Christianity

[Gary Childress]

Shut up dickhead. Next time you criticise something, read about it rather than accepting what others TELL you. But truly, you really are a dickhead, to now even suggest that I am the one that has not read the bible.

Well, have you read the bible? Doesn't appear to be so.

[attofishpi]

Shut up dickhead. Next time you criticise something, read about it rather than accepting what others TELL you. But truly, you really are a dickhead, to now even suggest that I am the one that has not read the bible.

Well, have you read the bible? Doesn't appear to be so.

Gazza you awful human being a dickhead, have you alread forgot this:

I just don't get the idea that close to around 6 billion of the world's population are going to go to hell because they haven't given themselves to Christ. I mean, if Paul is in heaven after murdering God only knows how many people, then that should pretty much open the door to almost anyone. I mean, I just can't see Gandhi frying in hell but Paul being saved. What an absurd religion.

LMFAO. Are you really that stupid that you assume what evangelists preach is the truth or Y don't you pick up a fucking bible for yourself and work it out.

The evangelist fund_a_mental_list twats actually state you will go to hell for a man making love to a man (personally I'm not into that shit and find it a total turn off) - there is barely a sentance in the buy bull about it. ffs.

NOTE - U DONT GO TO HELL JUST BECAUSE YOU DONT ACCEPT THE LIFE AND DEATH OF CHRIST AS TRUE...

OR

CAN SOME KUNT FIND THAT STATEMENT FROM CHRIST AND PROVE ME WRONG




..how about this GAZZA?

The evangelicals are just preaching what parts of the Bible say. If it wasn't there, they wouldn't be preaching it.

REALLY?

GAZZA LISTENS TO EVANGELICALS....rather than reading a bible

[attofishpi]

I just don't get the idea that close to around 6 billion of the world's population are going to go to hell because they haven't given themselves to Christ.

Gazza, you amazing man of great wisdom and insight.

Have you found the quote in the bible yet where Christ states that unless you believe in him you will go to hell.

PLEASE mate. PLEASE I need some DO_U_BT.

..or are you going to post a video from the likes of an evangelical like Joyce Meyer that states that is the case - because clearly we should believe her more than Christ.

[Immanuel Can]

It must be all the counter-evidence to two of the Bible's key stories (creation and flood) that has you convinced?

Hi, again, Gary...I take it you're feeling "on the down again," from your tone?

Here's the paradox; there's only one Person who actually knows and understands what you go through in your head...and for some reason, He's the one you're at pains to provoke...

I'm not sure why. Maybe you can explain. But whatever the answer is, I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with either the evidence for Creation or for the Flood. Though there is great evidence available for both, but especially for the first (which is indubitably the first and most obvious hypothesis human beings of every culture have ever had) I doubt either one of them actually concerns you much. So maybe we should move past the historical to whatever's really bothering you at the moment.

What's up?

[Alexis Jacobi]

Seen Biblically, then, faith is not opposition to facts. It's a road to finding out what the facts add up to, when they don't add up to quite enough. As such, it's an ally of reason; one does not put faith in things about which one has no reason to exercise any trust. So when Christians are told to "have faith in God," it is not because they have no idea what they're doing, or to Whom they are doing it; it's because they know who God is, how trustworthy He is, how truthful He is, and how rightly He has dealt with them. They exercise faith because of what they already know, and because reasoning invites them to that trust.

In my view what IC does here is to make mistakes of categories. In order to explain what I mean I have to make a few initial statements.

1) Any person who takes themselves seriously, who examines themselves in the platonic sense, who engages with their soul (psyche) in a spiritual sense, who examines their conduct in life, and who takes themselves in hand, that person steps foot on a path where what is inside of us (for a Jungian that is described as 'the unconscious' and for a Vedantist 'the atman' or the 'higher self') responds to what we do and to our intentions.

Anyone can verify this. The contrast then is between a person who is living carelessly, who has relinquished moral and ethical control of themselves, and becomes the victim of those choices and another person who begins to engage with themselves more seriously. I submit that when any person, in any context, at any time, and indeed in any *world* (I mean any different circumstance within our own worldly existence), gains the benefit of access to their own conscious self and potential.

This has been done since *time immemorial*. There are sages and wisemen from all periods of history. And when they talk about what they realize it all coincides.

