Atheist surprised when god answered his prayer

[Alex K]

... And of course this former atheist got his fifteen minutes of fame.

And I suppose you have a litmus test for No True Atheist...You're just incensed by the idea that maybe atheism isn't as compelling as YOU think it is.

Oh, let him have been a true atheist, we don't know... but not one with a lot of critical thinking skills. Why would he attribute this whole situation to the christian God?

But what makes us more suspicious is the way the entire text is worded. If I were given the task to write propaganda drivel intended to give believers the warm fuzzy feeling that all that rational smart thinking is not a threat to their religion, that's exactly what I would write. It's by now absolute christian propaganda boilerplate, actually - stories of this type are a dime a dozen. You can find the standard propaganda characterizations here:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Ma...oodAtheist

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Ma...rthAtheist

has overlap with

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrawVulcan

In our case here the functions seem to be

1. I used to be sooooo logical and rational and wanted proof for everything (establishing the fact that the main character was of the sort the listener is most afraid of, and supposedly the hardest to convert - we wouldn't want to pit Jesus against too easy an I-can-win atheobot)

2. but then I met Jaaaayyyysus, and now I'm back in the fold (reassuring the listener that all this rationality business is either just an easily defeated abnormality or perfectly compatible with their religion)

When such a real life example checks all the boxes of straw atheist tropes, one gets suspicious, although of course it's not proving that the story hasn't happened like this exactly.