No, those were not the complaints YOU made. I was talking about others.

Your complaint was that it did not look hopeful that we could agree on the terms of debate, since as far as I could tell you believed in a magical wish-granter, but you denied this.

But I have now changed my mind: Jesus is not a magical wish-granter.

Anyway, thanks for the debate while it lasted.

Those were not the complaints I made.

Other readers: please refer to my last several letters.

Thank you.

I don’t think there’s a very good argument from analogy to be made in the way you describe.

I did not ask “why” my description of Jesus should have a jolting affect because it does not matter. The fact is that it DOES have a jolting effect in our culture, and that serves the useful purpose I described.

I was not the one who persisted with the “magic” stuff. I kept trying to move on and Tom kept bringing us back to “magic.”

“Literally” true, “strictly” true – yeah, that’s what I’m asking. I don’t know why I’m the one being accused of lack of clarity. I stated many, many times what definitions I was using, what I hoped to achieve with such a statement, and so on. Tom, in contrast, repeatedly avoided direct questions so that I could understand what he believed. I was trying very hard to understand what Tom believes and I still can’t get any straight answers. All I get is complaints about tone and approach and respect. Not clarity. Not straight answers.

I would really enjoy an online debate sometime. Definitely! I think they should be viewed as a partnership seeking deeper thinking about the issues. Let me know.

I think it’s quite acceptable to describe Jesus as an “invisible friend”, if that’s taken as an implied argument from analogy (or parallel) of the sort I described above. But, if this was Luke’s intention, he should have made the argument more explicitly, especially after he was challenged on it. Moreover, if Luke intended his comment as an implied argument it was inappropriate at the time he made it, because it was not his turn to make an argument.

Luke keeps saying that his intention was to “jolt” believers into re-examining their position more objectively. But he doesn’t seem to have asked himself why such a description should have this effect. As far as I can see, the only rational reason for it to have this effect is if it’s taken as the sort of argument I’ve described. In any case, if it was not intended as an argument at all, then why persist with it when it had clearly failed to achieve its intended effect and was only serving to distract attention from the actual argument?

Luke justifies his description on the grounds that it’s “literally true”. First (and sorry for being pedantic but I want to be clear about this) I don’t think the word “literally” is the right one, as I don’t think anyone was in danger of taking Luke’s description figuratively. I think Luke really means “strictly true”. But natural language (as opposed to, say, mathematics) is not so straightforward as that. Words have connotations, and as Tom pointed out, the phrase “invisible friend” has additional connotations over and above those of the two individual words. In claiming that that his description is justified, Luke is implicitly claiming that the connotations are appropriate. And that’s a debatable question. (I happen to think they are appropriate in the right context, but I accept that there’s room for disagreement.)

The result of Luke’s lack of clarity was that Tom and others mistakenly took his words as being a summary of his understanding of their position, and continued to interpret them that way despite Luke’s insistence that they were not.