[intalentive]

>You'll never convince someone logically of something that has to be experienced viscerally.

While you might be right, Christianity in particular is based on truth claims, including specially the resurrection, so the Christian tradition places special emphasis on rational defense. Apologetics is not just a means to persuade others; it is also a means to persuade oneself.

Edit: Responses say that all religions involve truth claims. True, perhaps I was imprecise. I only mean that the Christian case is especially stark. St. Paul: "If Christ be not raised, your faith is in vain." I'm not aware of another faith tradition that considers itself to hang upon a single boolean.

[swat535]

Actually, as a Christian (Catholic), I 100% agree with your assertion. While all regions claim truth, Christianity really centers itself on this idea.

In fact, this is repeated over and over again, so much so that I've lost count of the number of times I've heard the following during Homily: "In Christianity is not true, and Christ was proven to not have been risen, we should stop practicing it".

You quoted Saint Paul which is great and one can find plenty of other examples such as Lewis's trilemma: "Lord, Liar, Lunatic". [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis%27s_trilemma

[thrance]

All religions are based on "truth claims", Christianity is nothing special in that regard. Ask a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew... They all have their professions of faith, and fervently believe their teachings are the truth.

[jabl]

> Christianity in particular is based on truth claims

As opposed to...? I'm not aware of any major religion that openly admit their teaching is made up BS. All seem to claim to know "the truth".

[collingreen]

They claim to know the truth but the reasoning behind it is different between religions. I'm no religious expert but I'm very familiar with Mormonism and they push really hard on the idea that faith is intentionally separate from truth and you learn about the truth of the church by meditating on your feelings and experiencing frisson, not via logic. Yes everyone has their mythology and Mormonism has its share of things the prophet says God says but it is very different than the Christian apologists that try to reconcile the Bible with things like astrophysics and other observed phenomena.

[ensignavenger]

"faith is intentionally separate from truth"

Do you have a citation for this? I am reasonably familiar with Mormonism (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) and I don't think I have ever heard this before?

[collingreen]

I'm no religious scholar but I've had a LOT of conversations with Mormons with various levels of training (regular folks, bishops, missionaries) about why parts of the story don't make logical sense or aren't internally consistent. The common answers are in the expected range from the standard "god works in mysterious ways" to "if you could prove God was real it wouldn't take faith and the point of the human existence is to find faith".

The Mormon church, of course, has its wings of scholars trying to find evidence to support their origin stories (like looking for their god's original home planet or buying ancient South American temples to hopefully find something supporting the story of white peoples in the early Americas) but they also fully lean in to the idea that humans are inherently fallable and human reason isn't as powerful as faith and feeling. I think this is well demonstrated by the ritual of "bearing one's testimony" in church which is always ways you FELT the holy spirit or by the modern forgiveness (and embracing of) the clear corruption and deception of the original prophet Joseph Smith (like the demonstrably false book of Abraham, for example).

This isn't even supposed to be judgement of one way over the other - I'm just describing the very strong difference between Christian apologists like the author (who want the true truth the right way) and other kinds of proselytizing (that are more supportive of "any road to the right answer").

[ensignavenger]

None of this seems to indicate a belief in faith being "intentionally separate from truth".

[collingreen]

Hopefully you can forgive me for the misleading turn of phrase then

[paulddraper]

Means that it rests on claims of real-world events.

As opposed to Buddhism, Taoism, Shinto, Jainism, etc.

[pitpatagain]

It still seems like a meaningless distinction, Buddhism also rests on claims of real world events: the Buddha is a historical figure, the story of his enlightenment being a factual happening is key to the belief system.

There are ways of interpreting and practicing Buddhism in which this is less important (eg modernist, psychological, western), but that's also true of Christianity (eg the Jefferson Bible, Unitarians, etc).

[gunian]

>You'll never convince someone logically of something that has to be experienced viscerally

"poofy guy in the sky doesnt care about war or rape or torture because someone ate an apple. sent his kid in the form of a human. kid was killed/human sacrificed. that saved all humanity. this doesn't stop rape, war, torture but it saved humanity"

the brain has to do some gymnastics to deal with dissonance

[heyjamesknight]

/r/atheism is leaking again.

[StefanBatory]

as militant as that sub is; I can't feel but understand them

that subreddit makes a looooot more sense when you treat it like you'd treat exislam or exmormon, people who were intentionally hurt by the church, both Catholic one and local Protestant

[heyjamesknight]

In my experience frequenting those boards as a former atheist, the vast majority of the militant atheist types were harmed more by their inability to compete in the standard hierarchies of society than they were by any particular Church or faith.

Most of them are angry at "The Man"—God just happens to be "The Man" at the very top.

[StefanBatory]

I get your perspective and I will admit there are surely cases like that - I still wouldn't say it's a vast majority.

Though that raises a question. For example if you were a LGBT person in Deep South and abused over that, who is to blame? Every individual who did that (unfortunately, in the name of religion), or the Church culture who allowed for that to be norm?

And anger over church. I'm Polish, and I'm bi. The most well-known bishops were politically hand-in-hand with the previous ruling party. I would hear in public state media how I'm a part of "rainbow disease" that's infecting the country. Church would often buy land for 1 (!)% of the price. At which point can I say that it wasn't just a few bad apples, but the whole structure who allowed for things to be that way?

[gunian]

haha don't know what that means / is but shout out poofy guy in the sky got better PR than the barons :)

dude created rape, torture and human sacrifice and gets less negative press than Trump and Elon

[MisterTea]

> sent his kid in the form of a human.

Jesus is God. Don't ask me how to explain it from a theological standpoint but from my understanding: God decided he wanted to better understand the NPCs in his HumanSim(TM) game so he straps on a VR headset, enters the game via a virgin birth hack, gets killed, then rage quit. Hasn't been seen since so likely started a new game on some other planet.

[gunian]

SV waiting for the HumanSim IPO