People can always find things in surface syntax to object to. Python's whitespace is pretty unpopular with people who think all "normal" languages have to have curly braces — as well as with some folks who grew up with Fortran and think that significant whitespace equals dinosaurity.
The interesting thing about Lisp is not its surface syntax, but the relationship between code and data. The textual syntax of Lisp is a way of expressing data structures; Lisp code is defined in terms of trees, not text. Most languages don't make the syntax tree of the code available to the programmer; it's hidden away as internal data structures within the compiler.
True, and that makes it a good language to be familiar with, I'm just not convinced it's a good language to start with.
People on this board have talked about programming as a gear in your brain that, to a first approximation, you have or you don't. I'm wondering if there's some well put-together resource you can direct someone with zero experience and just a web-browser to and say "if you're having fun an hour from now, you have the gear, good luck" -- maybe something on Khan academy?
(I learned to program a long time ago, and I started with BASIC program listings in my math textbook -- I don't actually know what the optimal onramps are now.)