Christian Logic

[DeistPaladin]

I didn't know about them and just looked them up on wikipedia. Some of them are atheists who still believe that Jesus was a wise teacher but I'm baffled by -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_a..._existence

Thomas J. J. Altizer is a well-known Christian atheist who is known for his literal approach to the death of God. He often speaks of God's death as a redemptive event. In his book The Gospel of Christian Atheism he speaks of how

"every man today who is open to experience knows that God is absent, but only the Christian knows that God is dead, that the death of God is a final and irrevocable event, and that God's death has actualized in our history a new and liberated humanity".[4]

I'm not sure how people can be atheists if they believe that God used to exist but is now dead.

Wow, that's even more elaborate than the ones I knew. The self-described "atheist Christians" that I knew were people who rejected the idea of a god or afterlife but nonetheless considered themselves followers of the "wise teachings of Jesus".

On the surface, given our cultures reverence for and rose-colored glasses view of Jesus, this seems reasonable enough. Maybe they liked the parts about "love thy neighbor" and "do unto others..." but they might not regard themselves as devotees of Jesus if they bothered to read the rest. After all, a substantial part of Jesus' teachings are about devotion to his father god and salvation from Hell. Another significant part are unfeasible teachings like his outlandishly extreme pacifism and poverty.

My suggestion, were I to meet an atheist Christian today, would be to read the Gospels with a critical eye before embracing the teachings of Jesus. The few wise things he did preach were not original and the rest, to put it kindly, wasn't that great.