Great article on how most Athiests insist on limiting their definition of God into the most simplistic, fundamentalist, and ridiculous so that they can easily rail against it.
I grabbed the link from Jordan Stratford, and I agree with him that I have never seen an Athiest deal with any of the philosophical, mystical, and for that matter traditional ideas of god.
Sadly even some of us Buddhists fall into this hole when discussing the difference between Buddhism and the "theistic" faiths.
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Don't even get me started on how far the arguments of the New Atheists fall from most polytheist conceptions of divinity.
I've run into one of these True Nonbelievers on a Yahoo group. He insisted that magic couldn't alter reality because you couldn't make a coin come up heads 95 times out of 100, and because there was a delusional idiot on another group who insisted she could kill people at a distance. He insisted that a real magician should be able to produce these proofs upon demand and the fact that they couldn't was irrefutable evidence in his favor.
I suggested that he might want to look for something like making a coin come up heads 60 times out of 100, that a doctor couldn't heal a sick patient 100% of the time on demand, and that we all knew there were delusional idiots on the Net: taking them as examples for your cause was shooting fish in a barrel. He replied that I was trying to sell books and that he knew magic didn't exist because everyone who thought it did also thought they could kill people at a distance, and that they couldn't make coins come up heads 95 times out of 100.
At this point I realized he was not arguing in good faith and that any attempts at debating with him would be wasted. So I left him to his conviction that he had proven his point and driven me away by the superiority of his arguments and logic.
The amusing thing is that it's actually pretty easy to prove the existence of Magic; for example altering emotions and causing (slight) pain. The coin flipping test is just too tedious and far too easy to dismiss.
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