@Francis,
There's no need to take it to heart Francois. It's only a dispute for the sake of the dispute. None of us know anything about gods. They wouldn't be gods if we did.
My atheist friend in the pub, the others say that they are "not exactly atheists", began as a nominated atheist in a classroom discussion, they save the teachers having to teach do classroom discussions, due to him having found a hammer and sickle badge in the mud playing rugby and polishing it up and pinning it in the lapel of his school uniform. (To add "jacket" would have been tautologous but I almost did. It's surprising how easy it is to fall into tautology when you want to make a sentence longer. Or a speech.)
He had never given God a second thought before even when in church. And from little acorns mighty oak trees grow. And from the chance happening on the playing fields here he now stands, decades later, as proud as a cock on a gatepost at dawn, and as aggravating, a full-blown atheist with all the usual lines rehearsed going back to the atheists in ancient Greece and Rome. Each one stamped into the preferred pathways the more firmly each time it is wheeled out.
I'm not saying he wouldn't have become an atheist had he not found the badge. He was at that age when it starts to dawn on a young man that what he most wants to do is a sin. But that's quite normal. And thus not something to shout about. At that age one cannot be expected to know why it is a sin. That's a complex business.
I suspect that what gives his atheism the stridency it has is something in his past since then considered more sinful and possibly much more. Sins have a hierarchy He wants to shovel the Pope and all his works into a big hole, cover it over and stamp on it. Then there are no sins. And the alternative appears centre stage. Fear of the law. And fear has a hierarchy. As the behaviourists well know. And jockeys.
How do you do lifelong thought when the idea that a sin is a sin for very good reasons is kept on Ignore. That we would have no modern world if there were no sins. Or, to be more exact, if our sins were not sins and others were instead as is sometimes said to be the case in the Dark Ages with chivalry of the Don Quixote type in operation in the classes which had risen above grunting in mud huts and which was the only class to leave written records even if they were only mere shreds.
Militant atheism is the rejection and contempt of the culture and has been treated as such in non-Christian societies. To apply it to the rejection and contempt of the Christian God needs must imply the existence of God because it is impossible to reject and be contemptuous of something that doesn't exist.
It's a debate Francois not a slanging match.
