What is the best possible approach a missionary could take on an atheist website?

[Drich]

D Rich - you wrote a book of quotes.  I didn't read it.  Because I don't consider you worth reading.

Got it?

So sad, he is like a cantankerous imbecile with Turrets syndrome.  You feel sorry for the Turrets and rationalize that as an imbecile he may not be entirely responsible.  But then the cantankerous hits you like a wall of words and you think, ahh fuck him.

"He" is undefined in your comment...

He= Your mama

[Drich]

[Mark]

D Rich - you wrote a book of quotes.  I didn't read it.  Because I don't consider you worth reading.

Got it?

So sad, he is like a cantankerous imbecile with Turrets syndrome.  You feel sorry for the Turrets and rationalize that as an imbecile he may not be entirely responsible.  But then the cantankerous hits you like a wall of words and you think, ahh fuck him.

"He" is undefined in your comment...

Oh, I was agreeing with you in my own way about the drich.

[Glossophile]

Okay, quick tip: even if you're only looking for respect and civil discourse, saying stuff like this is definitely not the way to do that.  It's a simmering cocktail of disrespect and triteness at which even a fairly even-tempered atheist is quite likely to roll his eyes and groan.

Translation: always leave us an out. Don't force us to honestly look at ourselves.

Actual translation: Do us the courtesy of not claiming to be an authority on what goes on in our heads.  You can't read minds, dude.

pride is apparent like it or not. any time any one of you has an absolute reason they failed that does not include any possiblity of personal error, that is the point of pride i am talking about. if you do not like being called out or having this point of pride identified openly, then say; 'I don't know' when asked about God. Once you presume to know one way or another from an admitted ignorance, anything said can only come from pride.

That's just a straw man of at least my position if not that of most atheists/agnostics.  Many if not most of us acknowledge that we can never be absolutely certain and that there's always at least the slim possibility of error on our parts.  Yet it is not pride to simply move on when the probability of error seems by all indications to be negligible.  If nothing else, it's pragmatism.  If your standard of "knowledge" is the kind of absolute, self-authenticating certainty that only the philosophically naive believe is even possible, then I'll freely say, "I don't know," about God.  This doesn't mean I should live my life and view the world as if his existence were just as likely as his non-existence, because it's just not.

and if it was never about their best? what if it were about seeking god on his terms. terms none of them know as they always assumed if they do a good job God would seek them out. again only pride can say they did enough. only pride says God must react to me this way and when he doesn't he can not exist because i did my best.

If it was never about their best, then what did God ever expect from them, given that he presumably created them knowing that their best efforts would be insufficient and/or ultimately irrelevant?  He could've set more attainable terms.  He could've made his terms clearer.  He could've created more capable and properly disposed mortals who would successfully understand and fulfill his terms in greater proportions.  No matter how you slice it, the ultimate responsibility lies with God, not with us.  We're not the omnipotent ones, after all. 

At no point has God asked for anything more than a mustard seeds' worth of faith placed where He tells you to place it.
That's it.

Many former believers put in much more than a mustard seed's worth of effort, and they did so in what they understood, presumably to the best of their ability, to be the proper place.  Again, it seems to me that the omnipotent creator of the cosmos should really be a better communicator and not expect beings far less powerful than him to pick up his slack.  

this is not a quid pro quo religion.
this is do what i/God says religion.

You heard it here, folks: the tyranny of the Christian god laid bare (well, more so than it usually is, anyway).

which means if you fall short, you chose to quit.
How proudful is that?

There's that presumptuous mind-reading again.  You're not going to win any points with that attitude.

Second of all, in a sense, it begs the question.  The only way it makes sense to just keep seeking God no matter how many times he eludes you is to already assume on some level that he exists.

This only is true if you preclude that God can only come in a form that you are expecting.

I would accept any form that was convincing to me, and as Matt Dillahunty often points out, he should know exactly what that is and have no trouble making it happen, even if it's not anything I could have even conceived of beforehand.  Omniscient and omnipotent, remember?

That said is any other form of research in which we will never ever truly have an answer begging the question?

