so my first comment to any living, breathing atheist interested in a good dialog would be to thank them for critiquing the church and for publicly denouncing all the dangerous theologies that i, too reject.

my second comment would be confessional in nature. you see, though i am pretty convinced of the merits of faith and the religious life, i can't quite oppose atheism, per se, because i, too am an atheist some days. whether in the practical sense, in which i often foolishly life as if there were no god, or even in the intellectual sense, in which i may say that there are days when my doubts outnumber my assurances and i lose all confidence in the literal existence of god. so i've certainly got no business trying to talk anyone out of their atheism; you might say i'm rarely more than a heartbreak or two away from it myself.

at this point, if my antagonist were still awake and present after my having seemingly conceded the debate before it began, i would shift to an altogether different line of discussion. now that i've said, essentially, thank you for not believing in god, and by the way i totally get where you're coming from, my next point is to say, maybe you don't believe in the most common ideas of god, but maybe let's start basic and see how far we can get. let's start with the loosest, most liberal theology we can find and see if we can find any common ground whatever, then maybe we can move inward toward a more concrete, orthodox theology.

so, i must say to my agnostic friend, forget for a moment about w. bush's and j. dobson's idea of what god is, and let's start with john spong's idea of what god is. what we are talking about here isn't a person or even a being so much as, well, let's call it 'the ground of all being.' let's just start to say there is a reason there is something instead of nothing and that reason is called god, the ultimate reality behind all reality, a truth that is truer than fact. and furthermore, this god is synonymous with whatever it is we're trying to talk about when we say 'love.' love isn't something you say god does or teaches or invented as much as love is what god *is*. you can't talk about love, in the truest sense of the word, and not be also talking about god.

surely any but the most materialistic, over-rational mind is still with me. so, to move on, since any self-respecting atheist is undoubtedly a great admirer of the intellect, further descriptions of god should rightly draw on certain experiences drawn from the many academic disciplines. jung's idea of a collective unconscious, or the greek philosophers' appeal to a muse for creativity and inspiration, or the mysterious event of a big squeeze reversing into a big bang--these are all getting at a certain underlying force at work in the universe, a way that the whole cosmos 'wants' to be. each is loosely getting at something about god.

surely i haven't lost too many people there. but the christian must ask if this 'god' is even worth calling a god yet. and sure enough, he (it) is still a far cry from any kind of orthodox theology, but that may change once the question of jesus is considered. if we believe that christ is god's ultimate revelation of himself top humanity, then sure a discussion of the christ story is a good place to start. but again, it's best to take baby steps. a man trying meat for the first time in twenty years would do well not to go first to a twenty ounce medium-rare new york strip. so again, the question is best considered first by a search for common ground.

what common ground can provide a starting place for talking about christ? well, there's actually quite a bit that most anybody wouldn't really dispute. right around 7 a.d., a figure emerges in palestine going by the name 'jesus of nazareth.' he was a jewish peasant, and in adulthood became an itinerant rabbi. his outspoken criticism of jewish and roman authorities alike won him a growing following among the poor until those authorities viewed him as too much of a threat to be left alive, at which point he was executed as an insurrectionist. after his death, his movement continued to grow, as did a body of literature surrounding him. the earliest were letters between local chapters involved in his movement, later followed by collections of his sayings, which eventually included biographies about his life and ministry. within a few centuries, as the church became more organized, so did this body of literature, of which the most enduring, widely-affirmed documents were accepted as a canon, much like the diaspora jews had canonized their own scriptures just a few years before. these christian scriptures are now called the new testament, and bound in one volume with the hebrew scriptures, which christians call the old testament, and these are the defining, authoritative books in the ongoing life and story of the church.

that tells a good amount of the story of christ and christianity (and about two thirds of the creed), and there's nothing very controversial in there. the skeptical rationalist may leave the resurrection and the virgin birth and the ascension for another day, but the life and politics and work of this jesus is there for the world to see, and not hard to believe.

but here's the rub. what makes a christian a christian, singular among all groups of people who believe in and talk about and worship a god or gods, is this: christians believe that this jesus is the very embodiment of god. in jesus god has a face and a name. he is the ultimate reference point for any inquiry as to who and what god is and what he is like and how he thinks or feels about this or that. jesus, taken seriously, goes beyond spong's non-personal god and shows us persuasively that god is a person, and that that person who is love, also loves us. if we believe even a fraction of anything that anyone who ever directly knew jesus said or wrote about him, it all overwhelming leads to a jesus who viciously loves people, the world, the the cosmos, and whose love drove him to a radical life and a criminal's death. and so, finally, whatever god is, he is christ-like, and any version of god that is un-christ-like, is necessarily a false god. christ tells us what god is, and also what god isn't.

and this is likely where i lose most of (i hope not all of) the horde of atheists. to believe in a very abstract, thin-line sketch of a hypothetical god is good and well, and to concede a few facts about christ as a historical figure is certainly no problem. but to connect the two, well, that is a finally a judgement we all must make; one of us is correct and one of us is mistaken. there's no getting around it. from here i can offer little more than my own conclusion, and only the words offered by others seem to reliably hold them up. perhaps i had best let eagleton and chesterton have the last word. my apologies, as usual, for gratuitous long-windedness.

'For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.
This, not some super-manufacturing, is what is traditionally meant by the claim that God is Creator. He is what sustains all things in being by his love; and this would still be the case even if the universe had no beginning. To say that he brought it into being ex nihilo is not a measure of how very clever he is, but to suggest that he did it out of love rather than need. The world was not the consequence of an inexorable chain of cause and effect. Like a Modernist work of art, there is no necessity about it at all, and God might well have come to regret his handiwork some aeons ago. The Creation is the original acte gratuit. God is an artist who did it for the sheer love or hell of it, not a scientist at work on a magnificently rational design that will impress his research grant body no end.
Because the universe is God’s, it shares in his life, which is the life of freedom. This is why it works all by itself, and why science and Richard Dawkins are therefore both possible. The same is true of human beings: God is not an obstacle to our autonomy and enjoyment but, as Aquinas argues, the power that allows us to be ourselves. Like the unconscious, he is closer to us than we are to ourselves. He is the source of our self-determination, not the erasure of it. To be dependent on him, as to be dependent on our friends, is a matter of freedom and fulfilment. Indeed, friendship is the word Aquinas uses to characterise the relation between God and humanity.
Jesus... was a joke of a Messiah. He was a carnivalesque parody of a leader who understood, so it would appear, that any regime not founded on solidarity with frailty and failure is bound to collapse under its own hubris. The symbol of that failure was his crucifixion. In this faith, he was true to the source of life he enigmatically called his Father, who in the guise of the Old Testament Yahweh tells the Hebrews that he hates their burnt offerings and that their incense stinks in his nostrils. They will know him for what he is, he reminds them, when they see the hungry being filled with good things and the rich being sent empty away. You are not allowed to make a fetish or graven image of this God, since the only image of him is human flesh and blood. Salvation for Christianity has to do with caring for the sick and welcoming the immigrant, protecting the poor from the violence of the rich. It is not a ‘religious’ affair at all, and demands no special clothing, ritual behaviour or fussiness about diet. (The Catholic prohibition on meat on Fridays is an unscriptural church regulation.)'
-terry eagleton, from 'lunging, flailing, mispunching'

'This tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall.
His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud, proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something . . 
Solemn Supermen and Imperial Diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down from the steps of the Temple and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something . . .
I say it with reverence — there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness.
There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray.
There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation.
There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth, and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.'
-g.k. chesterton, from 'orthodoxy'