Reply #33: I think that

[Donald Ian Rankin]

the reason why atheists on DU tend to be more combatitive than theists on DU is because we're used to arguing with theists (specifically Christians) of all flavours, not just the (mostly) eminently reasonably ones found on DU.

I suspect than most of the posts attacking Christianity on DU have in mind something far more like Pat Robertson's religion than like yours. However, I suspect that he's probably more representative of people who call themselves Christians (at least in America) than you are, so I think it's probably not entirely unreasonable for them to do so, although I think it's lazy not to qualify ones remarks fully.

In my particular case, I recognise that my dislike of Christianity is more than rational, and as a result do my best not to let it come through in my posts. I come from the UK, where all schools have to have a compulsory "daily act of collective worship of a broadly Christian nature". Being made to sing Christian hymns about how happy I was to be a Christian and how lucky I was that I wasn't an atheist, every day for thirteen years, have left me with... Issues... with religion in general, and Christianity in particular. I still twitch whenever I hear "Jerusalem" or "Guide me oh thou Great Jehovah".

I agree that it is, in general, obviously more use to refute someone's argument than to caricature it. The problem is that there are no impartial judges awarding scores to show whether an argument has been succesfully refuted or not, and so all these debates go round in circles endlessly and all sides get heartily sick of them, and so there is definately room for portrayals of the state of the debate, as well as for additions to it.