In my experience, detractors of religion in general and Christianity in particular are very fond of using straw-man arguments against faith. I don’t know if they purposely misconstrue doctrines or are just woefully ignorant of actual orthodoxy, but more often than not they attack beliefs that no one should hold. For example, in his LA Times piece last Sunday, Michael Bywater characterized religious people as "infantile" because their soteriology was so ridiculous.
Believing that when they died, they didn’t die if they had thought the
right things, had eaten the right special foods and had slept with only
the right sort of people! [How silly!]
I suppose there might be religious people in the world who think that God will only let them into Heaven if they think the right things, eat the right foods and sleep with only the right sort of people, but right believing Christians are not among them. According to Christianity, God is not interested in having you obey a list of arbitrary rules in order to win his favor. Rather, he is interested in having you become a certain type of person. He wants us, according to Galatians 5:22-23, to be loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle and self-controlled. Those who allow God to make them so get to enter the kingdom of God. Somehow I think Mr. Bywater would have a little harder time making fun of Christians, at least, if he used their actual doctrines in his article. Imagine, believing that after they die, the righteous in heart get to live on. Doesn’t sound so silly to me.