An attempt at soft-selling Christianity to skeptics

[arvindiyer]

Here is yet another article at the Huffington Post, where a 'religious moderate' has supposedly 'checkmated a skeptic'; with the interesting title "What's the least you can believe and still be a Christian?"

After ritually knocking down a few strawpersons, the author makes a case for Christian belief by listing these advantages:

Quote::
:
A great benefit of these beliefs is that they provide promising answers to life's most profound questions including:

• Who is Jesus?
• What matters most?
• Am I accepted?
• Where is God?
:
:

Hold on a second! Life's most profound questions? Is 'semi-literate carpenter-turned-village-preacher from Bronze Age Palestine' a valid answer to the first question? All a skeptic can say is 'Nice try!'. There is no need to take the trouble of explaining why we don't think there is any sense of priority or proportion in these listed Christian pre-occupations. Prof. Feynman has already done so:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zi699WzAL0#t=1m45s

Prof. Feynman's 'too-local-too-provincial' objection is expanded a bit in Item 1 in this recent post..

[bala]

Isnt the resurrection an essential tenet of christianity? Throw away the resurrection and the whole thing falls down like a pack of cards. How does a sceptic come to terms with resurrection?

[astrokid.nj]

His set of 'Life's most profound questions' is a fucking joke. Its amazing how such a person can watch the world around him, and not feel ashamed when watching true intellectuals discuss true profound questions and in fact come up with evidence based, truly amazing answers to those questions.

[arvindiyer]

(28-Jan-2011, 01:52 PM)bala Wrote: Isnt the resurrection an essential tenet of christianity? Throw away the resurrection and the whole thing falls down like a pack of cards. How does a sceptic come to terms with resurrection?

Indeed. One exasperating (and amusing) trait of many believers is that they even nod vigorously in agreement with Prof. Feynman when he says "I have a difficulty believing in all these special stories that have been made up...", but will hasten to add that though the other 'special stories' are false, theirs, just theirs, is true. And they will say this with a straight face.

In this excerpt from this remarkable conversation between Prof. Dawkins and the astronomer-priest George Coyne, Fr. Coyne goes as far as admitting that "Most of the miracles I read about, I don't believe in!", but in that very sentence begins to defend his belief in the Virgin Birth and Resurrection!

One skeptic response to the believers' insistence that 'some special special stories are truer than others' could be that it is hard to believe because so many of these special stories are so very similar! A case in point is the Hidden Story of Jesus, which is recycled and remixed from so many other stories which followers of mainstream monotheisms today have no difficulty in lambasting as myths.

Elsewhere in the complete interview, Fr. Coyne raises the religious objection to the scientists' claim that scientific explanations of natural phenomena progressively make God superfluous (outlined briefly in Item 2 in this recent article), by simply saying things like 'God gives himself to us superfluously out of love' and 'I do not seek God in order to be able to explain things!'. Doesn't this sound like a classic cop-out? Don't the apologists notice the paradoxical nature of their attempt to 'prove the necessity of the superfluous'?