I've often wondered why Christian sites seem to attract so many persistent, foaming at the mouth atheists/agnostics and heretics.
Then I realized although it had been many years in the past, I had once felt much the same way. I had forgotten how and why, when I was young and rejected God, I began truly hating Christians. This guy brings it all home:
MY PHILOSOPHY TURNS ANTI-CHRISTIAN
The worst idiots were the Christians. I hated them because, in their ignorance of naturalism, they failed to see that there was no reason for the rest of the world to believe in their god, live by their standards or give a damn about what they had to say, yet there they were, acting as if they had a copyright on truth. Their pretentiousness sickened me, despite my being equally pretentious toward them. After all, I was justified in my pretentiousness! At least I could give logical reasons for not believing in the supernatural. I would challenge them to give reasons for believing in something that couldn't be seen and they would reply, "You can't see the wind but it's there." I would then try to explain to them that wind was created by differences in pressure and that there was plenty of scientific proof for the existence of wind but none for their god. Even the most intelligent Christians I knew had a difficult time articulating their reason for faith.
Most of the explanations I heard rested on the Bible's authority. "The Bible says... the Bible says... the Bible says." Who cared what the Bible said? I certainly didn't. "It's all a bunch of made up, superstitious baloney. Can't you see?" and I would then go into pagan origins, etc., and try to demonstrate that Jesus was a manufactured myth. I ended up knowing the Bible inside and out just to be able to debate against it.
My anti-Christian arguments became my ultimate diversion to a hopeless life. I learned that religious debate wasn't as much about truth as it was about language and presentation. I began seeing flaws in my own logic while trying to demonstrate certain instances of Biblical errancy, but that didn't keep me on the bench. To justify my desire to destroy Christianity, I had to find reasons to discredit it. I railed against its hypocrisy, the behavior of its followers, the wars fought in its name and I questioned the motives of its bloody god and the religion's effective outcome. In short, I began seeing it as the supreme evil, despite the fact that my own view of moral relativism did not permit a logical defense of the concept of evil... (A.S.A. Jones, link below)
He goes on to explain how reading Jabberwocky in Through the Looking Glass paved the way for a new understanding of the Bible
The rest is here:
http://www.ex-atheist.com/from-skepticism-to-worship.html
Especially of interest to me were other pages on his site regarding debate. A link to one of his ("Hired Gun") actual online debates is here:
http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/showt ... hp?t=17450