2) Every culture, and every sophisticated culture, offers definitions of *wisdom*. Every culture outlines a path, as it were, toward moral and ethical and spiritual good. These all coincide. They are not the same but they strongly coincide. All cultures define *god* in one way or another. The way that god is defined is usually a reflection of something inside themselves. There can be no *seeing* of god that is outside of humanness. So, when god is seen (I mean explained) it is really a 'reflection' or a 'projection' of inner content. Thus, to understand what is meant by 'god' one has to examine that human person.

2a) The notion of a god that exists independently of a man is not a possible notion. There is no way that a human person can step out of human consciousness. And there really is no *external god* that can be seen or even defined. Thus there are *god-images* or *god descriptions* and all of these are deeply welded into projections out of human personality. Especially when it comes to the notion of 'personal god' (ishvara). What is a 'personal god'? It seems to be (speaking of believers from a wide belief-perspective) the perceived means and the content through which the image or concept of the personal god responds. It could be in a sense of *intuition* when a difficult question is confronted (and the believer prays for help or resolution). It could be a sign or an event. Such as an 'answer' or a clue coming through some unexpected or unlikely means. It has traditionally been through dreams and also 'omens'.

But it is always something deeply personal, and in a sense non-communicable. Either the believer experiences it, and 'knows', or he does not. And those around him have no way of experiencing what he experiences.

3) When the Evangelical Christian faith-system is examined (I can say that I have done this in some depth) you will find that it has a number of different dimensions or aspects. Let's start with the *personal* and the *internal*. They describe a 'relationship' and also a 'response' or 'answers'. These are personal and have to do with personal issues. Relationships, career, children, health, understanding. But primary is 'psychic health'. 'Taking the Christian cure' meant to leave a disordered sort of life and enter into an ordered and ordering life with a new moral and ethical code. That code was largely Judaic and developed within Judaic social life.

4) Where things get, let's say, wonky is when Christians (or any believers in any religious system) begin to associate in mass communal rituals. Since they do not have a sophisticated view of *personal god* (ishvara) as a reflection or even a sort of 'convenient image' of what in Vedanta is known as the 'impersonal god' or Brahma (a definition of god that is effectively beyond conception) they fall into a trap of laying far too much stress on their personalized god-image. I suggest that this is where things get really really weird a murky.

The best way to illustrate what is hard to describe discursively is through an image.

The myriad pastors who work in this mass-religious field all *work the crowd* and are master psychologists and manipulators.

5) Now one must talk about the foundation of the Christian religion and the definition of god that comes from Yahwism. I have been writing about this over the last couple of weeks. It is a unique and really very strange god-image that is the base of the Christian god-concept. It declares that it is the *only god-image that is real*. It declares that its intention is to destroy other people's god-concepts and to be the sole god-concept for the entire Earth. It is thus a militant movement which operates through rather aggressive techniques.

To understand American Evangelical Christianity and what it has become one has to understand mass-media. These have offered tools of mass communication hitherto unimaginable to the mega-churches.

Briefly, there are two aspects: an inner relationship to what a person discovers inside themselves when *god* is conceived and evoked. The manual for a Christian believer is, of course, the Bible (often the Psalms). The *relationship* with god is something undertaken privately and there is absolutely no reason why this cannot be understood as wholesome. But it would be the same for a Hindu practitioner or a Taoist. Except that Christianity is tightly woven with Occidental mores and our Occidental life-path.

But the other aspect is something strange and troubling. It is perhaps described by the term the theopolitical. We are dealing now with the theopolitical in America today (and I write as an American and from within the cultural perspective though this is an English forum). This is something that requires a whole other descriptive essay.

So then, what is 'faith' in the personal context? It is pretty much what IC says it is. There is a god-idea, a god-concept and a god-possibility, and the believer dives in as it were into an internal path of discovery, revelation, desire for change, for growth and for all that we describe as 'life'. And 'faith' is what exactly? Giving oneself over to the possibility? Trusting in something both inside-beyond and inside-above (like higher self)? Who can find fault in that?

It is the operation of *faith* in the larger theopolitical sense that concerns many.

[Alexis Jacobi]

It must be all the counter-evidence to two of the Bible's key stories (creation and flood) that has you convinced?

Hi, again, Gary...I take it you're feeling "on the down again," from your tone?

Here's the paradox; there's only one Person who actually knows and understands what you go through in your head...and for some reason, He's the one you're at pains to provoke...

