Dr. Craig is a liar.

[wiploc]

Hate to be debbie downer, but I doubt anyone is going to transition away from their religious beliefs on account of any of this...lol.   Been here too long, know better.   

It happens often enough.  I once commented (at talk freethought) that somebody was out of reach, not worth talking to.  People came back and said things like, "A year ago, I was just like him.  Let him keep working with us.  He'll come around." 

It's a long slow process. 

At first the theist expects us to be bowled over by his logic. 

Then he thinks there is something wrong with him.  He isn't a good enough Christian, doesn't have enough faith, hasn't done his homework, or something.  So he goes back and studies, modifies his arguments. 

The presumption is that there's something wrong with him.  It takes a long time for him to entertain the idea that there is something wrong with the arguments. 

His people have armed him with stupid arguments, and told him that they were smart.  This realization, when it finally does come, cracks the foundations of his belief.  He'll still come around, still test arguments in the proving ground, but now with some willingness to conclude that the argument is where the flaw is. 

And, finally, maybe, he gets to wonder whether, if the argument is so bad, the belief supported by the argument isn't bad too. 

This process takes time.  You could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times in your life you'll see somebody sit down with one opinion and get up with another.  So what you're doing is planting seeds.  They may not sprout for twenty years.  You will presumably not see them sprout. 

And you don't know where they will sprout.  There are people reading over our shoulders as we debate, people who wonder about the same arguments we are discussing, people who are likely to be affected far sooner than the debaters will. 

So our job, really, is first to be personable, principled, and good-willed, to let people see that we would be good neighbors, to show that we don't have horns and tails like they've been told.  And second, we want to show that we care about right and wrong for reasons at least as good as those the theists offer. 

In third place is the goal of refuting specific arguments like the KCA.  It's a stupid argument, indefensible.  The people who arm you with the KCA, and send you out to do battle with it, those people are lying to you.  Maybe not individually, but as a group they know better.  They wouldn't keep the KCA in circulation if they had anything better. 

But they know they don't have anything good, so they keep sending people out with bad arguments. 

This is our proof that Christians don't have any good arguments.  If they had good ones, they wouldn't rely on bad ones. 

So, yeah, people come across all the time.  People cross the other way all the time too.  Discussions like this are a significant part of people are now coming to us a lot faster than they are leaving us. 

When I was a kid, we had no internet.  There was nobody to talk to.  Madalyn Murray was the only other atheist that I knew of in the United States.  Christian kids could be told that atheists just wanted to be evil, and that atheists had no logical arguments, and they pretty much had to believe what they were told because they never heard the other side. 

Now, because of forums like this, Christians can test out theist arguments, and learn that they just don't work.  And then they can wonder why.