this very curable affliction.

His beef is that he was denied cab fares because he was an atheist. How did that come up?

Still, tho, reminds me of one of the greatest miracles of all time, Robert Ingersoll calling his son to his deathbed and begging him to convert to Christianity. Somehow Ingersoll had the power to create a son out of thin air. That's power, my friends.

nt

... it's strange that a relatively small act of kindness would convert him. Either he was an extremely ignorant opponent of Christianity, or, he may be overwhelmed with gratitude.

These stories are kind of a standard with theists who need to show how atheism is wrong. We hear them all the time as part of the apologetic toolbox. Needless to say, few atheists take them seriously.

My personal opinion on this case? So what!? It's irrelevant.

Yes, Mr Apologist, we've heard that Darwin accepted Jeebus on his deathbed, and Bertrand Russell accepted Jeebus on his deathbed, blah, blah, blah. The fact is that none of these have any basis in fact.

So the modern technique is to find some putative non-theist who becomes a theist of some sort and put him or her on a pedestal to illustrate how evil atheism is (which is always in the background of the theist's story).

This whole thing gets a bit tiring.

Why not just hear a person's testimony no matter what changes have taken place?

Might want to go back and re-read what was being called "tiring."

Because you'll be waiting a very long time.

*You might read this with a strong southern accent.

"Brothers and sisters, I came here to tell you today how powerful...how glorious...and how merciful our God is! Can I get an AMEN?!"

"Let me tell ya', I was a sinner. Drinkin'...carousin'...fooooooooornication! I did it all! I denied God. I defied God, and I did it every day of my life. But you know what happened to me, don't you? You know why I'm standin' here today. God showed me the way. Ya hear that, I said God showed me the way. Can I get an Aaaaamen outta somebody?"

"He took my sight. He took my job. He took me down to the lowest point that I could reach, so that I could experience fear! And then he lifted me up..."

*Snap back to reality.

People have asked me where, as an atheist, I get my morals. They honestly can't understand that a person who doesn't believe in God could be anything other than a sonofabitch. Let me tell you something, if I were an amoral and unscrupulous individual, I could be rich. But I'm not a sonofabitch.

Now, I may not know this man, or his motivations, but I follow the link you provided and find that he's using the money to get out of Texas, buy something his wife has always wanted, and score a book deal. And I think to myself "that man found a way to make bank...I wonder if he's a sonofabitch?"

Let me leave you with a couple of quotes from a rather apropos episode of South Park.

Exactly what I was thinking - I just couldn't put it together nearly as colorful.

The article mentions $400 and the video $1500. And he's going to use SOME of the money to buy his wife a dream mobile home? I don't know much about the price of mobile homes in Texas, but I'm pretty sure you couldn't get a decent one for that sort of money. Did his website bring in a lot more than $1500 and these figures are purely for public consumption?

And wouldn't you think that cataract surgery would be the primary focus for Mr Greene?

The video says he's still an atheist, which contradicts the article.

Snake-oil salesman.

This fellow has some small notoriety he may or may not be leveraging honestly, but when Anthony Flew can do the same with no ripple and numerous preachers can go the other way without much impact either, it's hardly any more significant outside the individual than my own conversion (hardly imminent methinks) would be.

What strikes me though is the terribly naive reasons for many conversions (or yes deconversions). Converting because some Christians were nice makes no more sense than becoming an atheist because some Christians were nasty. It actually makes fractionally less sense, because a common claim of Christianity is that their faith makes them nicer people, but neither way reveals anything more than a bare surface level of contemplation. The only "deconversion" for which I am personally responsible was barely more logical on the part of the switcher. It was a pretty bog standard discourse on the impossibility of free will given an omniscient and omnnipotent creator which while true enough, only means that the god in question may lack just one of those qualities, or even lacks none but somehow he has fun making atheists just to damn them for an eternity after a flickering picosecond's exiatence on the divine timescale.

Most atheists I've spoken to fall into three camps: a) those who never really believed, but may or may not have gone along to get along for a while b) those who believed but never really examined the belief to any serious level, then became atheists once they did and c) those who became atheists for reasons akin to the above - a nasty priest, racist congregants, church gosssip; basically the frankly irrelevant ontologically speaking human trappings. While I'm an a) myself I actually respect and enjoy talking on the topic to b)s much more. Some c)s may be fine as people, but never found one yet who was worth more than a banal chat on the issue itself.