I'm not sure why. Maybe you can explain. But whatever the answer is, I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with either the evidence for Creation or for the Flood. Though there is great evidence available for both, but especially for the first (which is indubitably the first and most obvious hypothesis human beings of every culture have ever had) I doubt either one of them actually concerns you much. So maybe we should move past the historical to whatever's really bothering you at the moment.

What's up?

Here, the apologist moves into the territory of psychological analysis. Usually, those who work this angle look for a weakness, a doubt, a crack in the armor that they sense can be exploited.

Immanuel has not in any way commented on or answered the actual complaint brought forward -- he simply cannot take in the information or consider it real. He goes straight for *the kill* so to speak: the breakdown of the potential convert in order to bring him to the *conversion experience*.

Christianity then, in my own view, always shows this aspect: something coercive and *psychological*. Something that operates through opposition and conflict. Something that must *convert*. It is unique in this sense. And all the Abrahamic religions share this tendency because they rise our of the same root.

[iambiguous]

When an individual has invested a lot of his life's energy and work under the banner of an ideology it's hard to let the ideology go. I understand IC has done a lot of charitable work under the aegis of the religious sect he espoused.The effect is like a love marriage in which commitment grows with the duration of the marriage. Divorce is then extremely hurtful. As you say IC is intelligent so he rationalises and rationalises.

You forgot at least one question, B. What do you think a rational person does when the "ideology" (as you call it) is actually right?

It's not how much you've invested in a thing, or how "hurtful" it would be to be disillusioned, or how much you've committed to it already that determines whether one should adhere to a belief or not; it's whether or not you're actually convinced it's the truth.

Here we are at the crux of the matter. Once you have either been indoctrinated as a child, or, on your own as an adult, you have come to embrace one or another religious denomination, you have found a Scripture that comforts and consoles you. A frame of mind that allows you to anchor your but "one in billions of others" Self in something that brings everything together onto the One True Path. You believe this. As do those on all of these -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r ... traditions -- paths as well.

Now, there surely must be a part of you that recognizes those on the other paths are all insisting that you are the one on the wrong path. But the psychological need to believe that they are all wrong and only you are right prevails. Why? Because of what is at stakes on both sides of the grave if you are wrong.

The only difference between IC and many others on their own paths is that IC insists that he can demonstrate that his path is in fact the One True Path. Most other believers embrace a more or less blind leap of faith to their God. They can't actually demonstrate His existence, but are still able to sustain their belief in Him all the way to the grave.

With IC, however, there are those videos. If you watch them sincerely you cannot not believe in the Christian God.

And if you accept that the Christian God must exist because it says so in the Christian Bible that then nails it.

[Immanuel Can]

Seen Biblically, then, faith is not opposition to facts. It's a road to finding out what the facts add up to, when they don't add up to quite enough. As such, it's an ally of reason; one does not put faith in things about which one has no reason to exercise any trust. So when Christians are told to "have faith in God," it is not because they have no idea what they're doing, or to Whom they are doing it; it's because they know who God is, how trustworthy He is, how truthful He is, and how rightly He has dealt with them. They exercise faith because of what they already know, and because reasoning invites them to that trust.

In my view what IC does here is to make mistakes of categories. In order to explain what I mean I have to make a few initial statements.

I'm going to simplify your argument, not changing a thing about it, except to remove the long chains of subordinate phrases and clauses that cause people to get lost in the middle of your thought. I'll keep the major premise, in other words, and just remove all the caveats, conditions, and secondary thoughts you've inserted between the words of the major premise.

So...

1) Any person who takes themselves seriously, who examines themselves ...responds to what we do and to our intentions.

What does this mean? It is a major premise, but the noun isn't appropriate to the verb: "Any person responds to what we do?" (if they also do all the stuff in between?)

This doesn't make basic grammatical sense.

I submit that when any person...gains the benefit of access to their own conscious self and potential.

Not even a complete sentence. It has no predicate. It even fails to communicate as a simple sentence, let alone in its more complex, super-subordinated, original rendering.

2) Every culture, and every sophisticated culture, offers definitions of *wisdom*. Every culture outlines a path, as it were, toward moral and ethical and spiritual good. These all coincide.

That's just flatly and verifiably false. Sorry. Not a single credible sociologist, anthropologist or philosopher will agree with you. They're all convinced of cultural "incommensurability." (their word, not mine)

2a) The notion of a god that exists independently of a man is not a possible notion. There is no way that a human person can step out of human consciousness.

Again, just obviously false. If I don't believe there's a tiger in the next room, it will not make there not be...or put one there, if there is not one.

