Who is a skeptic you love to hate?

[Jagella]

Question for Debate: Who is a skeptic you love to hate?

Many Christians just detest those who openly doubt their claims or criticize their beliefs. I'm curious about which critics Christians detest the most. They can be anybody famous or obscure. Here's a list of some candidates:

• â–º Madalyn Murray O'Hair
  â–º Robert Ingersoll
  â–º Friedrich Nietzsche
  â–º Richard Dawkins
  â–º Sam Harris
  â–º Christopher Hitchens
  â–º Jagella

[Difflugia]

• â–º Jagella

Heh.

• Baruch Spinoza
• Thomas Paine
• Voltaire
• Annie Laurie Gaylor
• Karl Marx
• Thomas Jefferson
• Julia Sweeney
• That little part of your own mind that the rest usually manages to shout down and keep quiet.

[Jagella]

• â–º Jagella

Heh.

Blessed am I when people revile me and persecute me. Whenever they utter all kinds of evil against me falsely on my account, I rejoice and am glad, for my freedom is great on earth, for in the same way they persecuted the infidels and freethinkers who were before me.

• Baruch Spinoza
• Thomas Paine
• Voltaire
• Annie Laurie Gaylor
• Karl Marx
• Thomas Jefferson
• Julia Sweeney
• That little part of your own mind that the rest usually manages to shout down and keep quiet.

That's a very good list of skeptics that Christians love to hate. I'm familiar with all of them. I hope that there are many more to come!

[Tcg]

[Replying to post 1 by Jagella]

Even though he supports an historical Jesus...

- Bart Ehrman

…gets plenty of disdain from those who dislike his conclusion that Jesus did not rise from the dead.

• ‘It was my biblical scholarship that showed me that there are in fact mistakes in the Bible,’ he says. ‘There are contradictions between the different accounts about how Jesus was raised from the dead. This eventually led me to become a more liberal Christian who didn’t hold to the inerrancy of the Bible.’
  
  The remnants of Ehrman’s faith were eventually swept away altogether when he later struggled to reconcile the idea of a loving God with the suffering he saw in the world. ‘I came to a point where I simply didn’t believe there was a God who was active in the world, and that necessarily had implications, because there can’t be a miraculous resurrection of Jesus if there’s nobody who is performing miracles.’
  
  https://www.premierchristianity.com/Pas ... surrection

Tcg

[Jagella]

[Replying to post 1 by Jagella]

Even though he supports an historical Jesus...

- Bart Ehrman

I'm OK with Ehrman or anybody else concluding that Jesus existed. I think there's an even chance that there was a Galilean preacher named Jesus who was crucified by the Romans for sedition and who was later given divine status by his followers. Where I part company with Ehrman is his approach to demonstrating that Jesus existed. I think his reasoning is faulty and his evidence is very weak.

…gets plenty of disdain from those who dislike his conclusion that Jesus did not rise from the dead.

Ehrman evidently cannot win. While apologists love his saying that Jesus existed, they cannot stomach the Jesus that Ehrman said existed! Ehrman's "historical" Jesus was not a god and had no magical powers. As such, Ehrman's Jesus cannot save anybody from death.

So apologists grab whatever Ehrman says that they presuppose about Jesus and trash the rest.

I'm not so different from apologists in that regard. While I agree with Ehrman that there are historical difficulties with a Jesus, I cannot agree with his conclusion that "Jesus almost certainly existed."