1. You become upset when a non-liberal Christian says that not everything in the Bible should be taken literally.
2. You find you have a grudging respect for “fundie” theists for 'sticking to their guns', all the while complaining they don't think for themselves.
3. You dislike how liberal theists try to interpret the Bible for themselves by dismissing history and the cultural / linguistic context of the verses while you create your own interpretations of the Bible for yourself: e.g. (a) Exodus 34 contains a new set of 10 Commandments; (b) Jesus commanded us to slay all His enemies.
4. 'You believe ‘thinking for yourself’' or being a “free thinker” means adopting an atheistic viewpoint.
5. Any scholar who believes in a historical Jesus must be a theist. If they aren’t, then they simply must secretly want to be a theist.
6. You demand that theists explain news items where bad things have happened to theists, even though no theists have claimed that belief in God is some kind of a "lucky charm" that wards off bad ‘luck’.
7. Similarly, you demand that theists explain news items where theists do bad things, even though no theists have claimed that it is impossible for theists to do bad things. (Ignoring the irony that concepts like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are meaningless within a consistent atheistic paradigm.)
8. Just like Richard Dawkins you became an ‘atheist’ before the age of 13, based on watered-down and unbiblical ideas of God that you learned from Sunday School or a relative that never studied the Bible . Your ideas about God & the Bible haven't changed since.
9. You think that the primary aim of an omnibenevolent God is for people to have FUN.
10. You believe that drippy ice-cream is a logical proof against the existence of God, because an omniscient God would know how to stop the ice-cream from being drippy, an omnipotent God would have the ability to stop the ice-cream from being drippy, and an omnibenevolent God wouldn't want your ice-cream to be drippy.
11. If you say "I don't know" you are being brave and honest. When a theist says "I don't know" they are being dishonest and are trying to dodge the question.
12. You love the work of Richard Dawkins but pretend not to be embarrassed by his decidedly dogmatic and vitriolic hostilities towards theists, especially Christians.
13. You have actually calculated, for purposes of "argument by outrage," (logical fallacy) an estimate of the number of people drowned in The Flood (Which at best was only LOCAL…….right?).
14. You can quote from the Bible better than most missionaries...at least the parts where someone dies.
15. The only Commandments you know are the ones that you don’t like.
16. You can't remember if she was Mother or Sister Teresa, but you can name every pedophile priest listed in the media over the last seven years.
17. You label all scholars and scientists that actually believe the Bible as "biased fundies" while those who don't believe it are known as "honest" and "accepted scholarship." (No true scotsman fallacy)
18. When you refer to history to prove Christianity is false (i.e., pagan parallel to Christianity), history is objective truth. When a Christian uses historical scholarship to prove you wrong, history was written by subjective men and therefore cannot be trusted.
19. You believe that when the American forefathers were framing their Constitution, they're staunch deists, but when they're ‘beating’ their slaves, they're Bible-believing Christians.
20. You believe that mockery, name-calling and acidic hyperbole are perfectly legitimate methods to refute Christians who dare to counter you with facts.
21. As a member of the Humanist & Skeptics Society you pride yourself on being skeptical of extraordinary claims. You also pride yourself on silencing and censoring by way of mockery everyone who is skeptical and provides scientific evidence against the extraordinary unproven claims of Darwinian evolution. (And, of course, all the non-Christian scientists who provide solid evidence against Darwinism simply must be labeled as “closet Christian fundies”!)
22. You believe that planes, computers, calculators, compasses, etc, were "all obviously designed," yet the human body, being intricately more complicated and inter-dependant was "obviously a chance product of blind biological evolution." It seems the more complex the apparatus, the more obvious the "fact" that it was not designed.
23. You think that Christianity is a 'virulent memeplex' and that atheism is the 'cure.'
24. You think the American Declaration of Independence is unconstitutional because it mentions "the creator".
25. On, that basis, you think that the Declaration is therefore void and the United States should return to British rule.
26. When it is returned to British rule, you plan to go straight to London and tell those Brits that having the Anglican church as a state church violates the constitutional separation of church and state. (Even though this ‘separation’ isn’t actually in the constitution!)
27. When you watch an Olympic athlete, you marvel at what evolution has done for the human race. But when someone gets cancer, you blame God for it.
28. You dismiss any feasible and logical attempt to harmonise the resurrection accounts by saying "one says A, the other says B, but none say A+B", then go on to offer your own elaborate conspiracy theory of what happened to Jesus' body, describing A+B+C+D+Q, none of which are said ANYWHERE let alone together.
29. You believe the astronomical size of the universe somehow disproves God, as if God needed to create a tiny universe in order to exist.
30. You think that Isaac Asimov was a world-class authority in Biblical Studies.
31. You make a point of referring to Jesus as "Yeshua" and to God as "Yahweh" in order to insinuate that they are no different from Molech or Baal.
32. When you're discussing the origin of the world, the phrase "uncaused cause (God)" is a stupid, meaningless thing to say. You will, however, settle for "uncaused effect” (the world without God).
