All youth 6th-12th grade are invited to join us at the Soul Garage tonight, May 12th 6:30pm-8:00pm as we wrap up our mini series on Gospel Competitors and review some of the key apologetics questions we have covered this year in preparation for our special night next Wednesday. Doors open at 6:00pm. Open recreation and open café at the start of the night.
On May 19th we will be having a Christian guest join us to role play as an atheist and have a conversation with our youth. Each breakout group of youth will be assigned one primary apologetic question tonight to review and study in preparation for having a mini debate with the role play atheist on the 19th.
All parents are invited to join us on the 19th for the role play with our Christian guest pretending to be an atheist. This will give you a great opportunity to have a follow up conversation with your child about the conversations that take place during the night. If any parents do not feel their youth are prepared for a role play like this, we respect your decision to keep your child at home that night. We have worked hard to format it in such a way that we feel it will be very appropriate and helpful for all youth 6th-12th grade with a debriefing time worked into the end of the night when our pretend atheist will come out of character and share his testimony and answer any questions that remain.
THE SOUL GARAGE 
How about chat with a real atheist, like me? By making up your strawman atheist, you just teach your children to fail.
Sorry for such a delayed response. I apparently need to check the comments section here more than once every couple years. You raise a great question. Actually, that was my original hopes. I love the idea of sitting down with people who have different religious beliefs to listen and seek to understand their perspective and reasons for coming to the conclusions they have arrived at. Ultimately, that did not work out for our group back in 2021. If you were there for the actual event with our “strawman atheist” as you called him, I would have been curious if you would have still been so derogatory. We worked hard to create a “steel man” not a “straw man”. Our guest was a Christian, but works on a college campus interacting regularly with agnostics, atheists and many others who do not share our Christian beliefs. My instruction to him was to do his best to fairly and accurately represent the best positions and defenses for an atheistic worldview. I felt he did that well. He challenged our youth to think very deeply and work to articulate their beliefs clearly. If it was a “debate”, he probably would have won. If you still have any interest in having a chat with a Christian, I would love to learn more about your story and how you arrived at your current position in terms of your spiritual beliefs. If so, shoot me an email at tony@soulgarage.com.
You claimed you had written a response to me recently, so I am confused on where it is.
I have quite a few reasons not to trust Christians when it comes to their claims of being “fair” with atheists. I’ve seen Christians pretnd they were atheists before and they are terribly ignorant on actual counter apologetics. I am curious, what do you think are the “best” positions and defenses for an atheist?
So, if this fellow would have “won”, why are you still a Christian? As for how I was a Christian and why I am now an atheist, you can see that on my blog, just go look in the “boss’s office”.
https://clubschadenfreude.com/about/