The Atheist Obsession with Insulting Christians

[Neo-Scholastic]

"make your best case for why atheism is true"

There are people who don't believe in any gods. Boom. Checkmate.

So lame. So so lame.

[Cyberman]

Because..?

[Randy Carson]

So don't watch.  He's constantly pulling the same shit I suspect because he thinks it makes him some kind of martyr.

Let's get something straight about him, C/L.  He's a cherry-picking asshole. 

That's because I can. There are LOTS of cherries which refute your stupid mythicism to choose from...I just love the ones from atheists best because they are so IN. YOUR. FACE.

He loves to trot out a line from Ehrman but I have yet to see him address Ehrman's conclusion to his bullshit resurrection gibberish.

So too with the resurrection of Jesus. Historians can, in theory, examine aspects of the tradition. In theory, for example, a historian could look into the question of whether Jesus really was buried in a known tomb and whether three days later that same tomb was found to be empty, with no body in it. What the historian cannot conclude, as a historian, is that God therefore must have raised the body and taken it up to heaven. The historian has no access to information like that, and that conclusion requires a set of theological presuppositions that not all historians share. Moreover, it is possible to come up with perfectly sensible other solutions as to why a once-occupied tomb may have become empty: someone stole the body; someone innocently decided to move the body to another tomb; the whole story was in fact a legend, that is, the burial and discovery of an empty tomb were tales that later Christians invented to persuade others that the resurrection indeed happened.

Of course....whether or not the tomb was ever "occupied" is solely dependent on the same book of bullshit which Ehrman has spent a career trashing but for now it is enough to make the point.

Hilarious. Ehrman is an atheist, so naturally he will draw some conclusions that I do not agree with.

But one thing is clear: Ehrman schools you again on the fact that yes, Jesus did exist.

So, what we're down to, Min, is the fact that Jesus really did exist and your whole life at this point is built upon the lie that He did not.

That's kinda sad, actually. Really sad.

[Jenny A]

Hilarious. Ehrman is an atheist, so naturally he will draw some conclusions that I do not agree with.

But one thing is clear: Ehrman schools you again on the fact that yes, Jesus did exist.

So, what we're down to, Min, is the fact that Jesus really did exist and your whole life at this point is built upon the lie that He did not.

That's kinda sad, actually. Really sad.

You think anyone's life is built on the conclusion that Jesus didn't exist?  I'm sitting here puzzling on how that could be so.  I suppose you might build a career on that proposition, but a life?  Really?  So you think Min's life would change in what way if you convinced him that there was a non-divine Jesus?

[Losty]

"make your best case for why atheism is true"

There are people who don't believe in any gods. Boom. Checkmate.

So lame. So so lame.

Arguing for atheism is lame. Atheism is a lack of belief in any god. What is there to argue?

[TheRocketSurgeon]

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When you speak to us like dogs, and then try to claim that the reason we counterattack is because we're just here to bash Christians, it's playing the victim card. Period. Are we less likely to give "benefit of the doubt" to Christians, based on our long, collective experience with proselytizing types? You betcha. But we don't attack because of a person's faith. Look at the Christians here with better reps than most of the atheists here, despite their strong faith-stance. It's you, Randy.

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No, it's really not.

1. You guys bullied Catholic Lady right out of the forum. She's back, but yeah.
2. The author of the article I posted has observed the same phenomenon at other forums.

It's a pattern that is repeated by atheists against other Christians...not just me.

Now, you can either admit there's a problem and begin to police your own or you can live with the reputation a few pukes are sticking you with. Your call.

I wasn't here for the C_L "bullying" incident, but I suspect it was just a fierce contention of an issue that got out of hand. People can get emotional and drop the pretense of civility that forms the basis of most social interactions. Given that she has such a high reputation, now, I suspect you're slanting the evidence here.

As for "police your own", don't make me laugh. There are just as many Christians who are openly hostile to us at every point as there are atheists in return; your observer bias is making you "count the hits and ignore the misses", as we say in statistics. So, rather than being an atheist trait, as the author tries to portray it, it's really a human trait, having to do with our evolution as a tribal-societal species, in which there is an "in-group" and an "out-group" in our minds, and we tend to defend the former while perceiving the latter as the enemy. Just by having this conversation, you're ignoring how many of us testified right here that we've been harassed and berated by Christians in Christian-dominated forums and public spaces. You portray it as a problem of atheism, when it's not, as our conversations with guys like Kingpin and C_L overall demonstrate, even if things get heated sometimes in an exchange. But we don't police, as policy, and when someone does step over the line, there are always those of us who pull them back in. I have done so twice in the last three days, personally! I've also given Kudos, up-rated, and typed responses to Christian points that I thought were solid. And I don't consider myself in any way unusual in these regards; we have our firebrands, but you're a bald-faced liar if you say the same isn't true on Christian forums!

