In a recent thread Stathei has been asserting all sorts of things that I believe that he believes are self-evidently ridiculous on their face...   He sums it up in this remark:

"Considering your "rationales" include that the Earth is 4,000 years old (supported in part by tales of dragons as evidence that man and dinosaur coexisted), Satan is a living being, and Jesus was able to walk on water but unable to say anything that was unknown to the average man in the street, I feel pretty confident dismissing them."

He also asserts that he came to my forum looking to give Christianity one more shot (which apparently I blew for him heh), which I find to be frankly unbelievable, providing he actually had a sense of what Christianity was.... A Christianity where Satan is not a living being, where Jesus is not able to walk on water, Jesus is not risen from the dead (the resurrection being another thing he has elsewhere asserted is ridiculous on its face) is not much of a Christianity.  Well, a Christianity without a resurrection is certainly no Christianity at all.  Keep his litany above in mind for a minute.

I think his real sticking point out of all of that is chiefly about my young-earth creationism.  For the reference, I have gone on the record on the relationship between YEC and Christianity as I see it here:  http://sntjohnny.com/smf/index.php/topic,2231.0.html Which can be summed up here:

"Now, I happen to agree that one could be a Christian, and even an orthodox Christian, if you believed in a full blooded macroevolutionary POV, as Collins does.   As Collins points out, creationism is largely derived from just a few chapters from just one of the books in the collection called the 'Bible.' "  ...

"The truth is that while I believe that YEC is the correct account of things, I do not think it forms the bedrock for Christianity.  The Resurrection does.  Careful and fair readers of this forum will recognize that I have never suggested anything else other than this."

Now, presuming that Stathei really did come to this forum seeking an examination of Christianity, even a smidgen of research on his own would have realized that there are plenty of Christians who have found a way to incorporate the macroevolutionary account of the universe into their more or less orthodox Christianity.  It is irrelevant that this raises its own issues, the point is that these are out there, and a reasonable Stathei could have found them.

The book I mention in that thread by Francis Collins is one example.  I could mention Hugh Ross, as well... see http://www.reasons.org/.

So if it specifically is an issue that centers on a view of the creation versus evolution, then the reasonably informed atheist ought to know that you can't measure the veracity of Christianity on that issue.

But we turn briefly to Stathei's litany above... what is 'preposterous' is not merely a belief in a young earth, but the whole scope of what Christianity is all about... the incarnation, the miracles, the death, the resurrection.   If these are all false on their face, then in fact there is no place Stathei could have gone and given 'Christianity a last chance' because the only Christianity he would have considered as not preposterous on its face is one completely devoid of Christian content to begin with.

So, I thank Stathei for the opportunity to once again point out my position on this as well as for his forthrightness in revealing that it is not just one issue within Christianity he finds to be insane but really the whole package.  I don't think Stath is the representative atheist, but I do think they all share in common the belief that naturalism is self-evidently true... which is the primary reason why arguments for theism fail... not because they are incoherent, but because the atheists don't need to know WHY the arguments fail... they know it.

Their perplexity arises as to how it could possibly be that others don't have the same self-evident intuition....

In conclusion, I submit that any honest atheist that investigates Christianity will recognize that there are a buttload of Christians who have accomodated the macroevolutionary POV, so if that really is the central issue, they won't let that stand in the way of their investigation into Christianity, coloring the whole debate.