Prudence, you’re strawmanning the article when you speak of “refusing to debate the preposterous.” I specifically said in the article that the atheist needn’t fear taking up an equal burden of proof. Indeed, along Guthrie’s lines, it’s not a question of fear but of tedium and of awkwardness. Having to cry out that the emperor’s wearing no clothes when millions of adults pretend or are brainwashed into thinking otherwise is a tiresome and absurd endeavour. It’s also not philosophically necessary, although it’s more than feasible.
For example, I can cut to the chase and ask you not just why you think your religious beliefs are rational, but why you think they ought to be so. The New Testament doesn’t read like a hyperrational Platonic dialogue, does it? It’s religious propaganda. The early Christians believed in their creed not because of arguments but because of religious experiences. Many Christians were prepared to accept such experiences and visions in their dreams and fevered imaginations because of their desperation. Jerusalem was destroyed and the Roman Empire was falling. The known world seemed to be ending. Christian hope was the answer. So who says hope in such desperate times has to be rational?
No, the reason you insist that religion can and should be rational is because you’re a modernist. You’re trying to modernize Christianity. I’d grant you that syncretism is certainly possible even in the strangest cases. Christianity itself is the synthesis of Jewish monotheism and pagan polytheism and saviour cults. But your rational, philosophical standards are bound to count against the content of the Christianity you synthesize. It’s a self-defeating project, isn’t it?
Why do you say it’s clear that theistic religions aren’t as preposterous as the notions that folkloric entities are real? There are adults who practice those religions and who believe in ghosts, albeit not so much in the reality, say, of Marvel superheroes or Star Wars Jedis, at least not outside mental institutions. Modernity isn’t exactly totalitarian or omnipresent, and the human mind is primed to accept nonsense especially in times of trouble.
What’s clear is that theistic religion still thrives despite modernity, not because that religion is rationally respectable but because it’s sustained by the sheer, widespread indoctrination of children. That’s the decisive social mechanism that explains that phenomenon, isn’t it? That’s why religions are mainly confined to different geographic regions: they’re passed through bloodlines which tend to keep to their home territory.
You say it’s a simple matter to prove there’s no teapot around Mars. But it’s just as simple to show there’s no person who created the universe. A person needs a brain. Who would have created God’s brain? It’s also simple to point out that Christianity was just another mystery religion, as Richard Carrier shows in “On the Historicity of Jesus.” There was no miraculous resurrection in the first century CE, but just another syncretistic cult worshipping a dying and rising saviour figure, that got twisted by politics and historicized.