33. You desperately wish that Stalin and Mao hadn't been atheists.
34. You're saving up to move to some more enlightened place, like Sweden.
35. You think if a Christian doesn’t address your arguments, (to your liking) they are too frightened to do so, or know they can't answer them; but if they do address your arguments, you think it is because they are "threatened" by them.
36. You can gladly believe any number of conflicting philosophical positions, as long as they're atheistic!
37. You feel that separation of church and state is a much more important issue than abortion, euthanasia or infanticide.
38. You think inane, self-contradictory questions like, "Can God create a rock so big that He cannot lift it?", “Who made God?” and, "Can God will Himself out of existence?" are perfect examples of how to disprove God's omnipotence and ultimately how to disprove God Himself. When someone proves to you the false logic behind the questions (e.g. pitting God's omnipotence against itself), you desperately try to defend the questions, but then give up and go to a different Christian to try to stump them.
39. You not only spell "God" with a lower case "g," but you also add an "E" to "B.C.". Yet, when asked to name the planets you have no qualm with spouting out the appropriate list of Roman gods. Heck, you'll even spell them with capital letters!
Not only that, you can even spell and fluently pronounce the name of the 800 mile diameter Trans-Neptunian Object ÔQuaoarÕ, and are delighted to point out that it comes from the creation mythology of the Tongva people.
40. When a Christian's exegesis of a passage (based on the social/literary context) solves one of your favorite Biblical contradictions, it is only their “personal interpretation”, and can be dismissed as such. But your eisegetical interpretation (based on a "plain" reading of an isolated text) to arrive at the ‘contradiction’ in the first place is entirely objective, and is obviously THE correct interpretation.
41. You insist that there is absolutely no difference between fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam and each is as dangerous as the other. When you are shown the very distinct historical, scriptural and doctrinal differences (and the origin and definition of ‘fundamentalist’), you try to subtly change the subject by spouting off a few of your favorite ‘Christian fundamentalist atrocities’. (Red Herring Fallacy)
42. You think that religious wars have killed more people than any other cause, even though the largest wars of history (World War I and II, Chinese & Russian Civil Wars, Vietnam, Korea etc) had no discernable religious causes and could even be correctly described as ATHEISTIC.
43. Similarly, you think that the Spanish Inquisition killed millions (or at least hundreds of thousands), even though the population of all of Spain at the time of the Inquisition was only about five million, and the actual total killed numbers throughout its 500 year duration was only 2000. When informed of this, you accuse the informer of belittling or being insensitive to the deaths of 2000 individuals.
44. You believe that Christians burned down the Great Library of Alexandria. When you learn that this was impossible, you assert that it is obvious that Christians did conspire to burn a lot of ancient books. When you are shown that this too is false, you make the same claim again to another Christian in the hope that they haven’t studied history either.
45. Also, you claim that the hundreds that were executed at the Salem witch trials is a perfect example of the wrongs of ‘fundamentalist’ Christianity, despite the fact that the victims totaled only 16 and it was a Christian by the name of Increase Mather who brought them to an end by showing that what they were doing was unbiblical!
46. You desperately confer with other skeptics to try and refute the considerable evidence that Hitler's Holocaust was evolution inspired, because, darn it, you just GOTTA prove that Hitler was a Christian "conveniently" ignoring the very obvious distinction between someone claiming to be a Christian and someone actually living as a Christian, and the fact that the Nuremberg prosecutors denounced Nazism as fanatically ANTI-Christian! ... But then again, you deny that the scientists who rejected Galileo's work were real scientists.
47. You believe you descended from ape like creatures.(Think about it.)
48. You call God "she" in the presence of Christians simply out of sheer spite
49. You start a local Atheists and Agnostics Society, the goal of which is to prove through good deeds that atheists and agnostics can be just as generous and caring as some Christians are. When nobody joins, and the club eventually unfolds, you are flustered. You have no idea why a group of people who by definition do not base their morality on anything greater than their own ideas and preferences wouldn't jump at the chance to be self-sacrificing for no logical reason.
50. Missionaries who give up their personal comfort and lives to aid starving, impoverished and persecuted third-world people are actually "corrupting ancient tribal cultures with ‘western(!)’ religious dogma", while you sit at home and complain about the price of petrol and KFC.
51. You think you arrived at your position because you are a free-thinker who rationally weighed the evidence, and then freely chose atheism over theism. YET, you also believe that your thinking and actions are nothing more than the FIXED reactions of the atoms in your brain that are governed by the Laws of Chemistry and Physics! (Think about it!)
52. You believe that any Christian who claims to have once been an atheist is either lying or was never a "true atheist” (No true scotsman fallacy)
53. When a Christian offers you his own experiences as evidence for God, you dismiss it as stupid and subjective. But when he offers you historical, philosophical and scientific evidence, you consider it too inconclusive and claim that you need to see God for yourself to believe in Him.
54. You think that humans are products of chance but when it comes to human reason we can believe in logic! (Think about it !)
55. You claim that because of Christianity, the world is lagging behind in scientific discovery and innovation, even though modern science owes its very existence by standing on the shoulders of discoveries made by Bible Believing Christian scientists who saw no conflict between their observations of the universe and the Bible..
