[Serious] Christians what would change your mind?

[John 6IX Breezy]

Your point is that it's Russell conjugation?

Essentially yes; it negatively biases an idea so that it's easier to reject. My position is that ideas should be addressed accurately in their most persuasive form.

[The Grand Nudger]

In what way do you imagine that my objections to christianity make it easier to reject christianity in it's most persuasive form? What is christianity's most persuasive form?

I'll tell you upfront that my objections to christianity all begin with the assumption that christian belief is existentially true. Help me to get where you are, from where I'm at.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

The majority of Christians believe that God has powers which are not bounded by nature. This is called ‘magic’.

The majority of Christians believe (with scriptural support) that God exists in a region above the Earth. This is called the ‘sky’ (or the ‘Heavens’).

The majority of Christians believe that God answers prayers, which is indistinguishable from granting wishes. A Being with this ability may properly be termed a ‘fairy’.

God is, therefore, a magic sky fairy. But I am nothing if not fair minded. In the interest of accuracy and as a concession to Christians, I am happy to refer to God as a ‘magic heaven fairy’.

Boru

[The Grand Nudger]

Even more pedantically, it was christians who decided to use the semantics of fairies to describe gods. Other people's gods, to be sure...but...

...are christians no longer of the opinion that other peoples' gods are fairies? Have you all become polytheists, and no one noticed?

[The Architect Of Fate]

All ideas deserve the dignity of being properly represented. 

Agreed they just aren't entitled to the dignity believers insist they be given which nothing to do with accurate representation 

Words are imbued with emotional coloring which varies even as the literal meaning stays the same. As Bertrand Russell put it,

Words are imbued with emotion only to those who are emotionally invested in them ideologically

"I am firm; you are obstinate; he is pigheaded." Synonyms vary in connotation, and with it their accuracy.

Both mean the same thing . The fact someone is offended by the later is irrelevant

To call God a magical sky fairy is a deliberate attempt to change a words connotation for the purposes of misrepresenting it.

Nope simply false. The idea is simply being expressed in an irrelevant way and theists don't like it because they know how silly their beliefs are stripped of all the wordplay

[John 6IX Breezy]

In one of my undergraduate classes we recreated an experiment from Elizabeth Loftus in which people saw videos of accidents and were subsequently asked to estimate each car's speed.

The variable that changed across participants was the word used to describe the accident. We asked how fast the cars were going when they "hit, "collided," "smashed," etc. The results were simple. People's estimates of the speed correlated with the intensity of the word.

To think you are not altering the accuracy of an idea by framing it with the least charitable words (e.g. magic) is to grossly misunderstand how the mind works.

[The Architect Of Fate]

Then those people were not very bright

And magic is a perfectly accurate word . Again if theists don't like it being described that way despite it's accuracy  . That's their problem not mine .

[The Grand Nudger]

We may be altering an idea, one could assume that this is the intention. That we are altering peoples casual perception of that idea by describing it in uncharitable terms...but here again, if the uncharitable terms are accurate, then what?

You really do have to pick a stream. Perhaps an uncharitable description of your beliefs is an accurate description. Perhaps not. If you insist on the latter, you have an argument from facts on your hand. Good luck...and we'll need more on that count than vague explanations of the problems with generalising in a vacuum. There is no vacuum, christians fill space.

[The Architect Of Fate]

Holy books -Magic fairy tale book 

God - Imaginary friend 

Theology -Magic and make believe 

Don't like me calling it this . Tough cookies because it accurate and your simply offended because you are emotionally invented in it . While i'm not .

[Fake Messiah]

If a man believes water can cure his baldness, he is free to do so. My disagreement with him does not warrant exclusion of him. But any attempt to make his belief representative of everyone else's is dishonest.

What about majority's representation of beliefs? Most of Christians believe in personal God, that God lives in heaven, that you can record sounds of hell if you go deep underground, and also they believe in exorcism. Why do you think Vatican trains exorcists if they are so sophisticated there in Peter's palace? Perhaps to "heal" people from metaphorical devils?

And what you are doing is being very vague, and that is what some liberal Christians are doing by speaking of God as a "ground of being" rather than as an entity with humanlike feelings and properties that behaves in specified ways. Just so you can make the fewest claims and are thus the least susceptible to refutation--or even discussion.

But the truth is for anyone having the least familiarity with religion, it goes without saying that such watered-down versions of faith are not held by most people, who accept instead a personal god who intervenes in the world.