If you have not read Stories Versus Truth, you may want to read that before reading this.

If you are frustrated with witnessing to an Atheist, you are probably dealing with a true Atheist.  Atheism means "not God" or "against God."  A pretty good synonym would be "ungodly person." You can expect no integrity from them. They can rationalize their morality and then change their mind and change it back to suit their purposes. Everything is arbitrary including truth.

I praise God that He has made Himself obvious through His creation, and that He daily speaks to His people and helps them in real, ongoing experience. I praise Him that He has made it obvious that the ungodly are fools who filter the evidence following ridiculous, untestable sswaafts, arbitrary assumptions, insane rationalizations, and logical fallacies.  This is really the difference between you, the Christ-follower, and the ungodly person.  You build on the sure Rock of revelation: God speaking to you and you responding in submission, honor, respect, and obedience to God's Voice and His Power for His Righteousness, which are all free gifts to you.  The ungodly are not so.  They build on carefully filtered evidence, ridiculous, untestable sswaafts, arbitrary assumptions, insane rationalizations, and logical fallacies.  And they like it that way.  We pray that they are set free, but they can be frustrating to deal with.  They tend to be rude, to bully, to lie, to be ignorant on purpose, and to be persistent in all of these things.  In fact, it would be nice if the saints of God would have as much dedication to good adn the ungodly have toward evil.

You need to know about the worldview/paradigm/fake reality of the Atheist  You, as a follower of Christ, also have a worldview/paradigm/fake reality.  Your own worldview/paradigm/fake reality is your fleshly mind.  Atheists are 100% fleshly mind. You also have some measure of the Mind of Christ, which Atheist have 0%.  Your fleshly mind will seek to hide real reality from you, but the Atheist loves unreality through and through.  The Mind of Christ, Christ in you, reveals reality to you as it really is--which destroys your worldview/paradigm/fake reality.  The Atheist has no such hope. Your worldview/paradigm/fake reality contains enough truth to give the illusion of truth but enough lie to spin the truth into a lie.  The Atheist is totally fooled and spends his/her life trying to avoid hearing the Voice of God.  Paradigms are planted in people’s mind by messengers of Satan.  Those messengers may be human or demonic.

God tells us that Atheists know that He exists and that they simply don’t want to acknowledge Him, so He has turned them over to a reprobate mind.  Your experience will confirm this.  With this in mind, does it make sense to discuss their pretended unbelief as if it were real?  They talk about logic and science, but they will not acknowledge the science and logic that confirms God.  That is because they are living in a worldview/paradigm/fake reality that does not allow God.  They will present a story, claiming that they simply are not convinced that God exists.  If they say this but then act as religious zealots for Atheism, they are not being consistent.  It is probably a tactic they have used before or read about on one of the Humanist websites.  Humanism is a religion.  It may be that their worldview/paradigm/fake reality confirms this story (of not being convinced) to them.  It's been said that the motto of the Atheist is, “There is no God, and I hate Him.”  They will tell you that they don’t hate God while they allow every type of irrational thinking in order to deny Him.  Hate is the absence of love.  Love for God is shown by listening to His Voice and obeying Him.  The problem with a worldview/paradigm/fake reality is that it seems like real reality to the person captivated by it.  A lot of these people have no meaning to their lives so they just run around seeing who they can debate.  They debate but never learn anything except how to be deceptive.  Avoid the spirit of debate that turns a conversation into a contest of wit where one side must lose and the other win.  Rather, look openly at the subject with Truth being the winner over error.

The Atheist suffers from this worldview/paradigm/fake reality; however, the Atheist doesn’t have the benefit of the Mind of Christ.  When you speak to a person who has actually set himself or herself against God, your experience is likely to be about the same as if you were speaking to a demon directly--just in case you ever wanted to know what that would be like.  You will hear attacks, accusations, deliberate attempts to irritate, claims of virtue, disdain for God, hateful words about God and His Word, and deception.  Mostly, there will be a lot of deception.  Some Atheists will claim that they are just seeking the truth.  There are also people who have not yet come to Christ who ARE seeking the truth, but the Atheist is simply trying to confuse the issue and deceive.  It’s not that there is no hope of the Atheist, but the Atheist is particularly closed-minded toward God and particularly open-minded to demonic influence.

