5.24.2010

Christian Congratulates A Fellow Believer For Ignoring Christ

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I try to read up on what non atheists are saying about atheists, and a lot of the time I find some really cool blogs and comments and the like, written by people who are at least trying to make sense of the atheist point of view. I should spend some time focused on them, but I found this crazy book review and felt like I just had to share it. The reviewer really hits the ground running with the characterization of atheists as some kind of malevolent, possibly military force coming to rape the minds of the Facebook generation!!

Thank their god they have some lady who isn't afraid to tell Jesus to grow a pair and stop turning the other cheek like a pussy.

The new atheists are on the march. They’re in bookstores. They’re on television. They’re everywhere.

Chilling! We sound super scary!

But nowhere is their effect being felt more than on college campuses and by young people. So invasive is the new atheist movement that in many ways their outlook has become the default mainstream culture.
I don't know how I feel about someone who sees a widely accepted point of view as invasive simply because it's becoming recognized by the younger generations. Isn't that pretty standard social progress? I'd say 'social evolution' but I know how scary the 'E' word is for some religious people.

For too long Christians have been a punch line for militant secularists.
The 'militant atheist' meme has been done to death, hasn't it? What constitutes militant behavior Expressing a point of view? Standing up for equal rights and representation?

It’s time somebody punched back. And Mary Eberstadt’s new book “The Loser Letters” is an unexpected roundhouse to the new atheist movement. I read it last week and urge you to pick it up. (You can click on amazon.com)

“Christians are always at a moral disadvantage because we’re told to turn the other cheek,” said Eberstadt. “So there’s been a lot of playing defense. I’m trying to go on offense.”

Yeah! Damn that Jesus wuss for his lame ass pacifist position! Why were we listening to that huggy hippie in the first place? Oh, wait...
She calls her book “apologetics for the Facebook generation.” And they need it.
The term 'apologetics' and the fact that some religious people feel completely comfortable using the term has baffled me for a while. In fact, when I was first looking into religion and ran across this term, I thought it was an insult until I noticed that it was a term religious people proudly used to label their way of explaining away the crazy and often glaringly obvious fallacies and inconsistencies in their religions. Did they 'take it back' or something?

Anyway, the book the guy is reviewing looks like a lame recycling of the same arguments we've been hearing for years, dressed up in (what must pass for clever in the religious circles) satire. I didn't really pay much attention to the rest of the review, I just thought the beginning was so ridiculous, it was worth repeating for the sake of a giggle. I did go to amazon.com and read the pages available with the 'look inside' feature, which was enough for me to both get the joke and find myself utterly unimpressed.

You go, Christian apologists. Though I hardly see how encouraging one another to proudly shuffle off your Christian values is going to help you make a case for Christianity.