Discussion Grounds

Luke, you say,

“I never intended to imply that Jesus was just an invisible, magical, wish-granting friend, or that Christianity was just belief in an invisible, magical, wish-granting friend. I have repeatedly affirmed otherwise. I never said that was a complete description of him.”

and

Maybe here’s where the misunderstanding is. I never said that calling Jesus an “invisible, magical, wish-granting friend” was to offer a good description of Christian belief, either. I know it’s distorted.

But you have also said,

I am not attacking straw men. I am attacking standard Christian doctrine.

The problem is not that I mock standard Christian doctrine. The problem is that standard Christian doctrine is so easily mockable. Please don’t complain that I’m sometimes not nice about your belief that you have an invisible friend. Instead, please stop believing you have an invisible friend….

If you’re an average Christian, you do believe in magic, you do believe you have an invisible friend, you do believe Jesus was a man-god, and you do believe Jesus resurrected and flew off into the sky….

My message to mainstream Christians is this: Don’t pretend like that’s not what we’re debating. Don’t hide behind obscurantist language. You believe you have a magical invisible friend who sometimes grants you wishes and you know it. You just don’t like how ridiculous it sounds when I state your beliefs in plain, simple English.

If the shoe fits…

Now apart from “man-god” and “resurrected,” that’s as trivializing as anything I’ve pointed out to you here, and as distorted. I don’t see you disavowing this distortion. I only see you making it equivalent to “belief in an ‘Almighty Creator and Savior.” Sure, the second is an incomplete picture, but it’s not a trivializing incomplete picture. One distorts through incompleteness, the other distorts through error.

Later in your most recent letter you say,

But it was literally true of what I believed.

If it was, then I’m glad you don’t believe that anymore. But if you continue to say this is “standard Christian doctrine” that is “so easily mockable,” then all I can do is refer you again to my refutations of that in my Letter 16 and its postscript, my Letter 15, and my Thinking Christian post on the subject, which I know you have read already. These show that your mocking depiction of Christianity is not literally true. I don’t know how I could show it any more clearly than I have.

Until we come to agreement on this, we have not come to agreement on the topic of the debate we are having here. The Christianity you are, in your own mind, disputing, is vastly different from genuine Christianity. I’ve demonstrated in a negative way how your view can be shown to be wrong, and I have shown at least a glimpse (at Thinking Christian) of the positive side of Christianity in its undistorted form.

We have to get through this to a realistic view of Christianity, or we will be at an impasse.