer world so much as of the brain. Just so "God" is more often that not a description of an array of certain mental processes, picked and ordered in a personalized manner, that we prize enough to nurture at all costs-- just so we can reenact them at will.

God is real and you are not mad for believing in him. I also believe you when you say you are born again. But the problem with others is, you're not able to better relay what you mean by those things when talking to different types of people, therefore disillusioned skeptics, for example, will tend to think you talk rubbish and maybe jokingly imply you must run a fever[or something to that effect] whenever you start conveying what you mean to say in that limited way of yours.

[Mr Greene]

Hmmm.... 14 yr old pastor's daughter... Maybe I was a little quick to judge, but I've been arguing with creationists since before she was conceived.
I've seen the "I'm not here to preach" approach far too often to take it at face value.
The "I'll pray for you" thing is also too regularly abused by the theists to be taken as anything other than disrespect.
Then we come to the usual attempt to blame life's misfortunes on the devil or man's free will. I find it interesting that the Jews (or certainly the rabbis) accept that their deity is both good and evil but the xtians need to invent a scape goat to absolve their deity of his responsibilities.