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Your second paragraph is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. I grew up as an evangelical, and I still own or have read a large number of apologetics books, from Mere Christianity  to Orthodoxy  to The Case for Christ  to Darwin on Trial  to The Language of God, et cetera.  In college, I read large excerpts from guys like St. Augustine and St. Jerome, as part of Biblical History courses. So your comment, "...despite what you may have heard from the low-information atheists in this forum" is not only snarky, it's revealing of your bias against us as atheists out of ignorance of The Truth™.

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Wrong. There are a small number of atheists in THIS forum who have distinguished themselves as being a cut above. I can name them on one hand.

That doesn't change my point one little bit, even if it was true. But it's not true. I've found that, in 17 years of being active with atheist groups, the members (certainly the ones who began in religion and moved away from it) are almost universally fluent in Biblical apologetics because of the process they went through in deconverting from the faith. While there are some who post information that is incorrect or misleading about Christianity, almost without fail it is followed by another atheist who says, "Actually, it means____; see reference____." And the first atheist goes, "Oh, I didn't know that, and corrects himself, because that's fundamental to a scientific mindset. It takes the certainty that comes with a religious mindset to say "I don't care what the facts are".

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This is indeed a public forum. And all are welcome. We have said so repeatedly. I have said so previous to this post, in this thread. But it is still our house; it is "a safe place" for atheists to gather. We have a Christianity sub-forum on which we discuss many elements of Christianity-- more often than not, what we are discussing, if you'll look, is the myriad ways in which Christians attack non-believers (often causing cruel treatment of us by family members and/or social circles), try to push their religion into law or social policy (into our lives), or the ways in which the dominant form of Christianity in our countries will attack science, education, and liberty. On occasion, a theist or an atheist will post a thread that is about apologetics or other doctrine, and a discussion will ensue. But it's not the purpose  of the thread, nor is it our job to give one shred of leeway to someone who makes bald assertions or copypastas, or who is demeaning or derogatory toward us, and you have a long history of doing so. I've silently sat back and watched you do it, to my increasing frustration, until I felt I had to say something, at last, here.

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And yes, we do mock Christianity. [emphasis added]There is much about it that deserves mockery. Even other Christians mock Christianity; entire professional comedic careers -- Mark Lowry, for instance, whom I've seen live twice (my mom's a huge fan). Much of what the 40,000 denominations think about theology is outright hilarious! And from our perspective, most of it is pretty funny...think of the way you see Hindu rituals or the Muslims praying en masse, with their asses in the guy's face behind them. And as I have said, this is our "safe space" in which we can say the things we could never say in real life, while the Christians who surround us have no problem lying about atheism, making atheists out to be untrustworthy and evil, and with socially ostracizing us for no other reason than an expression of our nonbelief. Some of us are going to mock.

Thank you for that admission. Now that we all know that serious discussion is NOT on the menu...let's all have some waffles and play Mafia. We can even hold hands and sing Kumbaya as a sign of our new-found unity.

Way to take something completely out of context. Did you not know that the specific example that followed my newly-bolded sentence is a Christian comedian? (He is also a songwriter; he wrote the very popular "Mary, Did You Know?".) Yet his mockeries of Christian silliness have whole crowds of fellow Christians, including me when I was one, and still I chuckle at some of his stuff.

When you do or say something that deserves mockery, we're going to mock you. If an atheist came in here and said he thought there was scientific proof that aliens landed in Roswell, and then did a terrible job of explaining it (especially one that contains a butchery of science), then I'm going to mock him, as would almost everyone here.

I guess that means I hate atheists???

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In the end, we are in every conceivable way more open than our counterparts on the Christian forums, by a long shot. The mockery you experience from us here is a fraction of what most of us go through in real life all the time, something we would never do to others. Hell, the fact that I'm still talking to you after you've told me I'm ignorant of Christianity, pretended that the reason we say mean things to you is because we just want to attack Christianity and not discuss it (rather than a response to the hostile way in which you discuss  with us), and telling me to shove my "victim card schtick" up my ass, should indicate to you that we do not prohibit you in any way for your Christianity, but only for the way in which it is presented.

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Rubbish. You could be a member for years at CAF without being mocked to the extent that I'm routinely mocked here...or banned for that matter. As long as you are polite, you can disagree all day long with God, the Church, the Bible, whatever.

Give it a try. Start a thread at CAF...make your best case for why atheism is true. OMG, how I would love for you to try.

Cya there.

Hells, no! I'm not going through that shit again. Unless the Christians online have changed since 10 years ago, when I last played that  game, there's no way I'd subject myself to it again. When I was younger and more idealistic, my Humanist group joined some of those boards as a sort of social experiment, and it was a disaster for all the reasons you are denying. The testimony of the other atheists on here who say they've gone there does not indicate to me in any way that things are different, now. Furthermore, I have no need to proselytize. That's the part you don't get we don't give a fuck if you are a Christian. We don't! It's only when it's thrown in our faces online or through family/peer pressure, or when the Christians in America (can't speak for other countries) come after our science education or otherwise try to shape the country in a way that is hostile to nonbelievers that we get aggressive in return. Think of it as "cornered wolverine syndome".

