How atheists are portrayed by Churches.

[lovegrenade]

While it's funny, I don't think it's accurate to say things like "Faith is believing what you know ain't so." It's unfair to religious people to assume that they know better, but they're just choosing to ignore the lack of evidence and believe anyways because they want to. Doing that is almost the same as the person earlier who said that atheists know there's a god but choose not to acknowledge him. Atheists and agnostics shouldn't doubt the dedication of theist' belief, we have no reason to assume they don't believe their point of view to be valid from an intellectual standpoint.

I think, ultimately, the crux of the debate is whether or not faith is a valid means of knowing or believing in something. I would argue that, since faith is belief not based or dependent upon evidence, people can use faith as a means to believe absolutely anything. If faith allows you to believe anything, then it is incredibly unreliable, which in turn makes it an entirely invalid basis for any claim or belief.

I'm not trying to say that they are ignoring what they know, but I do believe that they actively ignore information that could somehow affect their "faith". By using the "faith" argument and not using evidence; a parent can force a child to believe absolutely anything. It's sad really...