But it is always something deeply personal, and in a sense non-communicable.

...says the guy who is trying to "communicate" it.

3) When the Evangelical Christian faith-system is examined...primary is 'psychic health'.

Again, just plainly untrue. Easily verifiably so. You're talking about what's called "psychocentrism."

Postmodern "therapeutic" religiosity believes this...see Lundin, Bauman, Lasch, Gergen, and most famously, Reiff...and others. But Evangelicalism is rejected by psychocentric religiosity (and neo-Jungians) precisely for not being what they are.

You actually could not possibly be more wrong. It's like saying that the problem with Quakers is their addiction to violence...it's so far from believable it is a marvel anybody could possibly think it.

The myriad pastors who work in this mass-religious field all *work the crowd* and are master psychologists and manipulators.

If you get your view of what Christians are from watching televangelists, you'll be sadly misled as to what most of them are like. The secular world is rife with charlatans and used-car salesmen...you don't take them as indicative of every Atheist, or even of most of them, I presume.

5) Now one must talk about the foundation of the Christian religion and the definition of god that comes from Yahwism. I have been writing about this over the last couple of weeks. It is a unique and really very strange god-image that is the base of the Christian god-concept. It declares that it is the *only god-image that is real*.

Every religion claims that. Even the ones that pose as most inclusive always insist that the problem with others is that they are not sufficiently inclusive, or are not inclusive in the ways the inclusive people want to be inclusive. So inclusives exclude exclusive people.

But you know what, besides bigotry, is exclusive? Truth is. It always is only ever what it is, and won't bend for anybody. How exclusive!

It is thus a militant movement which operates through rather aggressive techniques.

Again, pretty hilariously wrong. It's an easy wrong assumption, because shallow-thinking would suggest that strong beliefs might be backed with strong methods. But evangelicals are actually pietists, at root: that means that they believe that nobody can be saved by being forced to be. They have to be convinced, on the basis of free choice. Hence, evangelicals are among the least violent and political people on earth, actually. They are limited as to the use of force by their soteriology.

But to know that, you'd actually have to know what evangelicals believe; and I can see you don't.

The manual for a Christian believer is, of course, the Bible (often the Psalms).

Wow. Wrong again. Wildly wrong, if you think that the Psalms are somehow an evangelical manual of self-discovery. They were written by a Jews of antiquity, and are even today celebrated by Judaism. They're in the middle of the OT, and as such, form a part but not the definitive part of the revelation that guides Christians.

But the other aspect is something strange and troubling. It is perhaps described by the term the theopolitical.

Evangelicalism itself is not political. it can't be, because salvation by political means is impossible.

What is true, though, is that in a place like America, evangelicals are able to have a political voice they are denied in most other countries. And it's also true that some of them, the theologically naive, may even believe that America is somehow "God's country" or that saving America is saving souls. But no informed evangelical's going to believe that.

So then, what is 'faith' in the personal context? It is pretty much what IC says it is.

This he says: and then goes on to completely misrepresent what I actually said.

Trusting in something both inside-beyond and inside-above (like higher self)? Who can find fault in that?

This is certainly not even close to anything I ever said about faith. One wonders if you read it at all.

I'm sorry, AJ...it always seems the same with you. You write these long, looping expositions, in which rooting out any clear idea is nearly impossible, and then end with some triumphal declaration of insight you think you've taken us to. What you've really done is lost most of the readers in the "woods" of convoluted verbiage, and then announced a theory that simply hasn't got sufficient warrant that anybody should believe it.

You don't know what an "evangelical Christian" is...that's abundantly clear, and clear to anybody who reads even one expert on the subject. I think you must be meaning "televangelist," or and little more. But what's really telling is when you confuse evangelicalism with psychocentrism, media manipulators, or politicization.

The three are, if nothing else is obvious, very different from one another. Anybody can see that. For instance, the problem with psychocentrism is it's too individualistic and introverted, and the problem with political religoin is that it's too collectivist, and with media manipulators that they are far too extroverted. It's clearly impossible for all three to be a characterization of a single ideology.

[Immanuel Can]

It must be all the counter-evidence to two of the Bible's key stories (creation and flood) that has you convinced?

Hi, again, Gary...I take it you're feeling "on the down again," from your tone?

Here's the paradox; there's only one Person who actually knows and understands what you go through in your head...and for some reason, He's the one you're at pains to provoke...

