What I Learned about Atheists from “God is Not Dead”

Godless in Dixie

I haven’t seen the movie. Some of my Christian friends have recommended it to me. I’ve been resistant because I fear it either is or comes off to my atheist friends exactly what this article says. Creating a wooden straw person and the caricatures run both ways.

I’ll take the main points of his post and see if they also play the other way:

Christians are such a pitiful, deluded bunch

Interesting that Atheists are usually described as miserable and Christians as foolish, but happy in their delusions.

  1.  Christian pastors (we erroneously assume Christians aren’t university professors) are predatory, they are out to convert everyone into ideological clones of themselves. This is probably more true of Christian pastors than atheist university professors.
  2. Christians are selfish, self-absorbed, greedy jerks
  3. Christians are cocky, self-sure, and totally enamored with their own superiority.
  4. Christians will openly threaten you,
  5. Christians are incapable of love: They just want to force you to live by their archaic rules.
  6. Christians lack ethical boundaries but are instead abject hypocrites who can’t often even live by their own rules. This is true of course, but true of humans, not just Christians.
  7. Christians believe in God because something good happened to them or they are just mindless dupes who still believe a loving father or mother.
  8. Can’t say Christians are angry at God, maybe they’re angry at other gods or someone’s lack of belief. I know many Christians who are angry at God, and also some former Christians. If you’re angry at God and stick with belief you’ve got a complicated relationship, which is normal. If you’re angry at people who believe in God, well, anger is usually our own issue anyway.
  9. Christians are miserable because they live for stupid, archaic rules that are based on myths and superstitions rather than reason and science.
  10. Christians have no basis for belief they just act out of mindless superstition and unquestioned or unchallenged ideas passed on to them by their equally gullible parents.
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About PaulVK

Husband, Father of 5, Pastor
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1 Response to What I Learned about Atheists from “God is Not Dead”

  1. Josh's avatar Josh says:

    Just read this because it was posted by an old classmate of mine who left a conservative evangelical college to teach at a more moderate Catholic university due to their feeling ostracized by their beliefs (and because she was a Democrat, but I’m not holding that against them). One issue I have with God’s Not Dead (and I have many many many issues with it) is how they treat Atheists as the author of the article describes. So many evangelical Christians treat higher education, academia, and atheists as judgmental and anti-Christian. What bothers me is that this not only paints Atheists in a bad light, it paints Christians in an even worse light to Atheists, agnostics, etc. It should not be in any way be used as an evangelistic film what so ever (same with the Left Behind movies and Heaven is for Real). A large number of these films do a disservice to the kingdom of God than advance it.

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