The study of absurdity

Some Christians rebuke atheists' dismissal of Christianity by claiming that we don't know enough about it to reject it, that we haven't studied it enough to assess it.

In fact, this is often not true.  Many Christians know very little of the Bible or of theology; it's a common observation that atheists often know more about those things than the average US Christian does.  There are people such as Bruce Gerencser and Dan Barker who spent decades studying Christianity and actively preaching it, but eventually repudiated it because their studies led them to the conclusion that its central beliefs were almost certainly false.

Aside from that, such believers do not practice what they preach.  Have they made such an exhaustive study of Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist theology and sacred texts before dismissing those religions?  (The same applies to their claim that if we would just sincerely pray to Jesus to reveal himself to us, he would do so.  Have they ever sincerely and open-mindedly prayed for Zeus to reveal himself to them as the true deity?  How about Rama?  Or Ahura Mazda?)  Of course in the vast majority of cases they have neither the time nor the inclination to do so.  Neither do we.

I have never seen any reason to take any religion seriously, nor any reason to treat any one of them as more plausible than all the rest.  When the beginning premise of something is that we're all born with inherited guilt because 6,000 years ago a talking snake persuaded a woman made from a rib to eat a piece of fruit from a magic tree, I really don't need to pore over the nuances of St Augustine or John Calvin to realize I'm dealing with silly nonsense that can safely be dismissed.

I put God in the same category with unicorns or dragons or fairies -- I can't absolutely prove it doesn't exist, but it's so implausible that it's not worth spending any time or mental energy on it.

The fact that all religions are merely products of human culture is affirmed by the way they vary more or less randomly from one part of the world to another, just as other aspects of culture do.  Science, by contrast, is universal.  There is very little resemblance between the beliefs of Christianity and Shinto, but the speed of light and the age of the Earth and the rate of decay of radioactive isotopes are the same in America and Japan and everywhere else, because those things are not products of culture; they're objective facts about reality which can be measured by anyone with the proper equipment and the skills to use it.

For that matter, even within Christianity there has always been an endless proliferation of sects, with the differences between them being important enough to believers to motivate horrendously bloody wars and persecutions at various times.  Christians claim to be the bearers of absolute truths which we should all accept, but in two thousand years they've never even been able to agree among themselves on exactly what those absolute truths are.  Does this chaos look like the result of a revelation from an all-knowing and all-powerful deity, or the product of past generations of befuddled people struggling to make sense of an interminable anthology of random gibberish?

Then there's the moral angle.  The Bible condemns homosexuality, beard-trimming, picking up sticks on a certain day of the week, and so on and so on.  It accepts slavery, depicts God as commanding various invasions and massacres, and mostly treats women as inferior.  (No, Jesus did not make all the Old Testament stuff obsolete -- see Matthew 5:17-19.)  A person who actually got his moral values from the Bible would be judged a depraved lunatic by any modern civilized society.

So, yes, I know enough, I've studied enough, to see that this junkyard of nonsense is completely unworthy of any further consideration.  It's no wonder that the rise of mass education, and especially mass access to information and ideas via the internet, are leading to a veritable stampede of people abandoning religion.