(June 1, 2015 at 11:40 am)Chad32 Wrote: ...
Yeah, some are really too far gone. It's usually more effective to go for the more liberal to moderate theists, than to worry about a fundy. ...
I'm not so sure about that. Often, the liberal types have such a watered-down version of Christianity that it is nearly impossible to nail down anything. If they don't take the Bible too seriously, they are not likely to be concerned with problems with the Bible. The thing is, without something like the Bible, there is no basis for Christianity at all. But with a fundamentalist, you have some idea of what you are dealing with and problems in the Bible are problems for them.
In my case, I was raised a Southern Baptist, a fundamentalist type of Christian, and it is through looking at the claims carefully that it all fell apart for me. Being a half-assed Christian was not something I ever considered, nor would I consider it. If Christianity were true, it would be the most important thing in the world. But if it isn't (and it isn't), then throwing it all away makes the most sense.
If we think of the Bible as just another book (or set of books) written by a bunch of people, not divinely inspired, there is no reason to pay much attention to it, as a bunch of primitive people are very likely to get a whole lot of things wrong. In which case, there is no basis for Christianity at all, and so it should just be discarded entirely. If, however, it were essentially written by god (divinely inspired, with god basically controlling the writers in their writing), then it all needs to be right. If a bit of it is wrong, then it is unreliable as a guide, and consequently can't be trusted for how one should live one's life. But if you are dealing with someone who is too stupid to get this, that it is either divinely inspired or it isn't, how do you argue with them, to convince them that they should stop pretending to use the Bible for a guide, when it clearly is pretend, since they don't recognize it all as correct?
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
