Attn: Christians, We've Heard Them Already

[Ben Davis]

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Open letter to any new Christians starting threads in this forum:

Please do not present any of the following arguments and think you're offering us anything new or even anything that atheists haven't heard and debunked a million times already. Many of us are ex-Christians and even those who aren't are still savvy enough that we've heard all the endlessly recycled, canned apologetic arguments. If you do offer these arguments, do not expect anything more than irritated GTFO or STFU retorts. Hearing the same tired arguments over and over gets old.

Rule of Thumb: If WL Craig, Strobel, McDowell, Habermas, Comfort or Answers in Genesis have used the argument you're about to post, we've heard it already.

Among the specific arguments we've already heard include but are not limited to:

• "Without (my) God, there can be no morals"
  
• "The universe can't come from nothing"
  
• "What about Josephus and Tacitus? They mentioned Jesus."
  
• "Why would the disciples have died for a lie?"
  
• "The Gospels are reliable historical documents, written by eye-witness accounts."
  
• The Ontological Argument
  
• The Teleological Argument
  
• The Transcendental Argument
  
• The Moral Argument
  
• Pascal's Wager
  
• The Presuppositionalist Argument
  
• "Where do you get your sense of meaning without God?"
  
• "Hitler was an atheist!"
  
• "Stalin was an atheist!"
  

Please feel free to add to the list.

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I'm actually in favour of both positions but not because I'm not sitting on the fence, honest!! For me, the value of having an 'FAQ' style area is to enable 'repetitive' threads not to avoid having them; they allow those who are new to the subject matter to take advantage of existing knowledge/experience, have more informed discussions and consequently be more likely to advance something new. Let's face it, even the most commonly asked question was new to us all at some point and our education would have been poorly served if we'd only been pointed to text books; many of us learn better through discussion than through straight reading.