Here’s a Thought: Why Don’t We Not Strawman Each Other?

In my experience, atheists and Christians commonly strawman each other. For example, the atheist criticizing Christianity assumes Christianity includes a narrow exclusivism with eternal conscious torment so that, for example, the 10-year-old Jewish girl who dies in Auschwitz goes straight to hell. Such a view has nothing, per se, to do with Christianity.

To be sure, the Christian regularly returns the favor by assuming that atheism entails a bracing nihilism and metaphysical reductionism such that life has no meaning or value and human beings are only hunks of data-processing meat.

Each of these views represents the most implausible and problematic expressions of their respective positions and thus to reject Christianity or atheism on such grounds is classic strawmanning.

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