[I have Hide-tagged the sections of my quotes that don't need to be shown as direct citations for the discussion, but left them in so the full context is available in a more presentable format. Hope that's not unclear.]

[Lemonvariable72]

Randy, in my experience most Christian forums will ban you simply for being a atheist. I was banned from Christianforums.org immediately and on worthy Christian forums they don't ban you out right but they only allow you access to one subforum.

Catholic Answers Forums will not ban you for being an atheist.

They will ban you for behaving like Minimalist.

I may have to try that for myself as I am skeptical of that. However of the three major atheist forums: this one, ttaf, and A+ I know here and over at ttaf many theists are allowed to post freely provided they follow the same rules as everyone else. Now A+ is a bit different, but they have a rap for being nuts over there.
I propose a social experiment. We take several atheists from here, and we each approach the forum from a different approach, but approaches that used by theists here.

[Catholic_Lady]

I wasn't here for the C_L "bullying" incident, but I suspect it was just a fierce contention of an issue that got out of hand. People can get emotional and drop the pretense of civility that forms the basis of most social interactions. Given that she has such a high reputation, now, I suspect you're slanting the evidence here.

In case you are interested: http://atheistforums.org/thread-34779.html

Thanks for the kind words, btw.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Hilarious. Ehrman is an atheist, so naturally he will draw some conclusions that I do not agree with.

But one thing is clear: Ehrman schools you again on the fact that yes, Jesus did exist.

So, what we're down to, Min, is the fact that Jesus really did exist and your whole life at this point is built upon the lie that He did not.

That's kinda sad, actually. Really sad.

I've never been a "Jesus Mythicist", like Carrier, but I still think Carrier's work needs to be carefully considered. I have always agreed with Ehrman's conclusion that it's likely Jesus was a real person, though I think Ehrman didn't consider thoroughly enough that Josephus' references to Christian testimony strongly implies it is testimony given at their execution trials (either by transcript or by interviewing the condemned). As such, it would not be necessarily indicative of a real Jesus or even a real trial by Pilate based on Roman records, but of a narrative gained from those condemned Christians about what happened. My Biblical History professor (a member of the team of scholars who translated the Nag Hammadi scrolls) and I had quite a long discussion about whether or not we could trust Ehrman's conclusion of Josephus' and Tacitus' historicity accounts, and pretty much came to the conclusion that it seems likely Jesus was a real person, but there are too many after-the-fact forgeries and too little information about sources of the data upon which the two rely to make a solid conclusion. Given that there was unquestionably a group called Christians, we decided to err on the side of "yeah he probably existed". None of this, of course, leads me to conclude that he was the Son of God or otherwise divine.

I don't understand how "Aha! Jesus existed!" is in any way a triumph for apologetics, since a large number of atheists (myself included) have no problem with an historical Jesus.

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I wasn't here for the C_L "bullying" incident, but I suspect it was just a fierce contention of an issue that got out of hand. People can get emotional and drop the pretense of civility that forms the basis of most social interactions. Given that she has such a high reputation, now, I suspect you're slanting the evidence here.

In case you are interested: http://atheistforums.org/thread-34779.html

Thanks for the kind words, btw.

I'll check it out when my fingers are not flying so furiously (and I can tone down the alliteration, apparently). 

I rarely agree with you, C_L, as you know... but your heart is kind and in the right place, and I think that is the single most important consideration when taking the measure of a person. So I like the hell out of ye.

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I may have to try that for myself as I am skeptical of that. However of the three major atheist forums: this one, ttaf, and A+ I know here and over at ttaf many theists are allowed to post freely provided they follow the same rules as everyone else. Now A+ is a bit different, but they have a rap for being nuts over there. 

TTAF is a great forum, but I just left there to come here because  they would not censor one particularly obnoxious Creationist, even to make him stop with mountains of copypasta, and I got tired of carrying the weight of debunking his Irreducible Complexity nonsense.

[Catholic_Lady]

In case you are interested: http://atheistforums.org/thread-34779.html

Thanks for the kind words, btw.

I'll check it out when my fingers are not flying so furiously (and I can tone down the alliteration, apparently). 

I rarely agree with you, C_L, as you know... but your heart is kind and in the right place, and I think that is the single most important consideration when taking the measure of a person. So I like the hell out of ye.

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No worries, it's long and boring and my participation doesn't begin till page 6, but since it's been brought up in the argument, at least you can have the chance to judge for yourself if you are curious.

Thanks again for the kind things you said to me. I like you too, as you know.