Right-wing Christians mock zingers that are actually valid dealbreakers

Last time we met up, I showed you some popular Christian zingers they attribute to atheists. We talked about how these lists of zingers operate as a form of ingroup performance. Today, though, let’s pivot to one of the lists of zingers themselves. Let’s explore why its strawman “atheist arguments” are actually valid dealbreakers, and how they allow right-wing Christians to shirk their own burden of proof.

(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 3/17/2026. They’re both available now!)

SITUATION REPORT: Zingers in strawman form

Our OP (original post) today is a list of what its right-wing Christian author calls “atheist arguments.”

In general, his list doesn’t differ overmuch from other popular strawman lists circulating among right-wing Christians. Often, the lists circulate as “atheist bingo,” a popular format for mocking their outgroup. We find these lists mostly among evangelicals, but tradcaths (so-called traditional Catholics, ultra-hardliners within the Church) and Orthodox Christians (like the OP himself) participate as well. For our purposes here, we will group them together as right-wing Christians.

Today, we’ll take the OP seriously. We’ll arrange the OP’s strawmen into rough categories, examine each one, and then compare the strawmen to what OP should be doing if he actually wants to persuade any of his enemies to join his tribe. By the end, you’ll see that he’s not actually insulting atheists at all, but rather a much larger and more daunting group that threatens the self-image of his tribe far more than atheists ever could.

The base of the strawman complaints pyramid: Reality itself wrote these zingers

If we consider the broad categories of the OP’s, we can lump them into four general categories:

1. Complaints about reality itself not lining up with any supernatural claims
2. Criticisms of monotheism itself, on its own merits
3. Major inconsistencies within Christian interpretations of the Bible
4. Christians’ hypocrisy and what that hypocrisy tells outsiders

I’ve taken the liberty of illustrating this as a pyramid of concerns:

At the very base of our pyramid, we have the zingers relating to supernatural beliefs in general. They apply not only to Christianity, but to any of the many thousands of gods and religions that humans have invented in our 300,000 years as a species. Quoting from the OP, here they are:

• I’m monkey
• Why can’t I look outside and see God
• Too many religion ;(

Roughly speaking, the OP’s writer takes issue with the Theory of Evolution, not only with reality in general. It’s important to note that these three strawmen aren’t actually “atheist arguments,” as he claims. The majority of Christian denominations don’t have an issue with evolution. Even the Catholic Church doesn’t pick fights about it. Neither does the Eastern Orthodox Church, to which OP belongs. It’s easy to find Eastern Orthodox Christians on either side of Creationism. In truth, his strawman zingers fight not atheists, but anyone who understands and accepts the Theory of Evolution itself.

As for the second, it’s very true that nobody can look upon this universe and see the hands of any gods upon it. It operates as if no gods exist, and it always has. Every single time we’ve figured out a big mystery about our cosmos, its solution turned out to be something perfectly natural. We’ve never once resolved a mystery as supernatural in nature. Not once.

That simple fact may be why humans have created “too many” different gods and religions: Their nature is subjective and highly dependent upon cultural and societal cues.

That subjective nature means that once a religion vanishes, once its gods fade from human memory and its artifacts crumble, we can’t recreate it. Nothing about reality informs any religion. We have “too many” religions because the supernatural just isn’t real. That’s exactly why our imaginations can go hog wild creating supernatural stuff.

What OP is not doing here, however, is shouldering his burden of proof regarding the supernatural.

He can’t demonstrate that anything supernatural exists, much less that anything supernatural created humans. So instead, he deploys strawmen to mock what he cannot defeat.

Zingers attacking the weakness of monotheism

Moving up our pyramid, we come to the monotheism-specific zingers:

• God is mean
• If God real why bad thing happen

What OP mocks in strawman form here is the Problem of Evil (sometimes called the Problem of Suffering), which is capitalized because Christians have never been able to resolve it.

But believers in ancient religions wouldn’t have had any issue with it.

Humans have existed for about 300k years, as I mentioned. Signs of our very first intentional burial emerge around 100k years ago. Monotheism only emerged with strictly-monotheistic Judaism around 2500 years ago (600-500 BCE), though there had once been a very brief flirtation with something a bit like it with Akhenaten in Egypt around 1348 BCE.

So for most of our existence as humans, we were pagan heathens—at least, by Christian standards. Maybe that’s why monotheism has so many dealbreaking problems. Polytheism had a lot longer to resolve the issues in OP’s strawmen than monotheism had. To those ancient believers, bad things happened because some gods could be vengeful or capricious. Good gods weren’t mean. At worst, they might be indifferent or simply not powerful enough to help.

With only one god, monotheists must come up with other reasons for the existence of evil and suffering. Jews engaging with the Book of Job (written down around 530-330 BCE) might have accepted that fine, okay, sometimes their god just wanted to win a cheap bet against Satan, and how dare they question that decision. However, Christians want that same god to be a truly good, loving, all-powerful god who considers them his literal children.

When something horrible happens to us, we want explanations. “Gosh, I don’t know” doesn’t satisfy victims or their grieving loved ones. Nor, anymore, does shaming them for daring to question a god.

Our OP today mocks those rejecting his religion because of the Problem of Suffering. But in truth, he must—because not one Christian has ever been able to actually defeat it. These are completely valid criticisms of his religion’s monotheistic nature, and he knows he has no satisfying answer for them.

