Contra Mozilla

Thursday, August 8, 2013

Cult of Anti-Christianity?

Rebecca Hamilton writes some of her observations concerning a variety of anti-Christian commenters on her blog. In a nutshell, many of the commenters use the same tired old arguments, often regurgitated without further thought from Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens.

God-is-evil commenters are another large group. They have picked up out-of-context Bible verses and stories, sometimes from Dawkins, but I think mostly from Christian-bashing blogs. They come swooping in here with their Bible verse or story and throw it down with an almost audible There! Take that!
{snip}
These leaders comb the Scriptures looking for stories or single verses that they can manipulate to support their contentions. They studiously overlook the vast bulk of Scripture that abrogates their prejudices so clearly that even they cannot twist it into meaning something else. They then reinterpret their gleanings according to their own malice in order to judge both God and Christians by the obnoxious standards of 21st century self-righteous nihilism.
This whole practice of pulling things out of context and ignoring all scholarship to reframe them according to your propaganda is intellectually bogus. It is not a sign of intelligence, especially since the people who come on this blog to throw these things down are just parroting what someone else has said or written without any real understanding.  
I haven’t been trained in dealing with this. So far as I know, nobody has. After all, those of us who follow Christ are more intent on learning what the Bible actually teaches than mining it for gotcha verses and stories to use against God.

This tactic is fairly widely used, and not just by Christian-bashers. I've often encountered it by seeing Protestants deploy it against Catholics, for example, though usually not in a hateful-towards-God or generally malicious manner. I've also seen Catholics do something similar to each other, though more rarely (let's face it, she's right that Protestant typically are better at picking and memorizing individual verses or even entire chapters).

Anyhow, this is the kind of thing that a good book on general apologetics should cover, but I almost never see anything about this. The advice that Mrs. Hamilton gives (about figuring out the actual context of the verse and going from there) is about as thorough as I've seen, and it's really not a practical "how to counter this attack" so much as a "a counter to this attack exists if you spend enough time and energy looking for it." People are often lazy, they're not going to put in the energy to defend against this kind of thing; and therefore many people start doubting, and then leaving, without really having thought things through.

And then there's this related issue.

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