Why would it be?  If a scientific hypothesis is disproven or at least reliably unsupported by any evidence, it is not a valid defense to just constantly appeal to the increasingly tiny but forever non-zero possibility that researchers just haven't looked hard enough or in the right place yet.  Science would hardly get anywhere if it were!  Technically, there's an infinitesimal possibility that flat-Earthers are right.  That doesn't mean that proceeding with the heliocentric globe model is begging the question or otherwise worthless.

it stands to reason that because only 4% of the world population have come to this conclusion and this 4% is the very definition of proud... it would more than likely fall to their pride as the source of their disbelief.
understand this is not an ad populum argument this is a an identification of a failure to comply to the rules argument. 4% hide behind their hubris often renamed 'science' but can be named anything

That's too bad, 'cause an ad populum argument, fallacy though it is, would still be more respectable than that bald assertion about the 4% all epitomizing pride and science being a mere euphemism for their hubris.  Science as a methodology has been honed over the centuries, and it's the best approach we've yet found for discerning truth from fiction.  If the rules that make it so successful happen to render theism unjustified, to argue that the fault lies with science and not with theism is indeed to beg the question.  You can't pray rockets into space.  

conclusion one is reached as an explanation as to why such a small percentage of the population can not commune with God in one form or another, after a usually brief examination of their efforts..  If the numbers were reversed then a circular reasoning dismissal would be in order.

Okay, I was granting your denial regarding the above for the sake of being a bit cheeky, but you have to know that this is an even more blatant ad populum argument!

This is not how falsifiability works sport. Again this term is limited to the viability of a scientific hypothesis. In a statement being falsifiable has nothing to do with the legitimacy of a idea or statment, but one's ability to simply test the hypothesis.

Whether you like it or not, the proposition that at least one deity exists is a scientific claim, at least theoretically.  Even if we grant for the moment that it's not, you're still missing the point at best.  Falsificationism may find its clearest and most important manifestation in science, but there's a reason it's such a central tenet of the scientific method, and that reason can apply in less formally academic settings.

Imagine that we're observing a chess match between two players named Rick and Bill.  Let's say that the game was actually rigged in Bill's favor, so that no possible sequence of moves could ever result in a loss for Bill.  Never mind the logistics.  Just assume for the sake of argument that it can be done.  When Rick eventually loses, as he inevitably must in such a rigged match, what can we conclude about the comparative aptitude of the two players?  The answer: absolutey nothing.  It's entirely possible that Rick was the better player whose superior skill was masked by Bill's cheating.  It's also possible that Bill was the better player who would've won with or without any foul play.  We can't know or even make any reasonably confident guesses one way or the other.

The tired and presumptuous excuse of, "Well, you just didn't seek God hard enough (or in the right way, or in the right place)," is the rigging of the chess match, and it renders us just as incapable of reaching any justifiable conclusions.

you ask by what right does God have to challenge us? again a basic understanding of the term agape' defines this right.
[...]
Agape does not run from pain and suffering. it turns into to it to deflect your loved ones from the storm. If God's son lived this model then why would he not have the authority to ask on a much smaller scale we do the same for those in whom we supposedly loved?

What you're describing is not love.  It's essentially a form of revenge (or ironically, the very "quid pro quo" which you earlier denied), and a very skewed form at that.  No arrangement that has any right to call itself "love" inflicts suffering unnecessarily (with the arguable exception of consenting BDSM), even in the name of reciprocity.  If I willingly suffer a beating in order to defend my children from being likewise abused, that doesn't entitle me to turn around and beat them myself because I think they owe me.  That's not how any flavor of love works, and if you think it is, that's a testament to how your religion has warped your mind.

This is especially true if the beating I took was actually quite gentle by adult standards even if it would feel much harsher for a child.  All that suffering on the cross and in everything that led up to it, excruciating though it may have been by mere human standards, must've been an infinitesimal prick of the skin for the all-powerful creator of the universe.  So God is claiming the right to inflict all manner of pain and misfortune upon his much more vulnerable and sensitive children just because he had what for him amounts to a bad weekend.

love is the key love is the force that spans this world and the next. it is the bifrost itis the bridge, that allows us to carry our essence from this world to the next. So why must we love God? because all of this has played out before [...] Those who seek to spend eternity with God need love him other wise over time say eternity at some point they will turn and rebell.

Again, what God is offering is not love.  It's totalitarianism.  You can call a turd a rose all you want.  It ain't gonna smell any better.

Why do we get all the burden while he's the one with all the power?

that was the shot heard through eternity. that is the very same question lucifer began his angelic rebellion with! You are proving my point answering your own question and you haven't even been there. why is he the master and you the slave? because if you were with Him in heaven, he bought and paid for you with the blood of Christ.

Call me a Satanist then.  It's a badge I'll wear proudly.  Did it ever occur to you that Lucifer, if not the outright good guy in the story, may have at least had a point?  To hear you describe it, he sounds more like the George Washington to God's George III than the ultimate embodiment of evil.

Also, God's supposedly generous gesture of coming down to Earth and paying my debts for me rings really hollow when you realize that he is both the creditor and the guy who created the whole situation in which I would inevitably fall into debt in the first place!  If anything, the passion on the cross could've been a form of reparations.