Zingers relating to the Bible itself

Now, we move up our pyramid one more step to arrive at the zingers relating to the horrendous mishmash that is the Bible itself. Again, quoting from the OP:

• Shellfish polyester
• If God is real why do I like [redacted, but refers to anal sex]
• Out of context Bible verse

These zingers attempt to mock dissenters for thinking the following are very weird indeed if the Christian god is actually real:

Shellfish polyester. Christians have very obviously self-interested ways of deciding which of the Old Testament’s many rules they’ll take seriously and which ones they can safely ignore. Generally speaking, they keep the ones that are easy for most of them to pretend to keep, like not having anal sex. They cheerfully discard the rules that would be really hard to follow, like not wearing mixed-fiber clothes—not “polyester,” as in the strawman—and eating shellfish. I’m actually surprised OP didn’t go with “but but but BACON” here. That’s easily the most common OT rule violation I’ve seen.

If God is real why do I like this off-limits thing? It does seem really weird that a god who hates and despises the idea of anal sex apparently created a prostate in men’s butts. The gland does have multiple important functions, of course. But for many men, it also feels indescribably good when stimulated. I don’t think even a Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil could be as tempting as the prostate to someone wanting a good time. Christians’ moral scolding about sex is always a little weird and controlling. But this one particular condemnation makes zero sense.

Out of context Bible verse. Considering the many Old Testament verses that were mangled out of context to make Jesus sound like the long-awaited Messiah, this zinger attempt is especially humorous. I could also name the out of context Bible verses used to attack abortion, homosexuality, and even criticisms of Christian hypocrisy. (Recently, we discussed it here).

The entire reason why there are tens of thousands of distinct Christian denominations is because none of them can agree on anything in the Bible. Even within OP’s own denomination, his own spiritual leaders can’t take a single unified stand on something as high-profile as Creationism!

So then, these objections are also completely valid. And OP can’t offer satisfactory answers to them.

PS: Here’s a list of 700 inconsistencies in the Bible.

The last zinger to rule them all: Hypocrisy

Today, we traveled upward from a base of general objections to more specific ones. We covered reality-based reasons to reject supernatural claims, the tension between monotheism and the Problem of Suffering, and the Bible’s problems as a sourcebook for Christianity. But now, we arrive at the very top of the pyramid. This last zinger concerns Christians themselves. Quoting from OP:

• Christians are mean

Our OP wants Christian’s hypocrisy to stop being a dealbreaker. He condemns those who reject his religion because of the behavior of Christians themselves. He wishes to invalidate rejections made on this basis.

But as we talked about recently, Christian hypocrisy is a very important sign of the validity of Christian claims. Besides seeking pleasant, safe, trustworthy groups to join, most of us want to be able to live authentically within our chosen groups. The presence of widespread hypocrisy makes both aims impossible.

Christian claims about what conversion does for believers is both far-reaching and dramatic. They can’t have this situation both ways. Either conversion does what they claim, or it doesn’t. If it does what they say, then Christians should be a dramatically different group of people than they are. And they’re not.

The situation gets worse for OP, though. As bad as that either-or might sound, it’s worlds better than the alternative. If their god only changes certain people while ignoring others, even if those others really really want to change, then he’s not worth worshiping. He’s just a very unreliable bet that, even when someone’s very lucky, produces change that individuals could certainly accomplish on their own with tested, real-world methods. (Ask me how I know.)

For that matter, the OP himself could not exist as he does now in a world where his god actually existed in Christians’ hearts. He should be terrified to be so contemptuous and mean-spirited to others. But he’s not. Instead, he’s gleeful. It just doesn’t add up.

Of course, OP can’t change Christians as a group. He doesn’t want to change himself, either. So instead, he seeks to invalidate hypocrisy as a valid reason to reject his religion. It’s such a very telling strategy.

Zingers are about ‘The Last Ideology Standing’

A long time ago, I noticed that the many high-control Christians frequently attack other groups to make their own sound better. They really seem to think that if they attack other groups well enough, then their own will emerge triumphant as the only real alternative in the religious marketplace.

Unfortunately for them, they inhabit a world where nobody must join a religious group. By shooting down other ideas, they do not make their own sound better. All they do is create a circular firing squad of Christians all attacking competing interpretations of the Bible. As my friend A Pasta Sea once noted:

Want to blow molinistic excuses for the problem of evil out of the water? Calvinists have already done the work. Want to undercut Sola Scriptura? Catholics have that covered. Want to illustrate the absurdity of the Trinity? Ask those Jehovah’s Witnesses that come to your door next Saturday. Want to show how evolutionary theory isn’t compatible with Christianity? Look no further than Answers in Genesis. What do all of these groups have in common? They all use the Bible to knock down each other’s theological systems. Not all of the arguments are that great, mind you, but my point still stands. They all show that the Bible can be an effective weapon against nearly every form of Christianity.

After one hears enough of these attacks, one could easily be forgiven for concluding what I did long ago:

They can‘t all be right.
But they can all be wrong.

NEXT UP: Remember Richard Land, the king of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission? And how he lost that opulent gig because he plagiarized and was a shameless racist? Well, now he’s got opinions about Baptists becoming Catholic. We’ll check those out next. See you soon! <3

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