RE: Are all atheists this ill-informed about religion?
October 19, 2015 at 12:25 pm
(This post was last modified: October 19, 2015 at 12:34 pm by Crossless2.0.)
(October 19, 2015 at 12:01 pm)robvalue Wrote: When your first axiom is that God is magic, can do anything, and isn't bound by any rules, you don't have to worry about explaining anything else properly.
How convenient that must be. Once your argument runs out of steam and has twisted itself up its own arse so far it can brush its teeth, you just kick over the board and shout, "Magic!"
Of course, you don't actually use the word magic. You describe magic, and call it something else. No actual real mechanism is ever described.
Spot on.
Now add to that a holy book of remarkable elasticity, such that parts of it can be read in completely different ways by people who claim with equal measures of sincerity that they are believers in and followers of that book.
The result? If an atheist adopts a fundamentalist reading of the Bible for the sake of argument, there will always be some believer popping in to say that the atheist has a crude approach to "god's word". If the atheist reads something metaphorically, some fundamentalist dipshit will insist that that's not the way to read it. And round and round we go. One of the few things all believers seem to agree on is that it's up to us, for some reason, to clear up their nonsense -- and always to their arbitrary satisfaction.
The bottom line is that Christians, whatever their denomination, all play word games that are meant to obfuscate and to shield them from actually making falsifiable statements of belief. So long as they can make claims that can't be tested, assert without compelling evidence that their holy book is divinely inspired and correct in all important respects, hide behind variant readings of Scripture as it suits their rhetorical purposes, and pretend that theology is anything other than the mental masturbation it obviously is, they can always avoid any real accountability for their claims. And when that is pointed out to them, their response is that we are shallow or ill-informed.