[skyking]

What is the best possible approach a missionary could take on an atheist website?

engage in conversations without an agenda

[Bucky Ball]

Here, we are a lost cause, so coming here as a missionary is not going to work.
But if they must...

1.  Avoid Walls of Text will large fonts and lots of exclamation points.
2.  Remember, we have all heard it all before.
3. Remember, we value reason and facts.  We don't like God of the gaps, rationalizations, and abandonment of reason.
4. Bible verse quoting means you are on aboard the Bible all the way.  Cherry picking verses, and ignoring verses that contradict your favorite verses will be called out sharply.
5. If you really don't know the atheist arguments about religion, you will read them loud and clear here.  If you just ignore us and plow ahead, you have lost the arguments.
6.  Mere repetition is not an acceptable substitute for measured reasoning.
7.  Merely posting a link to some video is going to get you ignored.
8.  Threats of hell fire and damnation don't work.  It will get you some rough handling if this is all you have to offer.
9.  Many atheists here were Christians in the past.  You are not going to be for the most part, be educating people who have just not heard the words of the Lord.
10.  Most of us have indeed read the bible, and are familiar with it. Some of us in great detail.
11.  Evidence.  Hard evidence.  Evidence talks, foolish claims walk.
12. The Bible is full of nonsense, contradictions, silliness and evil doings of a supposedly perfectly good God.  If hearing about these bothers you, don't come here to argue.  If you don't have good reasons to offer for these things, you are not going to get very far here.
13.  We don't care about the ancient thoughts of St. Dumbass or St. Cowflop of ever so many centuries ago.
14.  Bible verses do not trump the findings of science.
15.  If backed into a corner, all you have to offer is "God is incomprehensible.  His ways are not our ways.  God is inscrutable.", you have lost the debate.  These things are how we know we have won the debate.

But ..... big red letters. They are convincing. The bigger the better. If they write in big red letters, I know they are right. 

big letters are almost always taken from source material that definitely prove your assumptions wrong. and even then only after I have posted the reference material three or four times that definitively proved you wrong, yet you are too dense or proud to see it.

You should look up the term "source material". You don't know what that means, just like you didn't know what "pericope" meant. 
I educated you. Yo never once proven me wrong about anything. 
You're lying as usual. The big red letters are always put there by you.

[Fireball]

What is the best possible approach a missionary could take on an atheist website?

engage in conversations without an agenda

Then they wouldn't be missionaries. Personally, I think that the approach they should take should be to assume a position where the door can hit them in the ass on the way out.

[Bucky Ball]

this is not a quid pro quo religion.
this is do what i/God says religion.

LMAO
Hey dumbshit. 
This is an atheist site, and no one here except you gives a shit about your delusions and your gods.

You claim to be a business person. 
Yet you lack the most basic knowledge of marketing. 
You also have no knowledge about debate. 

There are 33,000 sects of Christianity. 
It's very clear there is no definitive answer to what your god says. 
You, of all people, you the most uneducated idiot of all time that ever posted on atheist sites, are the THE VERY last person anyone would take advice from about what the gods say.

[skyking]

What is the best possible approach a missionary could take on an atheist website?

engage in conversations without an agenda

Then they wouldn't be missionaries. Personally, I think that the approach they should take should be to assume a position where the door can hit them in the ass on the way out.

that was my first post in this thread.

[Fireball]

engage in conversations without an agenda

Then they wouldn't be missionaries. Personally, I think that the approach they should take should be to assume a position where the door can hit them in the ass on the way out.

that was my first post in this thread.

  I'm a slow learner?    Except I didn't have the part about willow switches. Nice touch!

[brewerb]

All of this is making my scrolling finger tired.

[Mark]

All of this is making my scrolling finger tired.

I find the going particularly hard on the scrolling finger when we hit drich bumps.

[Paleophyte]

but if what I say is 100% true, and I am still an ass.. what does that say about your reasons for ignoring God?

I'm not ignoring god. I'm ignoring you. If what you say is true then you have failed to deliver that message by being an ass.

[Bucky Ball]

I'm going to go ahead and let the cat out of the bag.  Sorry guys.  @Drich, you taking notes?  @SteveII, sorry but I don't see you as being able to pull this approach off even if you wanted to - but I don't think you'd want to.

The Christians I respect most are those who respect my position.  So the only ones who can ever get me to care what they think are the ones who genuinely accept that some people simply have other beliefs.   If they admit that there is no argument for the existence of God which can persuade someone who doesn't already find that likely, then I will consider them honest and bright and be more open to what else they have to say.  

