Sorry, but I just don’t have enough faith to be an atheist. They have to come up with such weird and exotic theorising, which any Joe Six-pack can see is patent nonsense.
- Bill Muehlenberg, What About Those Who Have Not Heard? (Discussion, 28 Jan. 2007, 5pm)

Bill is an evangelical Protestant of the Baptist persuasion. This means that he has enough faith to believe the following sensible and self-evident propositions:

In the time of the ancestors, a man was born to a virgin mother with no biological father being involved.

The same fatherless man called out to a friend called Lazarus, who had been dead long enough to stink, and Lazarus promptly came back to life.

The fatherless man himself came alive after being dead and buried three days …

If you murmur thoughts privately in your head, the fatherless man and his ‘father’ (who is also himself) will hear your thoughts and may act upon them. He is simultaneously able to hear the thoughts of everybody else in the world.

If you do something bad, or something good, the same fatherless man sees all, even if nobody else does. You may be rewarded or punished accordingly, including after your death.

- Richard Dawkins [2006] The God Delusion, 178-9

However, as a non-Catholic, Muehlenberg would join with atheists in rejecting the following absurd and ridiculous contentions:

The fatherless man’s [perpetually] virgin mother never died but ‘ascended’ bodily into heaven.

Bread and wine, if blessed by a priest (who must have testicles), ‘become’ the body and blood of the fatherless man.
- ibid., 179

What does Joe Six-pack think about all this? Sorry, you’d have to ask Bill.

Filed in: Atheism, Evangelicals