Since anyone can post anything to the Internet, it's inevitable that much of it's junk, and some it's outright, well, evil. So naturally, there's a Web site — heck, there are probably lots of them — devoted to blasphemy.

It goes by the charming name of Blasphemy Challenge, which sounds like a really warped board game. And that's not far off, actually, except things are a bit more high-tech than that.

The site was cofounded by a couple of guys named Brian: Brian Flemming, a filmmaker, and Brian Sapient, who runs an atheist outfit called Rational Responders. (Remember that name, because it's gonna look really ironic in a minute.) The Brians are ticked off over, among other things, Mark 3:29's warning that "whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; he is guilty of an eternal sin." So in ads on various teen-oriented Web sites, they're urging his audience to post videos of themselves announcing "I deny the Holy Spirit," in return for which they get a copy of Flemming's movie The God Who Wasn't There.

Cute, huh? But wait, there's more.

Flemming, who's fond of such language as "the crock that is Christian doctrine" and "religious tyranny," wants it known that he's waging war against Christianity because it's "psychological torture." So for the videos soliciting, he and his fellow Brian are handing out some helpful tips. "Give [your video] your own personal touch," their site suggests. "Possibly add extra blasphemy," and try recording the video "in a church or outside of a church." And they're high on the prospects for their project: "More than 100 participants have already blasphemed the Holy Spirit and earned free DVDs during the pre-launch phase of the Blasphemy Challenge," they crow in a press release.

Now if I were an atheist, I'd have to wonder just what the Brians imagine they're accomplishing here. Though one of them (Sapient) spearheads something called the Rational Response Squad, their approach — a mixture of in-your-face obnoxiousness and outright silliness — is anything but rational for a couple of guys hoping to gain credibility.

All the Brians are really doing is preaching to the choir, so to speak. They're not trying to persuade anyone, but simply catering to hardened atheists or adolescents who are into reflexive rebellion. They're turning off everyone else, and giving the distinct impression that they (and the teens they're urging to follow their cause) are, in the words of one commentator, "attention-starved boneheads."

The question is: Are the Brians really too dense to figure that out? That hardly seems likely. What's more likely is that they don't care — that they're far more interested in venting their spleen, and trying to strike a pose of cleverness, than they are in convincing serious people of the case for their position.

And if so, they've got company.

As Sam Schulman notes in a Wall Street Journal article, there's a new wave of atheists making their voices heard these days, several of them writing books, like Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation). But while they've gotten a fair amount of attention in certain media and academic circles, they haven't exactly made any new contributions to the debate. Writes Schulman:

What is new about the new atheists? It's not their arguments. Spend as much time as you like with a pile of the recent anti-religion books, but you won't encounter a single point you didn't hear in your freshman dormitory. It's their tone that is novel. Belief, in their eyes, is not just misguided but contemptible, the product of provincial minds, the mark of people who need to be told how to think and how to vote.

"For the new atheists, believing in God is a form of stupidity, which sets off their own intelligence," Schulman says. "They write as if great minds had never before wrestled with the big questions of creation, moral law and the contending versions of revealed truth. They argue as if these questions are easily answered by their own blunt materialism. Most of all, they assume that no intelligent, reflective person could ever defend religion rather than dismiss it."

Schulman cites a few examples of their rhetoric (Dawkins, for example, calls religion "a form of child abuse"), and having read Dawkins' and Harris' books for review elsewhere, I'll second his observation. The distinguishing trait of these atheists isn't their intellect, but their attitude. They're not just irreligious, they're contemptuous toward religion.

You might not think this is all that remarkable: After all, Christians know that hostility toward God and prideful human arrogance is almost as old as mankind himself. But there's more than one kind of atheist. While there are angry or sneering kinds of atheists, there's also a sorrowful kind — the kind who doesn't revel in his unbelief but mourns in it. And as Schulman points out, if you go back a century or two and look at the first major wave of atheists in Western civilization, you find the latter kind were more typical.

To read the accounts of the first generation of atheists is profoundly moving. Matthew Arnold wrote of the "eternal note of sadness" sounded when the "Sea of Faith" receded from human life. In one testament after another — George Eliot, Carlyle, Hardy, Darwin himself — the Victorians described the sense of grief they felt when religion goes — and the keen, often pathetic attempts to replace it by love, by art, by good works, by risk-seeking and — fatally — by politics.

God did not exist, they concluded, but there was no denying that this supposed truth was accompanied by a painful sense of being cut off from human fellowship as well as divine love.

I find it easier to relate to the sorrowful atheist. He's made the tragic error of believing that something (call it Science or Reason or what have you) has made it impossible for him to believe in God. But while he doesn't recognize the error of his belief, he at least recognizes that it is tragic. He has some conscious sense of how empty life is if God isn't there. He hasn't yet reached the point of imagining that his unbelief is some sort of glorious liberation for himself, much less that the world would be better off if everyone else joined him.

The sorrowful atheist generally doesn't publish books or conduct Internet campaigns to advance his views. He may even view the likes of Blasphemy Challenge with a measure of disgust: It can strike him as not only bad strategy, but repulsively mean-spirited. For the sneering atheist, though, that's the whole idea. He may cloak his mean-spiritedness in the garb of a public service, as Flemming does in claiming to save young people from "psychological torture." But the claim rings hollow coming from guys like the Brians, who urge people to film blasphemous declarations on church grounds. These guys don't regret offending Christians; they take a perverse delight in it.

For Christians talking to atheists, it's important to discern which kind you're dealing with. There can be a world of difference between them, and we need to tailor our approach accordingly.

To be sure, there are some rules which apply across the board. For example, while we can and should speak bluntly at times, we should never let ourselves be drawn into a spitting match, no matter how much we're provoked. And we shouldn't discount the possibility that some of the most hostile people have been provoked themselves, perhaps by other Christians who haven't represented the faith very well — whether by bad doctrine, bad argument or bad attitudes of their own.

Still, we need to recognize that some people just have hardened hearts. We can't change that. We can try to sway them with our words and our deeds, but the reality is that we may get nowhere — not because our witness is flawed, but because they simply refuse to believe. You can't spend all your time trying to change them; your time and energy are limited, and you have other people to help, others to serve. You must spend your time and energies wisely.

Other people, however — even if they say they're atheists — really do want to believe in something better. They don't like the way things are for them now: On some level, they know there's something crucial missing, and they long to fill the void.

What do they need? That depends on the individual case, of course. Maybe they need to be exposed to intelligent arguments for the faith; maybe they need to be exposed to Christian love; maybe they need a better understanding of God's Law, or His Gospel, or both. Maybe they need more than one of these things.

You won't know what they need until you talk with them, and in some cases it may take a while to figure that out. But it's worth taking some time to try. The rewards of a single success story — on earth and in heaven — make it well worthwhile.