Somebody who embodied the approach I'm advocating is @Catholic_Lady.  But there are plenty of Christians in the sciences who take this position.  Some will go so far as to admit they wrestle with faith but are committed to going on wrestling.  If they sense you would really like to go on wrestling they'll be happy to support you but they don't push their own agenda where it isn't welcome.

So @Drich, if you want to win converts.  Be brutally honest with yourself and humble about your beliefs and you'll have them eating out of your hand, provided that what you're handing out is at all tasty.  But so long as you go on pushing your religion on us out of your duty to God .. well, sorry but you can just get bent for all we care.  

@SteveII you couldn't make this work because you're convinced that you yourself are clever enough to prove God's existence both to us and to yourself.  We're never going to agree with you about that, but for what its worth I do believe you honestly think it can be done and that you can figure it out.  That means I think you're honest even if lacking insight.

I bit my tongue long enough. (Haven't read the entire thread). 
The question should be "What is the best possible *position* a missionary could take on an atheist website ?"
One guess.

[Chas]

i wrote a line by line but it was lost some how.

I get the anger.. God help Drich and f-ed KevinM1.

but you like everyone else tend to want to focus on only one part of my life. and then change the narrative to fit some screwed up world view you had to create in order to try and live without God. Example: you completely ignored all of the life threatening things I endured I did so without medical help in my recovery. Asthma, AIDS, Appendix, Cancer, was all resolved by god in some form or fashion

Again health was only a fraction of the total experience. the way my medical issues were resolved were only a small part of the total picture. but I guess because you feel you can trump my medical experiences you have the right to minimize and dismiss everything I attribute to God, because you decided to do it without him. Some how your experience was more real. What if you found out one day you suffered and trugged on not because you had to but because you were to proud to seek out god on his terms?

What part of "This forum was created to foster community between atheists, to provide an outlet for closeted atheists, and to help curious and doubting theists understand what atheism is."
do you not understand?

[SYZ]

...then stay out of my posts... simple right?

For fuck's sake mate!  How many times do we have to tell you?

This is NOT YOUR THREAD.  You're here as a guest of this forum and
its moderators and members.  You don't have any exclusive rights to tell
other people what to do, or "own" the rights to any/all threads.  And you
also don't have any rights to "memberate" either.  In my opinion you're a
disruptive influence within this forum—overly combatitive, patronising, and
repeatedly posting wilfully inflammatory comments, and insulting people.

Your ignorance of all things worldly is embarrassing, but you obviously don't
have the mental acumen to recognise that.  You seem ignorant of the sciences,
and repeatedly cite your ancient holy book, which is reliant solely on fantasy,
fiction, superstition, fear, and pseudoscience.  Due to your limited, blinkered
vision, you really have nothing to offer this forum—it's apparent that you're
not prepared to enter into any other discussion threads other than a couple
of those religiously-based topics you've thus far flooded.

[skyking]

All of this is making my scrolling finger tired.

I find the going particularly hard on the scrolling finger when we hit drich bumps.

the iggy bin has smoothed all that out considerably for me 

[SYZ]

...I wrote a line by line but it was lost some how.

What part of "This forum was created to foster community between atheists, to provide an outlet for closeted atheists, and to help curious and doubting theists understand what atheism is."
do you not understand?

Mate... Drich is too fucking thick to comprehend this, any of it.  He's here solely for two reasons: To
fight with atheists; and to proselytise.  He obviously has zero intent of engaging in any meaningful,
articulate dialogue with any of us. And helping to foster "a community" is the very last intention within
his tiny mind.

[Chas]

...I wrote a line by line but it was lost some how.

What part of "This forum was created to foster community between atheists, to provide an outlet for closeted atheists, and to help curious and doubting theists understand what atheism is."
do you not understand?

Mate... Drich is too fucking thick to comprehend this, any of it.  He's here solely for two reasons: To
fight with atheists; and to proselytise.  He obviously has zero intent of engaging in any meaningful,
articulate dialogue with any of us. And helping to foster "a community" is the very last intention within
his tiny mind.

And yet, he is allowed to stay and fuck the place up.

[Alan V]

pride is apparent like it or not. any time any one of you has an absolute reason they failed that does not include any possiblity of personal error, that is the point of pride i am talking about. if you do not like being called out or having this point of pride identified openly, then say; 'I don't know' when asked about God. Once you presume to know one way or another from an admitted ignorance, anything said can only come from pride.

Speaking of personal errors, religious rationalizations abound with them.  Here is a long list of atheistic arguments you should be familiar with before you debate us again: arguments.

