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Why Believe in Jesus?

Debate Unlimited: Bigger Than Jesus!

I've never met one, really. By that I mean people I have known to be real atheists with a coherent set of beliefs who later swallow the Christian message. I've never met one and I have never come across any evidence of the phenomenon in print. Of course there are countless examples of Christian authors (authors who sell to Christians on the basis of being aggressively Christian) who claim they once were atheists or even had set out to prove Christianity wrong, but they mysteriously have left not one word in the public domain from that mythical time of their own atheism. The best that can be seen is a bit of early journalism that doesn't betray much evidence of belief one way or another. There are precisely zero famously atheist people who are now famously Christian.

I know hundreds of atheists. There are dozens of them who I know are very clear about their beliefs and have a clear and coherent philosophy which does not include any room for superstition or belief in religion. None of these people has become a Christian. Of course there are millions of people who are atheists who don't make a big deal of it, don't write about their beliefs and don't expose them to scrutiny. This is the well out of which the “ex-atheists” emerge. When they proclaim their new religion, whatever it is, they want to make their conversion story sound good so they tell a big tale about being an atheist, why should we doubt their former doubt? Well, there are many different ways a person can be an atheist and nobody worries too much about orthodoxy or heresy. I've corresponded with very many people who claim to be atheists but who have a very mixed up set of ideas, if a few of them “get Jesus” I'm not going to be in the slightest bit affected, they never were coherent atheists, they never expressed an understanding of why there is no god, just an idea that they didn't believe the religions they knew about.

The mention that somebody who is now famous only for being the author of a book or books bought by Christians claims he used to be an atheist is not in the least bit impressive to me. They would say that, wouldn't they? “I'm a Christian, I've always been a Christian and here's my book about what I believe” — it's not very impressive is it? Neither is it very impressive to say I used to call myself an atheist sometimes, but really I was just not that bothered with religion and more recently I've been converted to Christianity and started to read up about it, and my publisher thought it would be a good angle to say I'm an ex-atheist and the book is the explanation for my change of heart...

If Richard Dawkins wrote a book about why he had converted to Christianity then I'd be shocked and I would want to know the details. Richard Dawkins is a famous atheist. There are no famous atheists who are now Christians. None. There are a few dozen famous Christians who were not famous when they claim they were atheists. Big bloody deal.

Don't give me any more accounts of these people who claim they used to be atheists. I know lots of atheists. They stay atheist.

If people tell you that they used to be an atheist you should tell them that they couldn't have been very good at it.

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Lee Strobel's Nonsensical Case for Christ

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