The Theist’s Guide to Converting Atheists
What would convince an atheist that a religion is true?
In several years of debating atheism and theism, I have made an observation. Ask any believer what would convince him he was mistaken and persuade him to leave his religion and become an atheist, and if you get a response, it will almost invariably be, “Nothing – I have faith in my god.” Although such people may well exist, I personally have yet to meet a theist who would acknowledge even the possibility that his belief was in error. Many theists, by their own admission, structure their beliefs so that no evidence could possibly disprove them. In short, they are closed-minded, and have been taught to be closed-minded. (For more on this, see “Thoughts in Captivity“.)
In light of this, it is ironic that atheists are often accused of being the closed-minded ones. Fundamentalist proselytizers very frequently claim that we are hard-hearted, that we are dogmatic and irrational, that we reject God based on preconceived bias, and so on. Such claims result from psychological projection. Incapable of coping with the fact that there are some people who genuinely do not believe in their god, these theists simply deny that such people exist, and instead insist that everyone thinks the same way they do. Therefore, people who reach different conclusions than them must have some secret ulterior motive for not believing. This is truly ridiculous, but unfortunately, some people really believe it.
Thus, in the spirit of proving that atheists’ minds are not closed, I’ve assembled below a list of everything I can think of that I would accept as proof that a given religion is true. Also included are things that I would accept as circumstantial evidence of a particular religion’s truth and things that would not be acceptable to me as proof of anything. While I do not claim to speak for all atheists, I would confidently say that any religion that could produce one of the things from the first list would probably gain a great number of converts.
Thursday July 12th, 2007 @ 9:30am
I have no plans on “converting” any atheist. Only God can do that.
But to answer the question of what would make me “convert”. When I die and find that I am just dead and nothing else (how would I know anyway?) – then I’ll have no choice to but accept that there is no Christian God.
OR; If science one day finds undeniable evidence that Jesus was a total and complete centuries old farce. (Which we all know will never happen.)
Just like atheists tend to think we Christians ignore evidence, atheists tend to ignore document after document that talks about Jesus or worse– They say someone made it all up to “control” people. I’d hate to see what would happen if we all ignored documents about other people in history… I fear NOBODY would have existed before video cameras.
Hell, using that logic; I don’t believe in Christopher Columbus. We don’t know for sure where he was born, what he looked like, where his famous ships are and we don’t even know where he’s buried. We don’t even know what the ships looked like! There are NO contemporary documents, ship logs, NOTHING but a few shreds of evidence from close witnesses. (sound familiar?) Isn’t that odd that he’s taught as fact based on this? I say we ban Columbus from school based on atheist thinking. Come on atheists, I know you’re with me!
So maybe, lets just have fun debating until we all die? :) Because we’re obviously stuck living here with each other.
Monday November 8th, 2010 @ 6:03pm
At least the idea of someone discovering a new land mass is more believable than someone turning water into wine.
Sunday August 5th, 2007 @ 10:15pm
Jesus was a charlatan; he had a lot of charisma, and told the people what they wanted to hear. His death, and thus, revival was staged. He was a god damned street magician, who managed to pull off a Hubbard [see:Scientology] long before Hubbard was around.
Wednesday August 15th, 2007 @ 3:26am
Apparently, on this website, god does exist and he’s an idiot…
Thursday January 10th, 2008 @ 4:04am
um…there is a bunch of columbus’ logs known to many historians