To claim to know God and his intentions seems like the ultimate pride-trip to me. So I think you are projecting more than just a bit.

[Mark]

What part of "This forum was created to foster community between atheists, to provide an outlet for closeted atheists, and to help curious and doubting theists understand what atheism is."
do you not understand?

Mate... Drich is too fucking thick to comprehend this, any of it.  He's here solely for two reasons: To
fight with atheists; and to proselytise.  He obviously has zero intent of engaging in any meaningful,
articulate dialogue with any of us. And helping to foster "a community" is the very last intention within
his tiny mind.

And yet, he is allowed to stay and fuck the place up.

I suppose there is some cache in being open to all comers .. give us your tired, your poor, your socially stunted and cognitively limited morons.  That would be the only reason I can see for keeping him around.  Maybe no one wants to take on the responsibility for making that kind of judgment apart from explicitly disallowed behaviors?

[Chas]

Mate... Drich is too fucking thick to comprehend this, any of it.  He's here solely for two reasons: To
fight with atheists; and to proselytise.  He obviously has zero intent of engaging in any meaningful,
articulate dialogue with any of us. And helping to foster "a community" is the very last intention within
his tiny mind.

And yet, he is allowed to stay and fuck the place up.

I suppose there is some cache in being open to all comers .. give us your tired, your poor, your socially stunted and cognitively limited morons.  That would be the only reason I can see for keeping him around.  Maybe no one wants to take on the responsibility for making that kind of judgment apart from explicitly disallowed behaviors?

Maybe there is, but that does not square with what appears as our mission statement, to wit:

This forum was created to foster community between atheists, to provide an outlet for closeted atheists, and to help curious and doubting theists understand what atheism is.  We are open to all regardless of race, creed, sex, or sexual preference. 

Where exactly do drich, theophilus, SteveII, Link, et al. fit? 

Hint: They don't.

[SYZ]

Mate... Drich is too fucking thick to comprehend this, any of it.  He's here solely for two reasons: To
fight with atheists; and to proselytise.  He obviously has zero intent of engaging in any meaningful,
articulate dialogue with any of us. And helping to foster "a community" is the very last intention within
his tiny mind.

And yet, he is allowed to stay and fuck the place up.

Yes... I'm not quite sure as to why he hasn't been banned by now.  His contributions—such as they are—don't
really comply with the aims of this forum, as far as expanding people's understanding of atheism and providing
a platform for a two-way dialogue between theists and atheists, with meaningful questions and considered
responses from both sides.  It's more than obvious by now that Drich is here simply to spread his subtle form
of proselytising, and to argue belligerently and doggedly with atheists.

A quick count tells me that Drich has made more than 800 posts involving his religion—promoting a strictly one-sided
perspective in his favour, decrying atheism and insulting atheists personally, and promoting via YouTube his own
religious videos.  He also refuses to participate in any other threads across the breadth of the forum, and doesn't
really offer any purposeful or congenial dialogue with other members; it's all about Drich and his religion.  And how
right he is, and how wrong we are.  It's tiresome, offensive, and not worth our time trying to debate meaningfully.

       

[Mark]

And yet, he is allowed to stay and fuck the place up.

I suppose there is some cache in being open to all comers .. give us your tired, your poor, your socially stunted and cognitively limited morons.  That would be the only reason I can see for keeping him around.  Maybe no one wants to take on the responsibility for making that kind of judgment apart from explicitly disallowed behaviors?

Maybe there is, but that does not square with what appears as our mission statement, to wit:

This forum was created to foster community between atheists, to provide an outlet for closeted atheists, and to help curious and doubting theists understand what atheism is.  We are open to all regardless of race, creed, sex, or sexual preference. 

Where exactly do drich, theophilus, SteveII, Link, et al. fit? 

Hint: They don't.

To state ones purpose in creating a website isn't quite the same thing as forbidding people with different purposes from participating for their own purposes.  For some of us a closed group consisting of nothing but the choir would be a bore.  Personally I find drich disingenuous in the extreme as well as uninteresting, to the extent that if the site was my play thing alone I would ban him.  But if I accepted the responsibility for banning on the basis of established principles, I'd need more than this mission statement to go on.

[Dānu]

Reminds me of the old joke about the guy who goes to his doctor and says, "Doc, it hurts when I do this." and the doctor replies, "Well, then don't do that."

If they're keeping to specific threads, and they're on-topic, and they're not pushing themsleves on people, and you have the ignore function, then I don't see what the problem is. Or, I should say that I don't see a problem with them. The people complaining about them, though, may be another matter. If you can't control yourself well enough that you can avoid and/or not interact with these folks, then maybe you should not be on the internet.