>How can someone reject Christianity when they haven't done the due diligence of looking at __primary sources__ for the Christian position?

Intellectual laziness. They just repeat what they see on reddit or sound-bytes they've heard from others who have no idea what they're talking about.

If they want to know what Christianity truly teaches have them read St. John Chrysostom, St. Basil, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, St. Augustine, The Council of Nicaea, The Council of Jerusalem, The Council of Trent, Cornelius a Lapide commentary, Haydock Commentary, the Catena Aurea, the Latin and Greek fathers.

It is amazing how incredibly prideful and intellectually dishonest people are. If they took even 20-30 hrs of historical and theological study of what the Church always believed before the Protestant revolt, they would quickly realize that they know next to nothing about Christianity or History in general.

It's more of a coping mechanism, is it not? I've read roughly half of the things you've listed, but definitely don't remember most of the nuances.

By default, people don't know (or care) about philosophy, and religion is a type of philosophy. It's a bit like bashing people for not taking the time to read Kant.

I think that thebproblem is that people that haven’t taken the time to read Kant most of the time do not attempt to criticize or discuss his work.

People criticize religion without extensively reading the theology because religion is a lived experience in a way that Kant isn't.

Wow that's incredibly judgemental from someone claiming to be a christian. I see you've learned the lessons from those books well and are applying them in your daily life.

Perhaps this is different than your own experience or reading, but it doesn't make this experience less valid. Considering this is the dominant form of Christianity in the US, I think it's safe to say the snarky statement above accurately describes Christianity as how a majority of us experienced it.

My childhood spent in a very restrictive environment, and watching how "Christians" behave, definitely gives me the right to speak on behalf of Christianity, and the right to reject it completely as the fraud it is. I understand it completely well.

All I have to do is observe what they do. From the near-abuses of my own experience, to how the Orthodox have been perfectly willing to embrace Putin and other cruel leaders, to how women and gay people are frequently treated. There's the cruelty dispensed by the faithful over the millennia. In your own response there's no shred of Christ's love or humility. You offer nothing but cold, empty judgements rushing to defend and insult.

All of this shows there is little to nothing of worth in the system, and wasting hours of my irreplaceable life reading men (and it's always men) debate how many angels can fit atop a pin, is not going to convince me otherwise.

I'm sorry to hear you were personally negatively affected by the Church. Btw Orthodox is a big umbrella, I'm not sure what you're referring to with Putin, I'm not Russian Orthodox.

I recognise that my comment may have been flippant. But you can't judge Christianity based on its misuse or the inadequacies of Christians. I am just sick and tired of hearing that my beliefs are irrational, or "out of date", and that I need to "get on with the times" and abandon myths and legends about God and Christ. This has been a consistent impression I get from others especially in the tech field. And upon talking to people who believe this I find that they really have done no research on their part and so end up with superficial understanding of everything. I only ask that people do their due diligence and read Christian texts to judge for themselves. I encourage you to completely abandon the current messy Christian debates (including my comment) and look into Christian texts of the first few centuries.

Indeed a lot of writers are men due to the cultural reasons of old times. But you can find sayings by women: https://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Desert-Mothers-Sayings-Chri...

Christianity is supposed to remake people into something better. Paul had a concept of the "new man" in Christ. If Christians are no better than the secular population, and if the Christian leadership are just as prone (if not more so) to being corrupted by power and money as secular leadership, then it becomes obvious Christianity does not work. Or at least, does not work for the majority of its adherents. There are truly holy women and men out there, but, it's quite clear these are outliers and not representative.

In my personal experience, and in looking at history, it's quite clear Christians are the same, or worse, in most observable behavior as their secular counterparts. Though I'm shouldn't single out Christians. Any faith, which aspires to personal transformation, falls short. I was briefly involved in the American Zen Buddhist community, and then I discovered the faults and greed of the so-called zen masters. If "enlightenment" doesn't free someone from the desire for money, for temporal power, for sexually abusing members, then what good is it? Islam also falls short in many, many ways.