I'm not sure why. Maybe you can explain. But whatever the answer is, I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with either the evidence for Creation or for the Flood. Though there is great evidence available for both, but especially for the first (which is indubitably the first and most obvious hypothesis human beings of every culture have ever had) I doubt either one of them actually concerns you much. So maybe we should move past the historical to whatever's really bothering you at the moment.

What's up?

Here, the apologist moves into the territory of psychological analysis.

No.

Here the guy who knows Gary speaks about how Gary is experiencing life. Gary and I are not new to each other...and my comments to him are not for your benefit, nor asking you to feel the same way. I was speaking to Gary.

[Immanuel Can]

...all of these -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r ... traditions -- paths as well.

The simplest of logic defeats you.

According to this reasoning, there must be no single answer to "What is 2+2." And why? Because there are is a literally infinite number of other possible answers...3, 4, 5, 99, 1000...

So you are saying, "The fact that other people have so many wrong and partially wrong answers means that you can't ever have the right one." And you call that a powerful argument?

But the psychological need to believe that they are all wrong and only you are right prevails.

Yes...mathematicians are all like that. They always want to be right. And engineers. And brain surgeons, and scientists, and anybody with anything important to communicate... rotten blighters!

Seriously, Biggie...do you honestly think those rejoinders are more than chaff?

[Belinda]

Oh My God. Keep reading book after book after book and maybe you get to quote an author or two and preach like there is a consensus wisdom!!

You muppets of poorly analysed "knowledge" have absolutely NO IDEA about Christ.

If you can read and don't read you are at as much disadvantage as if you could not read.

Yeah. It's funny though isn't it Belinda - just like you state that the like of IC have invested so much that they cannot detach from their ideology...nor can you with your faith in what fellow wo/man have managed to ascertain - YEARS after the fact. Heresay at best.

Funny, ironic...that you don't need to spend your life reading books when with the right faith and the right books and the right intelligence you actually get to the SOURCE.

You are a hypocrite in your statements towards the likes of IC, just an opposite side of the coin.

IC and I are alike in that both he and I have invested time, energy, and faith in certain ways of life and have not been able to nor wanted to rubbish those learned ways without very good cause.

This conversation took a turn that got me interested and reminded me of knowledge from School Certificate scripture lessons when I was sixteen. (Thanks Miss Macdonald!) I consulted Google today to verify half -remembered facts. The theory I have explained is socio-historical .

I wonder if you imagine Palestine at the time of Jesus to be some other -worldly place existing only in myth.

Actually much of The Bible, if you understand the socio-historical and anthropological context, more relevant today than ever before.

[Belinda]

Yahweh's greatest hits: The Desert Island Selection

1. Throws his creations out of the joy of Eden and into the realm of suffering and death because they non-violently disobeyed a single order. If Yahweh were human, the DCF would have rightfully confiscated his "children" by now.

2. Ordering the Jews to commit genocide including the murder of women and children when other tribes "got in the way". Are we sure Adolf wasn't getting his orders directly from Yahweh? Oh, I forgot, Hitler's genocide just wasn't completely successful. Bad Adolf!

3. Summoning a flood to kill just about every human being and non-aquatic creature on Earth because they irritated him. OK. Even Hitler and Stalin would get squeamish over that one. Instead of experiencing death by drowning, wouldn't it have been better to just force an abortion on every living thing that was pregnant? Oh, sorry, my bad. Abortion is an unholy abomination. It's better to suffocate and drown people!

4. Demanding that Abraham show his faith to him by being willing to slaughter his son like a goat. Yeah, right. No. Really. Thanks. I love my children. I'll go find another God. Thank you.

5. Instead of summoning truly just men to carry out his commands, he decides to summon the likes of Abraham, Moses, Paul, and other criminals. Is it any wonder Christianity is so successfully preached to prison populations? Or maybe it says something about Christians that they hold such people in high esteem? To be honest, I'd rather follow the prophecy of a good man, than a reformed psychopath.

It's amazing that anyone worships this thing! You Christians need to take a good look at yourselves. Pretty sickly bunch if I do say so.

[/thread]

Time to find a worthy being to worship.

It's better to spend your time seeking some solution to today's problems. You may find precedents for today's political problems in The Bible. If there were not these precedents The Bible would be no more important in this day and age than stories about demons and dragons.

The story of Abraham and Isaac means a lot more than some lurid child abuse story. You have to factor in that Jahweh was a big change from the warring tribes in the ancient middle east. Jahweh was centralised justice and rule of law, instead of powerful priest-king dictators and honour killings.

