One student went on about how he “used to be an atheist until…” Then another student went in about how “I was an atheist too until…” Then I asked the whole class a question (or two.)

“How many people here consider themselves to be atheists?”

Only a few hands showed up (including mine.)

Then I asked the next question. “How many of you WERE atheists at one time?

It looked like just over a fourth of the hands in the room went up out of a class of roughly 80 people.

So I pointed that out. Why is it that “I was an atheist” outnumber “I am an theist”? Would the results been different with another group of people. Would they have been different last year? Etc.

Most of the people in that class were friendly. I did get a bit of hostility but not bad.

In all of these cases, for me, not believing takes no faith at all. I view them all as being equally improbable.

The other fallacy in all this is that for some reason they imply that taking more faith to believe something is some sort of advantage!

Or maybe they are saying it takes less faith to believe in a myth…that would be totally ridiculous. So its probably what they mean.

Once a former skeptic of the Christian faith, Pastor Frank Harber speaks about the truthfulness of Christianity.

So, does that mean he’s no longer a former skeptic — thus making him a current skeptic of Xianity — or is he now agnostic of skepticism towards Xianity? Religilogic gives me a headache.

———

BTW, melikes Jeff’s comment.

I won’t claim that I was the most religious person. I wasn’t. I didn’t like to pray. I hated church. But this is all well within the range of Christianity. People are diverse; Christians are diverse. I don’t believe in dictating who is truly Christian and who is not. Therefore, I wouldn’t say that I wasn’t ever really a true Christian. However, I would freely admit that I probably wasn’t the same kind of Christian that you are.

If ex-atheists want to use the same tactic, but in the opposite direction, I respect that. If you say you used to be an atheist, I will tentatively accept this claim (honesty is the null-hypothesis). Did you identify yourself as atheist, or is this just a label after the fact? How do you define “atheist”? Do you think you were representative of all atheists? Do you think you were representative of my kind of atheism? Or were you just a living straw man?

My impression is that most alleged ex-atheists were living strawmen. Because they are too focused on depicting atheism as negatively as possible, they have lost any sympathy I might have had with their former atheism. If you insist that as an atheist, you lived a hedonist life and hated God, then you can no longer say, “I was just like you when I was younger.”

In the end, it doesn’t even matter whether ex-atheists are lying about their former atheism. Obviously, they’ve never been in my shoes.

I would very much like to speak to church groups in a genuine discussion, not to challenge people’s beliefs about gods, but to dispel their far more hurtful beliefs about atheists. I think it could really help to reduce strife and tension in our communities. The problem is that while I’m articulate and personable, there isn’t any qualifying criteria for being an “expert atheist” other than writing a best selling book or a successful blog, or being an officer in a large atheist organization. My Master’s degrees are not in atheism, so who the hell am I to represent atheists? We really only have one thing in common for certain.

This echoes the Ray Comfort book title “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist.”

I thought faith was supposed to be a good thing?!

I’ve noted this before, but it seems there is a certain type of believer who uses “faith language” as a knock against others.

Evolutionists are “dogmatic”, “zealous”. Scientists are members of the “high priesthood of materialism”. It seems that for some people, the worst insult they can think of is to call something a religion. It’s a bit self-loathing, don’t you think? Can anyone imagine any atheist taking a dig religion by calling it science?

As in “Oh, that Pope, he’s a regular white-coated biologist!”