I think, actually, [Richard Dawkins is] a pre-Christian atheist, because he never understood what Christianity is about in the first place! That would be rather like Madonna calling herself post-Marxist. You’d have to read him first to be post-him. As I’ve said before, I think that Dawkins in particular makes such crass mistakes about the kind of claims that Christianity is making. A lot of the time, he’s either banging at an open door or he’s shooting at a straw target.
Terry Eagleton (via Halden)
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But before we feel smug. Let's allow him (and others) to critique a knee-jerk theism that too often passes for Christian apologetics:
[Conservative Evangelicals] despise Richard Dawkins while actually believing in the kind of God he rightly rejects, as if the existence of God were, in principle, demonstrable, as if the proposition “God exists” were a hypothesis to be affirmed or denied, as if God were simply the hugest of individuals.
Kim Fabricius (I object to his other points, but this one has a lot of truth to it).
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Dawkins himself says that all he does is stretch his disbelief one God further than the Christians.
Which is absolutely right. Both Dawkins and the Christian reject Thor and Vishnu and the Flying Spaghetti Monster and any other super-being you care to imagine. The task of the Christian apologist is not to establish a deity but to proclaim the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
As Mike Reeves recommends - the question for the atheist is 'Which God don't you believe in?'
And once they've described it, the response to have ready is 'I don't believe in that either, let me tell you about the cross.'
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