56. Sir Isaac Newton does not count as an example of a great scientist who believed in the Bible since he died before the Origin of Species was published.
57. You love to castigate Christians for being "anti-science" if they deny evolution ‘from goo to you via the zoo’, and you preach that they should adapt their thinking to the "science" of today. But you also castigate the Church of 400 years ago for being anti-science, when it DID abandon the Bible and adapt its thinking to the science of ITS day, i.e. Ptolemaic cosmology, then joined with the Aristotelian scientists of the universities in rejecting Galileo!
58. You adamantly believe that "the Bible says pi equals 3" in 1 Kings 7:23 even though: (a) the verse does not make the slightest reference to the calculation of pi, (b) there are more measurements of the bowl from that verse in subsequent verses, (c) the bowl in question could very likely not have been intended to be a "perfect" circle with "perfect" measurements, (d) it's not unusual for ancient peoples using ancient tools (or even modern peoples using modern tools) to use rounded off, easy to remember numbers, (e) asking an online math forum results in a refutation of your belief, but you ignore what professional mathematicians plainly say and twist their words to make it appear as if they are backing your assertion in order to continue to justify your belief (not that you ever had any intention of doing otherwise in the first place).
59. You love to criticise Christians that hold to an absolute standard of truth and morality as being “intolerant”, even though such criticism is intolerant itself!
60. During a debate when it has become clear that the theist has let the air out of your ‘air-tight’ case against God’s allegedly horrific behaviour, you simply retort that “I don’t believe it happened anyway.” Clap. Clap. Clap.
61. You flatly declare “There is no God” despite that such an absolute statement requires absolute knowledge of all the evidences in the universe on your part. I.e. Omniscience which is an exclusive attribute of God!
This necessarily entails ironically that ‘atheists ’- in the strictest sense - don’t exist!
In this light, instead of honestly conceding to this logic, you then say you are a ‘weak atheist’ because it would be inconceivable for you to say you are an ‘agnostic’ and thereby admit that you are ‘ignorant’. (Without knowledge)
62. You believe that if something cannot be touched, seen, heard, or measured in some way, then it must not exist, yet you fail to see the irony of your calling Christians "narrow-minded".
63. You claim poker-faced that "social Darwinism" and its spawn of eugenics have absolutely no connection to the biological theories propounded by Charles Darwin in "On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" (despite the fact that the term eugenics was coined and advocated by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, who acknowledged his debt to Origin), but that none of these philosophical positions have any connection to the modern fields of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.
64. When a Christian points out the impossibility of a biological system (or feature) forming by pure chance you accuse them of invoking a "God of the gaps". YET, when you are asked how a particular feature could come about solely by chance you invoke "Evolution of the gaps" (i.e., we don't know HOW but we do know that Evolution MUST have done it!)
65. You assert that there is no absolute categories of good and evil, that all morals are merely personal, social and evolutionary constructs but then you can still describe Christians and Christianity as absolutely immoral, repugnant and evil and a danger to humanity and not feel even a twinge of hypocrisy at the monumental illogic of your position.
66. You use one,or more,of the following alternate spellings: GOD-"gawd" JESUS-"jeeezus" "jayzus" "jebus" "jeebers" BIBLE-"bibble" "babble" "wholly babble" "buy-bull"
67. You pontificate about the Bible as if you are an expert in theology, textual criticism, ancient languages and cultures and much more besides, when your knowledge of the Bible is just cut and paste from atheist discussion lists which cut and paste it from atheist websites which cut and paste it from embarrassingly unscholarly rantings by the likes of Messer's Freke and Gandy and Acharya S., etc.
68. Archaeology continually frustrates your attempts to find errors and contradictions in the Bible, but you continually use the same outdated accusations anyway since you ran out or material a long time ago.
69. You visit a planetarium, but afterwards complain bitterly to the director that it uses the Earth as a convenient reference frame, and portrays the Earth as the center of a celestial sphere with the heavenly bodies revolving around it. This, and his use of the words "sunset" and "sunrise", is another part of the conspiracy to legitimize the Bible's use of such language.
70. You don't seem to realise that 'Landmark Baptist Church's' website is a (poorly conceived) parody. Even when you do realize it is a parody, you think that it's implied arguments are suitable for use as a reply rather than Biblical scholarship.
71. You find the term 'fundy atheist' meaningless, baffling, illogical and just plain oxymoronic/self-contradictory even though the two terms are not exclusive of each other (except in the minds of fundy atheists, of course).
72. You spend hours arguing that a-theism actually means "without a belief in God " and not just "belief that there is no god" as if this is a meaningful distinction in real life.
73. You join a Christian discussion and ask questions- not because you genuinely want an answer, but because you genuinely think there is no answer. If and when your tactics and objections are exposed and dismantled, insteaqd of conceding that you were wrong,you disappear and try the very same 'genuine queries' at a different Christian forum.
74. You believe Richard Dawkins is right. All the time. Without exception.
