“Though she knew next to nothing about Christianity, she began to mock Christians and belittle their faith, intelligence and character.
"[I]t was fun to consider myself superior to the unenlightened, superstitious masses, and to make snide comments about Christians," Ordway writes.”
That doesn’t make you an atheist; that makes you a dick. If she was mocking a group of people she knew nothing about, then I am going to have to call her on being “logical and intellectual.” The person that would just start ranting at people they don’t understand strikes me as crazy; akin to the guy on the corner ranting at the street signs for being colorful.
Her problems with a naturalistic worldview didn’t end with her being a dick, as if the two are somehow mutually exclusive.
“One reason for her interest, she explains, is that her "naturalistic worldview was inadequate to explain the nature of reality in a coherent way: it could not explain the origin of the universe, nor could it explain morality."
"On the other hand, the theistic worldview was both consistent and powerfully explanatory: it offered a convincing, rationally consistent, and logical explanation for everything that the naturalistic worldview explained plus all the things that the naturalistic worldview couldn’t."”
Inadequate to explain reality in a coherent way? Could not explain the origin of the universe? Could not explain morality? Where does religion do any of this? Just saying “’cuz of God” doesn’t make it so. There have been better people than I to write at length about morality as an evolutionary condition, such as Sam Harris. As for the origin of the universe, “not currently able to explain” and “never going to explain” are two different things. This is one of those constantly moving goalposts. It went from the age of the earth to the age of the universe to how the universe came into being to the actual origin of the universe. Every time science answers a question, the goalpost moves a little further out. As for reality, you mean to tell me the idea of the invisible sky daddy who is his own son but not and killed himself on a cross 2000 years ago, but not really is somehow a more coherent explanation of reality? Wow.
To the points of the theistic world view taking care of everything, I would ask for evidence. No religious books are rational, convincing, logical, or coherent. They are stories that have been written down from hearsay about events that never took place on timelines that are demonstrably false. They are myths that don’t agree with each other even when talking about the same story.
Here is where the story begins to eat itself.
“"I don’t 'believe' because I like the idea and want it to be true. I don’t 'believe' because I think Christianity makes sense intellectually (although that was a necessary foundation to my faith). In fact, I wouldn’t say that I 'believe' in God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or that I 'believe' I have a personal relationship with Him: I would say that I know these things to be true," the former atheist emphatically stated in a 2007 blog entry.”
Didn’t she just get done talking about arrogance and absolute knowledge? She doesn’t believe, she knows. That sounds more conceited and arrogant than any atheist I have ever met. This is where religious people always lose me. They talk about atheists as arrogant and all-knowing, then turn around and call atheists fools for not seeing the truth that was there all the time; the truth that they know.
She is still a dick.
