The Irrational Atheist

I became a Christian in 2006. I was born in a Christian home, but wandered a different path until August 2006, when I finally bowed the knee to Jesus. I was trained to do evangelism in November 2006 and began doing street evangelism straight away. While I was a new Christian, technically, I had been raised in a Christian environment, so I was familiar with the Bible and its teachings, and just wanted to get out and evangelise. 

One of the most common arguments I would hear when out on the street back in that day was: "But religion is responsible for all the wars..." or "...most of the wars in history." My response was always this: "name me ten wars started by religion in history." 

I don't think anyone ever mentioned the Wars of Religion, in the 16th century, which would have given them easy points. Usually they mentioned World War 1 or World War 2, or Vietnam, which were easy to knock back as having nothing, or very little, to do with religion. 

I didn't develop this argument myself. I knew the history relatively well already. But it was the Evangelist who trained me to share the gospel that forged this argument for me. It was powerful, simple, and effective, and I saw it make a lot of sceptics think twice before asserting again how violent Christianity was.

 

Then in 2008 came this book, The Irrational Atheist (TIA), by Vox Day. I came across it in a review in a Creation Ministries magazine. It wasn't the first apologestics book I had read, but it along, with The Devils Delusion, are among my favourites. TIA had a pretty big impact in the evangelism world, because it neatly destroyed many Atheist arguments. 

For example, Vox destroyed the argument that religion causes all or most wars in this book. Showing that 6.98% of all wars are caused by religion. Indeed, this argument was so conclusive and so effective, the more well read atheists I encountered just stopped using the religion causes war argument altogether. That is because this statistic was like a vice grip crushing their argument. Because of this, evangelists like myself, the one who trained me, and others, were able to knock the religion causes war argument down conclusively in debates and discussions. I still hear that Evangelist using that statistic when he trains people in evangelism in my church today. Such was the effect of this book. 

Though it's use in apologetics is less common than it once was, because it is less needed today, I used a version of it just today in an online discussion. Among other things, I told my friend who asserted that Christianity was reaponsible for great genocides, that 2005 called, and it wants it argument back, because religion is responsible for far less bloodshed than other causes, including Communist Atheism. This book has been, and still is, useful in many ways, even though the main atheist antagonists in the book are hardly influential anymore. 

It makes sense that they aren't very relevant today, as well, because they were so provably wrong in many ways. Or as Vox Day puts it: 

"I am saying they are wrong, they are reliably, verifiably, and factually incorrect. Richard Dawkins is wrong. Daniel C. Dennett is wrong. Christopher Hitchens is drunk, and he's wrong. Michael Onfray is French, and he's wrong. Sam Harris is so superlatively wrong that it will require the development of esoteric mathematics operating simultaneously in multiple dimensions to fully comprehend the orders of magnitude of his wrongness" (pg7). 

That's still my favourite part of the book, and whenever I recommend TIA I quote this paragraph to highlight how fun this book is. And that is the thing this book taught me the most: defending Christianity can be, and should be fun. We are on the winning team, afterall.