Why It’s So Tricky for Atheists to Debate with Believers

Is it? Watch Christopher Hitchens debate any believer, and you tell me. It's only percieved as tricky by those wishing to elevate common coincidences to something meaningful.

you can't debate believers in any real sense,
they just start spouting slogans and poems like they are rock solid facts

Do people really believe in all of the things they say they believe in? Or are they just too frightened to admit that deep down they really don't believe in these things at all? Look at human history for the last two thousands years. Look at the way human beings have behaved toward each other. Would people who really believed in an eternal hell behave the way they have done and the way that they still do? Would people who really feared being called up before an all powerful god to answer for their actions still believe in war, still practice greed, jealousy, and hate. If people really believed in hell and facing their maker, would we have had slavery and genocide? I have always believed that people adhere to religions for two reasons. To hid behind and use it to promote all of the little biases running around in their head. The other reason is fear. People fear the idea of not believing, so they believe. And what they fear more than anything, of course, is the idea that there is nothing after death, that death is a cold, dark end. Reality is just too frightening for them, so they dream up a fantasy. But do they really believe in it? Or do they just say they do?

Nonsense (not to mention completely limited to a christian/islamic perception of religion).

You might as well say the complete opposite. If you're coming from a non-religious perspective, every person is fundamentally worthless except for what they can take over and control, and therefore killing them only means they weren't the fittest and didn't deserve to survive or whatever. Anyone who disagrees deserves to be eliminated. Coming from a Religious point of view, every person is a product of said supreme being and therefore everyone should be treated with a basic morality of kindness.

It's all crap. Most of what Athiests are really complaining about have nothing to do with religion, but all about politics. If it's not fighting over God (and most of the time it isn't honestly, just someone's political leanings) it's over something else (based on whatever you find uncomfortable about the next guy, maybe he's a Republican, maybe he's a Neo-Nazi voting socialist). Atheism doesn't solve anything, it just pretends that religion is the only issue.

The existence of some god is irrelevant to their being a secular state
Pay no attention to religious humbuggery

• vicious circles of religious irrationality eventually end in repression and violence

It is ludicrous to read those who discourse in absolutes on behalf of some religion. What happens when their “absolutes” don't bow down to yours? Do you use your text to justify its own contents? Of course you do. Must you thump harder on your fictional screeds, allegedly revealed by some god? Of course you must.

Vicious (logical) circles are a refuge for the refuted. Their religious ideologies dictate the type of interpretive gloss they scribble in the margins of fiction perversely accepted as dictation from supernatural characters.

A doctrine of absolutes, unchecked by secular authority, leads to repression and violence — very much related to our secular government are the destructive Puritan takeover of power in Britain (1649-1668) and Gibbon’s analysis xianity’s central role in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776).

The Constitution of the United States which is

• the founding document of our secular state does not contain the word “God.”

James Madison, primary author of the Constitution, in 1789 explained its two prescriptive statements about religion:

“. . . Congress should not establish a religion, and enforce the legal observation of it by law, nor compel men to worship God in any Manner contrary to their conscience.” (Source: 1 Annals of Congress 730. August 15, 1789)

These three simple statements are a précis of the anti-establishment doctrine in the first amendment and of Article VI Section 3. That is — The Constitution makes freedom of conscience a necessary condition for unfeigned religious belief to be possible.

• a thought experiment in freedom of conscience you can try alone at home

Exercise your rights to disbelief and to be free from religion. Consider, if you can, the import of any supernatural claim should it be false. First, there would be no supernatural agents, locations, states, or events of any kind whatsoever:

1. No supernatural agents: minds, souls, spirits, ghosts, godlings, gods, God (Allah, YHVH), cosmic soul, absolute.
2. No supernatural locations: hell, purgatory, heaven, buddha realms, moral world order.
3. No supernatural states: the numinous, sin, grace, illumination, nirvana, buddha mind.
4. No supernatural events: mysterium tremendum, redemption, mystical union, karma, or reincarnation.

Second, nothing alters in reality: not the universe, the solar system, the Earth, physical events, psychological events. Humanity’s supernatural hypotheses say nothing about nature — physical nature or psychological nature.

Third, nature itself is neither meaningful nor meaningless. Neither a source of comfort nor a source of despair. Both ideologies are rooted in the same mistaken presupposition that meaning should be found by searching “the starry heavens” for divine agents or by quarrying human inwardness for moral or cosmic “laws”.

Altering Nietzsche: There are altogether no supernatural phenomena, only supernatural interpretations of phenomena. (Compare, Beyond Good and Evil. section 108.)

• religious Ponzi schemes offer nothing but mendacious humbuggery and vampirism

Faith provides no contact with reality — consequently religions, above all the big-3 monster theisms (xianity, islam, judaism) must indoctrinate, lie, punish, bribe, co-opt power. They must feed upon the faithful — sucking money, time, psychological energy, and life itself — to enrich their institutions and to establish their irrational ideological agendas as theocratic dominions enforced by thuggery, violence, and warfare. (Just as the “C” Street Family seeks to do in Uganda, and later here in a theocracy, call it “Ameristan.”)

Religions’ sacred Ponzi schemes cannot be tolerated. Their defrauded dead investors are numbered in millions; their fraudulent tax-free take in billions. Their ideologies are inimical to constitutional secular democracy and to an open society — dismissive of human life, freedom of conscience, and freedom of thought.

The de-deification of western culture (including the sciences) is our task for the next 100 years. We owe it to James Madison.

the anti_supernaturalist

I think that most atheists are the way they are because they have not yet had the true three-fisted words of Bob revealed to them yet. Why not begin your enlightenment today and learn the power of slack? Best of all, you get eternal salvation for a mere $30 or triple your money back! So, what are you waiting for? Are ya pink or are ya Yeti?

The extremists are too entrenched to do anything but howl and wave sticks. I’m not moving one inch, as the argument left unheard cannot convince. So my sticks gonna be a waving.

Yes, that is a very close minded philosophy, especially for the purportedly open minded Atheist. Theres my lampshade on it.

When you are agrue with an idiot you run the risk of taking yourself down to their level.