RE: Official debate with local pastor.
January 25, 2012 at 12:33 pm
(This post was last modified: January 25, 2012 at 1:51 pm by Doubting Thomas.)
Actually, if a Christian did make a post about meeting an atheist, I wouldn't jump all over him, but I'd offer this advice:
Please don't try the shifting of the burden of proof tactic. This is what Christians constantly try to do but it never works. Does "You have no proof God doesn't exist" sound familiar? You're the one believing in a god, the onus is on you to prove it.
"Proof" doesn't mean "what I believe to be true." When atheists ask for proof, they mean hard, factual, incontrovertible evidence. For example, show a picture of God. Or bring God along to the meeting and have him talk to the atheist himself. Warm fuzzy feelings you get from thinking about God or Jesus are not evidence.
The bible is not proof of anything. You can rely on it to argue points of what you believe, but remember that's just what you believe. Realize that there's no evidence that God wrote the bible, and claiming that the bible is true because God wrote it is just a circular argument. Atheists tend to believe that the bible was written by bronze-age, superstitious desert goat herders who had a very rudimentary understanding of the universe, and tended to write this erroneous understanding down as fact. Think about why you don't accept the Koran or Book of Mormon as total truth of those religions, and you'll understand why we don't accept everything in the bible as fact.
Please don't bother with Pascal's Wager or threats of Hell. We don't believe in such a place, and we wouldn't worship any deity which threatens to send us there anyway. The idea of Hell may have worked a thousand years ago when people were far more superstitious and stupid, but nowadays its only purpose is to try to keep the people who believe in it from wandering from their religion.
Please don't try the shifting of the burden of proof tactic. This is what Christians constantly try to do but it never works. Does "You have no proof God doesn't exist" sound familiar? You're the one believing in a god, the onus is on you to prove it.
"Proof" doesn't mean "what I believe to be true." When atheists ask for proof, they mean hard, factual, incontrovertible evidence. For example, show a picture of God. Or bring God along to the meeting and have him talk to the atheist himself. Warm fuzzy feelings you get from thinking about God or Jesus are not evidence.
The bible is not proof of anything. You can rely on it to argue points of what you believe, but remember that's just what you believe. Realize that there's no evidence that God wrote the bible, and claiming that the bible is true because God wrote it is just a circular argument. Atheists tend to believe that the bible was written by bronze-age, superstitious desert goat herders who had a very rudimentary understanding of the universe, and tended to write this erroneous understanding down as fact. Think about why you don't accept the Koran or Book of Mormon as total truth of those religions, and you'll understand why we don't accept everything in the bible as fact.
Please don't bother with Pascal's Wager or threats of Hell. We don't believe in such a place, and we wouldn't worship any deity which threatens to send us there anyway. The idea of Hell may have worked a thousand years ago when people were far more superstitious and stupid, but nowadays its only purpose is to try to keep the people who believe in it from wandering from their religion.
Christian apologetics is the art of rolling a dog turd in sugar and selling it as a donut.