You can certainly believe in whatever you want. I'm sorry you feel harassed about it. But religion is as much a lived experience as it is a product of philosophers and theologians. For many of us, it was an unpleasant experience which no theologian can redeem. And for many others, they see religion used as a lever for power and an excuse for cruelty. When you feel criticized, keep those things in mind. The criticism is not directed at you personally, but is rather a reflection of the person, and their own experiences, making the criticisms.

New man in Christ indeed, but that's not a magical transformation that happened some time in the past, a time where I can say "I was saved". The transformation is a life-long journey. The new man vs old is a daily struggle, a life-long struggle...

This is not something that can be observed and tested, it is something that can be lived and tested.

I find it incredibly unsurprising that a christian like yourself would assume you know everything about my understanding of religion based on a single snarky comment on an internet forum.

I also find it incredibly unsurprising that a christian like yourself assumes that your understanding of christianity is the one that's right, and most Christians agree with you.

>Don't speak on behalf of Christianity if you do not understand it. And let me tell you in case this isn't clear: You do not understand it.

Holy shit. Literally. There was no place in my statement that I claimed to be speaking on behalf of christianity. Go ahead and keep 'splaining away to that strawman you constructed.

[1] It's also been many years since I last touched the subject.

Can you come up with an explanation that is succinct and correct? All the christian apologetics I read end up saying virtually the same thing, they just pretend they aren't by saying the same thing in a 10,000 word treatise.

It's like every time I read about how $deity isn't a violation of cause and effect, it always ends up being some long winded special pleading.

> You claim this is the Christian view of the atonement. Where do you get this? Is it scriptural? Patristic?

Could you break down each part of the fairly short sentence and explain how it's wrong? Preferably without the quantum jesus that both is and is not god.

"God is sacrificing"

This makes it sound like Christ was a passive agent in the events of the passion and resurrection, which he is not -- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have the same will.

"God is sacrificing his own son, which is also him"

Note how this statement must be false because it's contradictory. How can X "sacrifice" Y, when X == Y? This comes from a misunderstanding of the phrase "Jesus is God" -- that phrase means that Jesus is 'homoousious' in Greek or 'has the same nature/essence' with God the Father. However some people understand it incorrectly as "Jesus is the same person as the Father".

The idiom for Jesus is not God (which is never mentioned in the NT or the nicene creed -- never it is said that "Jesus is God") but the idiom is 'Son of God'. This idiom is the one language that is used by the council of Nicaea to formulate the creed. And to explain what 'Son of God' means the creed goes on to say that Jesus is homoousious with the Father.

"to himself"

The popular and incorrect understanding of this is that God just wanted someone to be punished instead of humanity (note how that doesn't even make sense how humanity is reconciled to God if someone else took the punishment! And how is Jesus supposed to die instead of humanity when he later rose from the dead? the whole thing is absurd!) but this understanding of the atonement (called 'penal substitution') is part of 16th century reformation theology. In the firsth 10 centuries of Christianity we have ZERO authors who thought about the atonement that way (have a quick look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atonement_in_Christianity for a general view of this). The reason all Christian apologists believe this and try to defend it is because they are protestant.

"in order to satisfy rules that he himself also put in place"

This just portrays God as one who needs to find a 'loophole' in the system which he himself has put in place. How can this be even intelligble? God can do whatever he wants and he could have forgiven humanity easily. It's just that what humanity needed was more than forgiveness: human beings needed to be made alive again after being subject to death because of sin. Again just to be clear: the death because of sin is not a punishment -- it's the natural course of events when a human being turns their back to the source of life -- God.

"so that he doesn't have to send people he created and loves infinitely to be tortured forever in a place he created"

The popular image of God throwing people in a pit of fire and torturing them for eternity is not a Christian image. It first made its way to Christianity long long ago (which is probably why it's still prevalent) with the apocalypse of Peter -- a document that was influenced by pagan ideas (I'll put a reference here because this is important: this is from Bruce Metzger's The canon of the NT)