An absence, of course, is an absence of something,

Or else it’s no absence at all!

So atheists know, it’s an absence of GOD

Whom they claim disbelief in, recall—

But they can’t disbelieve in a thing that is not,

Or the concept just wouldn’t make sense!

And thus atheists prove that my God does exist,

While their own claims are purely pretense.

In the “tangled chains of tortured logic” category, we have a promising new entry. The author, a Christian apologist, is reading a book by an atheist. I can’t exactly determine why, though, as he seems determined to ignore anything the atheist actually writes:

After giving the reader his definition of theism he emphatically wrote, “Atheism, therefore, is the absence of theistic belief,” and then goes on, “Atheism, in its basic form, is not a belief; it is the absence of belief. An atheist is not primarily a person who believes that god does not exist; rather, he does not believe in the existence of a god.” But, is this really what the atheist believes or is it simply an irrational statement of convenience to keep carrying out his long war against something he says he does not believe in?

The apologist does not quite understand why the atheist might occasionally refer specifically to the Christian god and at other times to a generic god or gods. See, not believing in God must mean that we don’t believe that religion exists. Or something. Let alone that multiple religions exist. Then, there was this paragraph, the spark for today’s verse:

A genuine absence of belief entails an absolute absence of knowledge. One cannot accept or reject the belief in something without first knowing something about that which is accepted or rejected.

This is, of course, a requirement of “strong atheism”–a positive claim of rejection. But this is not at all what the atheist book was saying, but rather what the apologist is saying. And the apologist, I suspect, would make such a strong claim against the existence of any other gods… which, by his own logic, would imply that they exist?

Now, given that the atheist is a know-it-all, which includes times, places, peoples, and events, then to say atheism is the absence of theistic belief would make no sense. He must know something about that which he rejects as true, otherwise his omniscient knowledge would soon be discovered to be less than omniscient.

But of course, the atheist he is reading is not the one claiming absolute knowledge of the lack of existence of gods; you saw, above, in quotes, the atheist writes about an absence of belief. It is the apologist who seems to claim some sort of omniscience, strongly believing in one god and strongly dismissing the others. Like I said, why is the apologist even reading the atheist’s book? There’s another book that already has it all nailed down:

No, atheism is not a belief in what is absent, but a rejection of Who and what is present. The atheist knows God exists, which is why Mr. Smith makes the distinctions, and because God has revealed Himself in the person of the atheist. “…because that which is know about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them,” wrote the Apostle Paul (Rom. 1:19).

We’ve seen it before, all too often. There is no need to pay attention to the claims of the atheists themselves, when the bible clearly shows them to be liars. Dude didn’t even really need to open the atheist’s book in the first place for this one. He claims that the “lack of belief” position is convenient for atheists, because it rids us of all the logical problems he demonstrates…I agree, those problems exist. But “lack of belief” not only avoids that problem, it also very accurately describes the privative nature of atheism (whereas “strong atheism” must be re-defined with respect to every single god–which, of course, no one actually does). There is certainly an argument of convenience in his post, but it is his own position. The bible is authoritative, so this inconvenient thing an atheist said about his own position? I can simply ignore it.

How convenient.

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