On Atheist Irrelevancy and Myopia: "I have found only two blogs that focus on debunking Christianity"

Robert Miller wrote me saying,
The Internet has more Christian apologists than a horse has hairs and many blogs by atheists or skeptics, but I have found only two blogs that focus on debunking Christianity or Christian apologetics. Yours and Cross-Examined. Do you know of any other blogs or websites that look at New Testament issues from a skeptical point of view?
I'm assuming Miller is speaking of sites that focus exclusively on debunking Christian apologetics. I am happy Miller found this site, that's always good to know. However, I find his question both interesting and provocative. I ask my readers to comment on other blogs that seek to do this exact same thing. I'm sure there are others. But I'm not sure there are others more popular than the two blogs he mentioned. And between us, only one has multiple authors with advanced degrees writing for it.

But, if Miller's observation is largely true, we have a serious problem. It means atheists are largely talking to themselves about atheistic concerns.

I'm aware of the concerns that atheists talk about. Some of them are important ones. Others not so much. Many atheist sites are focused on the concerns of the atheist community. Atheist sites that focus on social justice within the atheist community or politics or church scandals and sinners in the pews are interesting and important. But these are, strictly speaking, atheist concerns. Atheists are talking to other atheists when these issues are being discussed. None of these issues, as far as I can tell, will change the minds of Christians. They are needed, yes. But there seems to be far too many of them, if Miller's observation is correct.

The reason so many atheist sites largely talk about atheist concerns is because people generally want to be relevant to their communities. If people are considered part of a particular community then in order to be relevant they must weigh in about the concerns of their community. So it's important to have good leaders who focus on the overarching issues, while not neglecting the concerns within their own communities.

It's the same phenomena I saw when it came to church. One of the complaints we had when I was a student were churches who were only talking to themselves. Churches weren't interested in reaching the lost, we argued. They were only interested with internal concerns, stretching anywhere from minor doctrinal issues of the preacher, to the color of paint on the walls. We labelled that type of thinking myopic, and described it as majoring on the minors and minoring on the majors. Such a church might be relevant within herself but it was irrelevant to outsiders.

When it comes to atheist concerns we should focus on the majors by focusing on debunking the dominant religion of our geographic locations. In my case this is Christianity in America. If you own a blog count the number of times you write or link to arguments that debunk Christianity, compared with the times you write on atheist concerns. I know, it gets boring doing so, since it doesn't take long for people convinced of atheism to move on to other, more interesting subjects. But we should never forget that while our numbers are presently increasing we face a future of declining numbers according to polls.

A side effect of focusing on the majors by reaching out to others who are not already within our particular community, is that we won't implode by attacking each other. For when there is no goal beyond one's own community people will do this. And they gradually become irrelevant to outsiders in the process.

0 comments: