1. You became an atheist when you were 10 years old, based on ideas of God that you learned in Sunday School. Your ideas about God haven't changed since.
Well, I can assure you that I was a lot older when I became an atheist, and I've been exposed to every idea of God that there is, so there's no ignorance on my part about different people's beliefs about God. The vast majority of them are just excuses for how they can believe in a magic sky-man who wants everything to be good, and has all the power to make them that way, but doesn't even use any of it.
But it doesn't negate the possibility that you might be ignorant of what the core of Christianity actually entails as opposed to what you think it entails.
I'm pretty sure that I'm familiar with what beliefs represent the core of Christianity - indeed, I'm aware that different Christian sects have different core beliefs.
But, I'm amenable to correction.
I don't go to spiritual pep rallies, which, admittedly, many churches have resorted to rather than showing a true deference to God.
Then it sounds like your disagreement is not with my knowledge of Christianity, but in other churches' practices of it.
I trust you might be able to distinguish the difference in motives between a good pastor and Popoff.
Sure. It's similar to the difference between Popoff and the people, taken in by his fraud, who popularize him. I don't think pastors are out to fleece people, for the most part; the guy who says "hey, look at this book; isn't Jesus awesome?" is pretty much just as duped as the guy who says "hey, watch this video; isn't Popoff great?"
What leads me to believe that is your apparent inability to distinguish between somebody like Popoff from somebody like, for instance, Ravi Zacharias or C.S. Lewis.
I think you've misunderstood me. I'm not talking about the people; I'm talking about the
claims. The claims of Popoff are as equally religious as the claims of Christianity. That Popoff promotes his claims out of avarice, and the Christian claims are promoted with no duplicitous intent, is immaterial.
Of course I can distinguish between the
persons. It's the
claims, I repeat, that are indistinguishable.
It’s almost humorous that the many people who claim the Bible to be fallacy often have read little more than a few pages. Is that fair?
I find the opposite to be true, in my experience. It's usually Christians who haven't read much, if any, of the Bible; whereas atheists have usually read most or all of the whole thing. I have, several times. I don't commit passages to memory, but I usually remember the significant ones and whereabouts where they can be found. (That's what a good concordance is for, really.)
However, their personal exegesis typically does not accurately convey the message being portrayed by them. Should I assume by their platitudes that I have either caught them on a bad day, in where their memory is not what it should be, or that they are lying to me about their Biblical expertise or their grasp of the Christian ethos as a whole?
You should conclude that you have, apparently, a selective memory; I imagine that you've had the exact same experience with people of differing Christian background, only you didn't see any reason to call
their fluency with the Bible into question.
Or am I supposed to believe that, in your experience, every Christian you talk to about the Bible remembers every passage verbatim and comes to precisely the same interpretation as you? That strains credibility, to say the least.
Obviously atheists come to differing interpretations than you do, for some passages - they're not doing the incredible backbending and twisting I've seen you do when the literal text of the Bible runs hard aground against physical reality, or even other parts of the Bible itself. Freed to approach the Bible honestly, it's obvious that atheists would have a very different interpretation of its most twisted and re-interpreted passages.
™ Version 4.2
