Christian Apologist Says Church is Producing Atheists

effeminatefonzie »

Thu Aug 02, 2007 5:20 pm Agree: 0   Disagree: 0

I assume laforte that you are directing comments generally and not responding to my comment. I need no justification because my faith is not in question. I don't know that your comments would answer the needs of a young person questioning the faith they were raised in. Indeed, they might find your witness disingenuous if only because it seems to respond to theoretical questions merely by attempting to silence them. For questioning teens, this may seem less like an example of faithful witness and more like a rhetorical tactic. In any event, I'm quite sure that while your points might prove successful in quieting the urge of Christians who look for proof of God by expecting the miraculous, they would do little for an atheist who is unchurched and unschooled in not only the scripture you cite, but the fundamental truths you feel that reveal.

Christian Apologist Says Church is Producing Atheists

effeminatefonzie »

Thu Aug 02, 2007 5:01 pm Agree: 1   Disagree: 0

It appears to me when reading these comments that this article may be on to something. In my reading of the article, the claim was simply that the inability to create convincing theodicies (apologies that situate a just God along with the existing suffering), explain Biblical inerrancy to a cynical age as well as account for belief in extraordinary events like the Resurrection, may account for why some of the churched become atheists and the unchurched remain so. While wielding Biblical citations as weapons may be personally gratifying, it doesn't appear to respond to the claim raised in the text and hoping for a gathering unto God may be predicted in Scripture, but relying on that prediction exclusively would seem to me to create precisely the environment of one-sided justification that the article is convinved currently exists.