Building (and stoning) the Straw Atheist

I've been doing some reading over at Stone The Preacher, and despite my earlier comments I rather like the place. For one thing, the fellow who runs it ("Pastor Steve") has a working sense of humor and the ability to listen - though naturally he doesn't always agree with what his commenters tell him. He also tries to be aware of how his attempts at evangelism are received by others, and moderate his behavior accordingly. This is unusual, to say the least, for anyone who makes a habit of standing around in public places and handing out Bible tracts.

So while I obviously don't agree with everything he's doing, I don't feel any real need to criticize him, either...

...Except when he starts talking about atheists. Which, unfortunately, he apparently does every Tuesday. And when he starts generalizing, the atheists he talks about bear no resemblance to myself or any other unbeliever I've ever met. I'm not the first to point this out - a respectable number of people have commented, rebutted, corrected, and disputed in the comments on the site. Pastor Steve does allow such dissent, but so far his ideas about what atheists are like completely trump any and all testimony to the contrary.

They're some pretty odd ideas[1], too. Some examples:

• Atheists live "meaningless, purposeless lives." (source) Generally, we don't - not in any greater percentages than believers do.
• "The atheist’s great hope is that God is not real, Jesus is still dead in the grave and that the resurrection never happened." (source) I don't know any atheists who would describe that as a "hope." Maybe a "conclusion," but not a "hope."
• "[Faith] is a problem for the atheist. They want proof that God exists first." (source) Well, yes, but as a general rule unbelievers don't consider that a "problem." Most of us consider that "common sense."

These misrepresentations would actually make a (dishonest) sort of sense if Pastor Steve's goal were explicitly to reassure Christians that atheists live drab, wretched, miserable lives. And that may be partly the case, but he also seems to intend these Atheist Tuesday posts as a sort of evangelism to atheists, an attempt to "convict"[2] us of the Truth of God's Word. That being the case, I'm forced to assume that he really thinks atheists are like that.

This persistent mischaracterization makes the Atheist Tuesday posts very odd things to read. No, more than odd - it's weirdly disorienting. Imagine listening to someone tell a story in which the main character has your name... only that character's experiences are not your experiences, and the character behaves nothing like you do. So you're listening to this person talk, and he seems to be talking about you, only the you he's talking about is nothing like the real you. Reading these posts has that same surreal quality.

I've heard this explained as projection - that, basically, the people who do this simply fail to realize that atheists don't think like they do, so they project their own motivations and behaviors onto atheists. A commenter called Nohm described it as "failed mind-reading", which certainly captures the feel of it - an attempt at empathy that just can't make the jump to accurately imagine how atheism looks from the inside. Mainly, though, I think it's a consequence of relying on the map to the exclusion of looking at the terrain (a subject I've mentioned before).

At the risk of grossly oversimplifying: for a certain sort of Christian, the very existence of atheists - of people who have heard the Gospel but do not believe it - presents a theological problem. That problem can be summed up as a question: if the Bible is the Word of God, how can anyone not believe it? So, having encountered a theological problem, where do these believers look for an explanation? The Bible, obviously.

The Bible does indeed offer some explanations for why people don't believe the Gospel. These are, basically, that unbelievers hate God; that because they don't have faith, or aren't part of the flock, they can't understand God's truth; that they want to avoid God's judgement; that they are fools.[3]

Unbelievers also offer explanations for why they don't believe. These tend to focus on things like lack of evidence; the varied and contradictory beliefs of the many Christian sects and denominations; and the dubious morality displayed by the Almighty, particularly in the Old Testament.

You'll note that there isn't a lot of common ground between the explanations offered in the Bible, and the explanations offered by unbelievers. This is where the map-versus-terrain issue comes in.

Basically, for the sort of Christian who assumes that the Bible has all the answers, the explanations offered by nonbelievers cannot be true. The Bible says that unbelievers are in rebellion against God, therefore unbelievers must be in rebellion against God. Actual, legitimate disbelief (or even doubt) is simply impossible. Atheists are therefore either lying or mistaken when they talk about their motivations, experiences, and conclusions. Q.E.D.

It's an answer every bit as simple and elegant as it is wrong.[4] Not surprisingly, it's also wholly unconvincing to atheists, as it completely fails to match our experiences, motivations, and conclusions. But I think that's where a lot of this failed mind-reading comes from: people who believe that atheists must be a certain way because they believe that the Bible says atheists must be a certain way. Trying to follow the map without stopping to observe the terrain.

Obviously, if you don't assume that the Bible has all the answers, this is much less of a problem. Most of the statements about unbelievers were written at a time when Christians were a tiny minority living in a predominantly polytheistic culture, and the rest were written in a relatively small nation of monotheists at a time when most (or all? I'm not sure) of the surrounding nations were polytheistic. So it's entirely possible that the modern form of atheism (with its disbelief in any gods and generally in anything supernatural as well) simply isn't addressed in the Bible - after all, it wouldn't have made any sense to the people who were writing it all down.

Those are my theories, anyway. What do you think?

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[1] If you're watching the dates on those articles, you'll notice that I'm cherry-picking a bit. I'm picking out the things he claims explicitly, rather than taking the time to break down some of the more subtle (but equally misguided) implications in other posts.

[2] "Convict" is a particularly strange bit of Evangelical-speak, and I'm still not entirely sure that I understand how they mean it. It certainly isn't used in the "to prove guilty, especially after a legal trial" sense, though about half the time it seems to be used in the sense of "to impress with a sense of guilt." The other half of the time, it seems get used as a cool (though incorrect) way to say "convince."

[3] There are probably others that I'm missing, but these are the ones I've run into. Also, I'm entirely too lazy to look up the references that are the source of these explanations.

[4] Though if you're the sort of person who believes that, then I'm never going to convince you - because clearly I'm either lying or deluded. And in that case, there's really no point in evangelizing to me, is there? Or talking to me at all, really.