So, here we go again. A theist showed up on r/AskanAtheist and wanted to know why atheists were so incapable of impressing him, as a Protestant Christian, based on Dawkins’ The God Delusion. So we tried to help him out and that’s when absolutely everything went completely wrong.This isn’t a new story, of course, because this happens all the time. Theists with really horrible misconceptions show up, thinking that we’re just like they are and figuring that if Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris says a thing, all atheists must fall into lockstep behind it. That’s hardly a surprise because a lot of theists, perhaps most of them, think that atheism is just another religion and it acts exactly the same way as theirs, even if that’s totally wrong.

So the first thing that was pointed out, kindly, was that Dawkins was speaking only for Dawkins. He isn’t the spokesman for atheists everywhere, or, for that matter, for anyone, anywhere. That went over largely like a lead balloon because he just couldn’t get it. So we asked specifically what he was having problems with and he came up with an example that Dawkins, in the first chapter, said he won’t misrepresent God as a caricature, then, according to our theist, he starts out the second chapter describing God as someone who likes the smell of burning flesh. Well sorry, have you not read your own Bible?  Both Genesis 8 and Exodus 29 say that God enjoys the smell of burning animal flesh. It’s in your own book!

Of course, that wasn’t emotionally comforting, even when dragged by the hand to the specific passages, he wouldn’t admit they existed. So I jumped in and asked him what else God could be but a caricature. After all, there’s no way for Christians to objectively tell what God is actually like. They can’t show that God is actually real. Thus, it’s just a bunch of characteristics that ancient peoples invented in their heads and blew out of proportion to give themselves something to bow down to. That’s a caricature by definition.

From there, it just devolved into absurdity. He said Christians had lots of evidence for God. “Present some,” I requested. I mean, if they actually have evidence, it should be painfully easy to just type it in, or at the very least, to link to it. Nope. He’s got nothing. He just won’t admit that he has nothing, he keeps claiming that he can prove God is real, he just chooses not to.

He also starts getting upset at this point. We’re being mean to him because he’s refusing to answer direct, specific questions about his theology. We need to treat him with respect. No we don’t. He hasn’t earned it. Just because he feels a strong emotional attachment to his beliefs, that doesn’t mean we ought to, nor that we ought to stop asking him very basic questions or making entirely justified requests. He keeps getting more and more mad and screaming about how mean we are and we just keep on pointing out every single failure he’s made.

Let’s face it, these people are nothing but failures. This pretty much describes how these conversations tend to go. They get a very skewed perspective of atheism in their heads, we try to correct them and show them why atheism is warranted and they shit themselves trying to get away from the emotional discomfort of being faced with objective reality.

My YouTube channel is stuffed full of this kind of stuff and for the very few theists who are brave enough to venture out of their safe spaces and actually address us directly, it only takes a few rounds of back-and-forth before they scream, shout insults and run back to their flock. They can’t take the idea that we’re not just like they are and that we have good reasons to doubt their blind faith. They just don’t care. Not one bit and that’s a problem.

Too bad they can’t see where they go so utterly wrong.