I'm a born-again evangelical Christian, with an open mind. I understand why some people don't believe in things unseen. It's hard to grasp something you've never come in contact with. It's like belief in ghosts, really. Some people do not believe because they have never seen or heard one, while others believe because they have. That doesn't make ghosts or God any less real. That's just my opinion. Remember Abigail Freemantle in The Stand?
One of the MCs: I don't believe in God.
AF: That's all right. He believes in you. (paraphrased)
My belief is based on hope and faith that God exists.
This is the kind of clever response that seems to work for people who already share a certain view, but is irritating to those who don't.
This is symptomatic of a problem with insular groups.
By way of example, yesterday around lunchtime a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses came by. They followed their standard pattern of starting with some general topic (in this case death) and proceeded to try to do their classic argument method:
Step 1: Are you concerned about general topic X?
They presume that they will get the answer Yes.
Step 2: Dump a vast number of answers very specific to their views as if the highly general question led directly to the narrow views of their particular orthodoxy.
I intercepted the process with a warning: "I don't think you want to have this discussion with an atheist."
The speaker went on, clearly following what he had been taught about atheists, asking when I had become an atheist.
I explained to him that while some atheists began as theists who were disillusioned, not all of us are.
He tried to go on with the idea that the divine is visible in nature.
I pointed out that most of human awareness is full of error, that we don't understand what we are seeing by just seeing it, and therefore conclusions drawn from such observations are likely to be naive and erroneous.
I also pointed out that different people benefit from different spiritual and philosophical practices, so it seems absurd to me that a god who created everyone would also create only a single path of help for those people.
He clearly didn't have a direction to go from there and thanked me for talking to them before leaving.
I very much doubt that there will be any error correction on their views of atheists or the quality of their arguments. They will simply keep trying the same thing and anyone it works on will be seen as a success while others will simply be written off.
The clever dismissiveness of the quote given above is also embodied in what is probably the worst parable in the entire Christian Bible: The parable of the sower.
Here's the NIV version (just because it came up first in the google search).
A farmer went out to sow his seed. [SUP]4 [/SUP]As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. [SUP]5 [/SUP]Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. [SUP]6 [/SUP]But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. [SUP]7 [/SUP]Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. [SUP]8 [/SUP]Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. [SUP]9 [/SUP]Whoever has ears, let them hear.”
This parable preaches bad teaching and justifies it with bad farming.
A good farmer won't just toss seeds indiscriminately without regard for what the land would grow or what a good use for the land is.
A good farmer won't try to grow a monocrop on the assumption that people only need one thing.
A good farmer wouldn't sneer at the land as being bad land because they can't grow that one particular crop on it.
Similarly, a bad teacher will argue (as one of my children's teachers did years ago) that their job is to teach the curriculum.
A good teacher teaches the students.
A bad teacher sneers at students who don't learn.
A good teacher tries to find a way to teach what the student needs to learn.