This is the dumbest of all atheist arguments. Naturally, it’s one of Sam Harris’s favorites. From Scott Adams’s blog:
EVERYONE is an atheist. Christians are atheists with respect to Thor, Zeus, and so forth. Hindus believe in lots of gods, but not Yahweh. Pagans have their own gods that do not include all of the rest.
“When you understand why you reject all those other gods, you will see why I reject yours”.
No, moron, Christians are ABSOLUTELY NOT atheists with respect to Thor, Zeus and so forth. Christians believe that those beings existed in the past and that they exist today, but they believe that they are false gods, demons who have convinced humans to worship them.
Does Sam Harris really refuse to worship the Christian God because he believes it is a spirit of evil? Or is he simply a complete moron who doesn’t know the most basic tenets of the religious faith he has written an entire book criticizing?
It never ceases to amaze me how many atheists claim that they are incredibly well educated with regards to the Bible, then demonstrate that they don’t even know enough to make the distinction between BELIEF and WORSHIP. Satan and the fallen angels all BELIEVE in God; they know perfectly well that He exists. They are clearly terrified of His intervention, which is why their encounters with Jesus can usually be described as “panic-stricken”, which tends to make one think that Satan didn’t exactly tell all of his formerly angelic followers the whole truth.
As I’ve written before, Christians are not, strictly speaking, monotheists. The verse about the “assembly of the gods” should have been the first clue for those self-styled Bible experts unable to add 2 and 2 and come up with 4.