Carpet Bombing Arguments
A popular Christian strategy for winning converts is basically to see how any arguments they can bombard you with in as little time as possible. The idea is to carpet bomb their mark with lots of arguments with the hope that at least one of them will resonate with their mark.
On the off chance that these Christians get a well informed atheist, then they demand full answers to each of these arguments and turn each one into a fight. The thing is that these arguments are usually old arguments that we have all heard a million times. They range from the First Cause Argument, to the Moral Argument, to Pascal’s Wager, etc.
Sure, I can sit with a Christian all day long knocking down each of these arguments in turn, but at the end of the line they always fall back to faith anyway. My strategy is to point them in the direction for them to find the answers to these arguments on their own using the interwebs. I don’t even have to send them to an atheist website usually. Although, I have gone through a lot of trouble of debunking most of these arguments right here on Dangerous Talk and on my Examiner page in the Atheism 101 series. So I sometimes send them there first. But if they want a non-atheist site, I just send them to good old Wikipedia.
One idea I had was to create a short list of one or two line answers and to carpet bomb these types of Christians with the answers before they even ask the questions. I haven’t tried that yet but I will probably work on that list soon. If anyone has any short and pithy answers to the standard Christian questions, let me know.
Filed under: Argument by Design, atheism, conversation, culture war, discussion, First Cause Argument, god of the gaps, ignorance, Ontological Argument, prophecies, Religion, Religious Manipulation