Your foundation, as a Christ-follower, is Christ Himself.  He is the foundation of all your thoughts.  He speaks to you.  He reveals His will to you.  He is the One Who tells you that the Bible is His Word without error and that the Koran is not.  He warns you of danger many times.  He speaks to you through other Christians.  He speaks to you through the gifts of the Spirit in the members of the Body of Christ.  He speaks to you through creation, through real science.  The Universities, even so-called Christian Universities, have mostly turned from science and they teach a mix of lies and actual science in a way that makes it difficult for you to pull the lies from the truth.  However, real science is observation of the creation—and God speaks through creation?

(some caveats about hearing God's Voice)

The Atheist also has a foundation for all of the details of his or her worldview/paradigm/fake reality.  The foundation of the Atheist’s worldview/paradigm/fake reality will almost surely include Naturalism (God doesn’t speak to people or do anything else), Materialism (God doesn’t exist or I don’t believe that God exists), and Uniformitarianism (The worldwide catastrophic flood never happened).  There may be others assumptions that are used as foundational starting points for all Atheistic thinking.  This is why they immediately deny any miracles that you may be experiencing.  This is why they immediately deny your experiences with Christ, when He reveals His will to you and reveals many other things.  While they are willingly ignorant, they are, at the same time trapped in slavery to Satan.  You need to know that even though Atheists tend to talk a lot about science, they cannot use science prove their foundations, the starting point of all their thinking.  If you ask them to show you why they believe in Naturalism, they will not be able to do so.  They will give you a non-answer: “It’s self-evident”  “It doesn’t need any defense.”  These are examples of the non-answers you will get.  They will change the subject.  If you ask them to show you the steps of their scientific experiments that prove Naturalism in a way that you can repeat the experiments, they will not be able to do it.  They will try every deception they can come up with—which you will find to be a lot of deception, misdirection, accusations, abuse, attacks, etc.  An honest Atheist will admit that they take their foundational assumptions on faith.  They don’t like to think about this.  It destroys their paradigm to some extent.  But, you will find that a people who are refusing to acknowledge God have no trouble with a worldview/paradigm/fake reality that is inconsistent with itself.  The Atheist's real problem is with God.  They don’t want to acknowledge God.  They don’t want to submit their wills to His will.  This is the real problem.  Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, which is why the rebellious carry that spirit of witchcraft with them.  In fact, many of them move to some form of occult practice after they get tired of the emptiness of Atheism.  From that time, they build their paradigm directly on demonic revelation.

In an attempt to save his or her worldview/paradigm/fake reality, an Atheist will try to assert that your experience with the Creator God is your paradigm rather than reality.  They are trying to level the playing field by asserting a lie.  However, your worldview/paradigm/fake reality is not your experience with your Creator.  The Creator is gradually destroying your worldview/paradigm/fake reality with the Truth.  The Atheist will also try to equate your faith with his of her make-believe faith.  Don't allow yourself to be deceived.

So you have faith and the Atheist has faith?  Well, that’s an example of the logical error of equivocation.  That is, the word, faith is used twice in the same sentence and each use of the word faith has a different meaning.  So, the sentence seems true, but it is a lie.

You have faith, yes.  Faith, in this case, means a supernatural belief and trust that is a gift of God that comes when God speaks to you.  God speaks to you and gives you belief and trust in what He has said.  Along with faith comes hope, which is a vision of reality, a partial pulling back of the fleshly nature, a partial pulling back of your own worldview/paradigm/fake reality so that you can see reality as it really is.  This faith has power because it gives you access to grace so that grace can think the thoughts of God, say the words of God, and do the works of God through you.  This is the kind of faith that can heal the sick and raise the dead.  Make-believe faith has no power.

On the other hand, the Atheist has only make-believe faith.  This faith has nothing to do with the faith of the follower of Christ.  Atheists simply make themselves believe what they want to be the truth, hence, it is make-believe faith.  Some Christ-followers have this same kind of make-believe faith--and they live frustrating, Naturalistic lives.

You might think that the Atheist would be ashamed of using such tactics, but they are not.  They don't want to acknowledge God.  They want to live in unreality.  Insanity is the failure to accept reality as it is.

Summary: It’s fine to have a conversation with an Atheist.  You can’t really know if the Holy Spirit may draw them to Himself.  Even if they are insincere, your part is to listen to the Voice of the Holy Spirit and only say those words that the Holy Spirit gives you.  God doesn’t ask you to convince them of anything.  The Atheist always lives within a worldview/paradigm/fake reality and can never show the validity of the Naturalism, Materialism, and Uniformitarianism--the basis of every argument of the Atheist.  Your faith is the free gift of God as He speaks to you.