Dawkins is an agnostic atheist. As is pretty much everyone, with the exception of Hitchens, who fully admitted that even if god was real, he'd tell him to piss off lol.
The difference between you and someone like Dawkins, Is the willingness to face reality and question things. Dawkins has said, and i share the same sentiments, that if there is any proof whatsoever, any shred of scientific evidence that can validate the bible and it's stories, then his opinion would most likely change.
You differ here, in that you say there is NOTHING that can sway your belief in Christ/god...so even if scriptures were found that proved the bible was a work of fiction, or science made an amazing breakthrough and discovered all there was to know about the universe, disproving god....you'd STILL cling to the desperate hope of Christ and the bible being real....this is deluded to the point of insanity, and i'm not saying that to intentionally be a dick and offend you.
You cannot talk for "god" and have no authority or legitimate basis for saying things like "that isn't how God works. You both reject his terms and demand your own", as you have absolutely nothing to go by in order to make this claim, other than an extreme hope that you are right.
You are entitled to think what you like, but in my opinion, it's weak, it's lazy and it's a refusal to face reality.
Dawkins himself identifies as a militant atheist and his actions demonstrate that. The following are not the words of a soft atheist LOL:
Dawkins has been quoted with the following,
“I am a fairly militant atheist, with a fair degree of active hostility toward religion. I certainly was hostile toward it at school, from the age of about sixteen onwards. I mellowed a bit in my twenties and thirties. But I’m getting more militant again now.”So Dawkins reality is more real than mine? Why is that?
Our worldviews differ and our perceptions of reality are based upon our experiences and education.
Validate the bible and it’s stories? We have a ton of archeological evidence to consider that validates names, places and events from scripture.
Ok, so I’ll continue to wait patiently for the competing literature that fully invalidates scripture, negates fulfilled prophecy, negates the promises of Christ fulfilled in believers today, negates the presence of the Holy Spirit in the lives of believers, negates the resurrection of Christ, negates the biblical testimonies in scripture, etc…..
We have the gnostic Gospel of Thomas and the Jesus Seminar “Q” material and Bart Ehrman’s anti-scriptural works or Richard Carrier’s attempts to invalidate scripture. Even youtube atheist Brian Sapient ("sapient"
) has a website dedicated to "curing theism". There are scores of materials devoted to exactly this sentiment and yet none of them are sufficient debunking tools…they just provide an alternative…nothing more. Despite all of Ehrman's published works he affirms the following within an interview in the 4rd edition in the appendix (on pg 252) of his most famous work "Misquoting Jesus":
"Bruce Metzger is one of the great scholars of modern times, and I dedicated the book to him because he was both my inspiration for going into textual criticism and the person who trained me in the field. I have nothing but respect and admiration for him. And even though we may disagree on important religious questions – he is a firmly committed Christian and I am not – we are in complete agreement on a number of very important historical and textual questions. If he and I were put in a room and asked to hammer out a consensus statement on what we think the original text of the New Testament probably looked like, there would be very few points of disagreement – maybe one or two dozen places out of many thousands. The position I argue for in ‘Misquoting Jesus’ does not actually stand at odds with Prof. Metzger’s position that the essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament."No matter how many different works become New York Times Bestsellers I will still challenge all the scholarly erudition devoted to theological “debunking” via the ever present, tangible presence of the Lord being felt by believers worldwide today.
I’m sorry, but I find the rampantly overused cliché that I’m not willing to
“face reality and question things” absolutely laughable. Man, that’s all I do.
“you'd STILL cling to the desperate hope of Christ and the bible being real....this is deluded to the point of insanity, and i'm not saying that to intentionally be a dick and offend you.” LOL, of course you aren’t.
I have every basis for saying exactly what I do because every bit of it is grounded in Jesus Christ and his commands to go forward and spread the gospel and openly defend the joy and faith we have in him.
"it's weak, it's lazy and it's a refusal to face reality"The fact of the matter is that a 12-year old girl who is a believer in Christ and understands how to share her faith could lead the entire population of unbelievers in the United States to Christ in a day if those she spoke to would be willing to surrender of themselves and humble themselves before Jesus Christ and abide by his terms instead of their own as outlined in scripture. They could all come to an understanding of the concrete revelation of God's reality.....they simply refuse to follow and most don't want Christ. They're just fine without a "sky Daddy" and his "grimoire" (as avxo puts it). Further we have men like Hitchens that even if Jesus Christ would've appeared before him he would've spat in his face and vehemently rejected him.