[Belinda]

When an individual has invested a lot of his life's energy and work under the banner of an ideology it's hard to let the ideology go. I understand IC has done a lot of charitable work under the aegis of the religious sect he espoused.The effect is like a love marriage in which commitment grows with the duration of the marriage. Divorce is then extremely hurtful. As you say IC is intelligent so he rationalises and rationalises.

You forgot at least one question, B. What do you think a rational person does when the "ideology" (as you call it) is actually right?

It's not how much you've invested in a thing, or how "hurtful" it would be to be disillusioned, or how much you've committed to it already that determines whether one should adhere to a belief or not; it's whether or not you're actually convinced it's the truth.

Part of your personality is arrogant certainty you are right. This is not pride in the truth, it's vanity.

[Alexis Jacobi]

What does this mean?

It means this (and this is what I wrote):

AJ wrote: 1) Any person who takes themselves seriously, who examines themselves in the platonic sense, who engages with their soul (psyche) in a spiritual sense, who examines their conduct in life, and who takes themselves in hand, that person steps foot on a path where what is inside of us (for a Jungian that is described as 'the unconscious' and for a Vedantist 'the atman' or the 'higher self') responds to what we do and to our intentions.

Anyone can verify this. The contrast then is between a person who is living carelessly, who has relinquished moral and ethical control of themselves, and becomes the victim of those choices and another person who begins to engage with themselves more seriously. I submit that when any person, in any context, at any time, and indeed in any *world* (I mean any different circumstance within our own worldly existence), gains the benefit of access to their own conscious self and potential.

Is there something there you'd like me to clarify?

I submit that when any person, in any context, at any time, and indeed in any *world* (I mean any different circumstance within our own worldly existence), engages with themselves in the way I outline, they gains the benefit of access to their own conscious self and potential.

Bolded text added.

What I mean is that I believe this potential exists in all people. So the important thing is *engaging with oneself* or with *the self*. I do mean the idea of *atman* (inner self or inner soul) but in Christian terms I think that is expressed as Higher Self or even the angelic realm. Also connected in the notion of the Holy Guardian Angel.

When I use these terms I refer to different traditions where what I am naming *potentials* have been defined.

[Belinda]

When an individual has invested a lot of his life's energy and work under the banner of an ideology it's hard to let the ideology go. I understand IC has done a lot of charitable work under the aegis of the religious sect he espoused.The effect is like a love marriage in which commitment grows with the duration of the marriage. Divorce is then extremely hurtful. As you say IC is intelligent so he rationalises and rationalises.

You forgot at least one question, B. What do you think a rational person does when the "ideology" (as you call it) is actually right?

It's not how much you've invested in a thing, or how "hurtful" it would be to be disillusioned, or how much you've committed to it already that determines whether one should adhere to a belief or not; it's whether or not you're actually convinced it's the truth.

Here we are at the crux of the matter. Once you have either been indoctrinated as a child, or, on your own as an adult, you have come to embrace one or another religious denomination, you have found a Scripture that comforts and consoles you. A frame of mind that allows you to anchor your but "one in billions of others" Self in something that brings everything together onto the One True Path. You believe this. As do those on all of these -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r ... traditions -- paths as well.

Now, there surely must be a part of you that recognizes those on the other paths are all insisting that you are the one on the wrong path. But the psychological need to believe that they are all wrong and only you are right prevails. Why? Because of what is at stakes on both sides of the grave if you are wrong.

The only difference between IC and many others on their own paths is that IC insists that he can demonstrate that his path is in fact the One True Path. Most other believers embrace a more or less blind leap of faith to their God. They can't actually demonstrate His existence, but are still able to sustain their belief in Him all the way to the grave.

With IC, however, there are those videos. If you watch them sincerely you cannot not believe in the Christian God.

And if you accept that the Christian God must exist because it says so in the Christian Bible that then nails it.

Childhood influences are not always indoctrination, or thoroughly indoctrination on the one hand or leap of faith on the other hand. Besides churchy behaviour and narrative , I was subjected to doubt and scepticism partly by school teachers and partly by liberal parents.

As a British person my peers, at any stage of my life, would have thought leaps of faith were eccentric. There seems to be a culture in the USA of emotionalism and unreason regarding the religious quest. I guess Kierkegaard's leap of faith was preceded by a lot of reasoning and introspection.