I was chatting with a friend from college last week who went through similar doubts as I did during college, but somehow neither of us knew what the other was going through. Even more surprising is that this wasn’t due to her trying to hide it, either.

In the years since, I resolved my doubts by becoming an atheist, she resolved her’s by becoming a liberal Christian in the mystical tradition. She find’s it puzzling that I seem to ignore that kind of Christianity on this blog, but there’s a reason for that.

Liberal Christians tend to be pro-science, pro-choice, accepting of LGBT people and rights, and allies in the fight to keep church and state separate. From a political standpoint they are allies, not enemies and I don’t see any reason to put any effort into alienating them.

As far as the mystical tradition, it came up in a few classes, but I’m too concrete of a person to have taken it seriously. At least in its modern application it seems to be non-dogmatic, relatively liberal, and makes no fact claims about reality, so again I see no point in trying to refute it.

The big name atheists get some flack from the “sophisticated” theologians for arguing against what they see as a caricature of the worst that Christianity can be. Unfortunately that caricature isn’t a straw man, it’s what’s at the core of the dominionist movement, which unfortunately is a threat, especially with this election cycle.

The other issue with arguing with liberal theology is that with the rejection of the authority of scripture (whether explicit or implicit), it gets pretty slippery. At least with biblical literalists there’s a standard you can hold them to, and fortunately it’s a standard that makes it easy to mock them relentlessly.