Five tips for atheist bloggers

I've been trying to link to this post for a few days but the site was down.

Turns out Nathan got so much traffic from atheists commenting, that his domain provider shut him down (the comment count is now on 221).

His list is pretty good I reckon:

  1. Stop being so smug.
  2. Don't assume every piece of Christian evangelism is directed at you – we want the undecideds, not the decided-uns.
  3. Admit that the debate about God's existence is complex – and that it can, depending on your presuppositions, be quite possible for intelligent and rational people to intelligently believe in an intervening deity who communicates through a book.
  4. Admit that the scientific method – which by its nature relies on induction rather than deduction (starting with a hypothesis and testing it rather than observing facts and forming a hypothesis) – is as open to abuse as any religious belief, and is neither objective nor infallible.
  5. Try to deal with the actual notions of God seriously believed in by millions of people rather than inventing strawmen (or spaghetti monsters) to dismiss the concepts of God – and deal with the Bible paying attention to context and the broader Christological narrative rather than quoting obscure Old Testament laws. By all means quote the laws when they are applied incorrectly by "Christians" – but understand how they're meant to work before dealing with the Christians described in point 3.
Well done Nathan, keep up the good work.

How ironic that angry atheists have flooded his comments :-/