Scattered responses to my atheistic readership

Over the years I have found it frustrating that so many atheists reject a very narrow and often distorted conception of Christianity without realizing how much more complex this religious tradition is. And so in my last post I made a modest plea that they simply begin to recognize this complexity by citing three key examples. By doing this they would only enrich their critical exchanges with Christians and the Christian tradition.

And I got a range of responses. benjdm and DStegosaurus were engaging and sought to push the conversation forward.

Homoousia316 thought I was setting up an unfair standard and so retorted with an analogy: "Nobody is allowed to talk about atheism unless they read everything ever written by Kai Nielsen, Bertrand Russell, William Rowe, and all of the other "atheologians"...." If I am unwilling to demand this rigorous standard of the Christian anxious to refute atheism, then neither should I demand it of the atheist against the Christian. But I actually agree with H316's standard in the following way: if you want to engage atheism critically then you SHOULD read the most competent defenders of the atheist position. You shouldn't content yourself with Sunday school atheism or the rantings of the local village atheist. And the same goes for the atheist attempting to engage Christianity.

AderalApocalyps's response is summarized by the first three words (or rather the first word thrice repeated): "blah blah blah." This is sad, for it says more about AderalApocalyps than it says about Christianity.

Ethan thought that I wasn't living up to my own advice because I believe, contrary to his own view, that atheism is the position one holds when one believes that no god exists. (He calls this my "straw man of atheism".) That's like protesting the claim that Christianity is defined minimally as the view that the Christian God exists as a straw man of Christianity.

Nonetheless, Caffeine echoes Ethan's frustration that I misrepresent atheism. "Your particular straw-man, that 'atheism means a belief that god doesn't exist' is a step forward because that group is in fact a subset of atheism. The difference is you won't acknowledge this, and are attempting to paint us all with the same brush, in spite of being repeatedly told your error." But relative to what formal body of doctrine can this be counted an error? If I define atheism with the alpha privative of negation, and agnostic as the view that one does not know or believe whether or not God exists, to which atheistic canon law shall you appeal to refute me? Be that as it may, we've already covered this terrain and may have to agree to disagree

To cap it off we have Salvage who brazenly does precisely what I asked not be done: attribute a number of beliefs to me, some of which are distorted, others that no orthodox Christian would hold, and still others that are held by some Christians but not others: "As a Christian I assume you believe that your god created the universe and people and has been angry about it ever since. After killing a lot of people by blowing up their cities, sending armies here and there, flooding the whole planet he sacrificed himself to himself to he wouldn't be so angry anymore and / or to give people another way to worship him (why does your god need worship anyway?). You are now waiting for Jesus to come back and destroy the world / kill a lot more people one final time and that will fix all our problems."

So as with so many conversations across deeply entrenched ideological lines, you get the good, the bad, and the ugly.