Serious Query Regarding Jesus

[mediamogul]

Despite the joking about, people are pointing out a substantial issue.

If you are taking a position that accepts the majority of the scripture, not in an effort to understand truth but an effort to convince others you are placing yourself on a debate platform built on conjecture rather than evidence, and as dismissible as any other conjecture on the 'meaning' of the bible stories.

You may as well claim Jesus was a time traveler like doctor who, or an alien in human disguise. Even with scripture not contradicting your claim, is not the same as supporting your claim.

If you want to convince, you need logic and evidence. There is no compromise. He's either divine or irrelevant.

A theist who deconverts on a flimsy platform may well reconvert once the flaws are laid bare, and it will be next to impossible to bring them back.
Most of all, if they are relaxed about it....it shouldn't harm your relationship.
Changing a core belief based on a slight deception may very well be harmful.

This is an excellent point about deconversion and reconversion. I have known a couple of people who bounced back and forth between "atheism" and belief in god. I put atheism in quotations to describe them because they were in reality people who believed in the existence of god but were simply mad at the god they believed in. I put myself into the group of believing that god does not exist and being bound by that understanding. For instance when i tried to believe in Christianity I was unable because I could not force myself to believe in god and particularly in the Christian system. It was simply not a "live option" for me as William James so astutely put it. People who are at the highest risk of reconversion are people who believe in god and are simply "angry with" or not at peace with that belief. C.S. Lewis claimed that he was an atheist at one point in his life and said that he didn't believe in god but was very mad at god for not existing. I remember thinking two things: 1) that's silly because if you genuinely didn't believe in god's existence how could you be angry with something that didn't exist? 2) of course this guy became a Christian again thinking this way, he always had one foot in the door.