Christianity in regards to apologetics
First of all, I am not pro or against religion, I simply am pro questioning and using critical thinking skills for all systems of thought, including religion. A lot of people have been conditioned by religion to only use questioning and critical thinking skills within the boundaries that particular denomination has allowed. Then that church may use scare tactics of fear of hell in order to keep you from questioning beyond their biases and “approved areas of use for critical thinking skills.”
What I mean by this is within our mega church denomination, we often would get these books which would stimulate and cause us to consider our current state of “hope”, or as they like to put it, our Hope Quotient. Or they would give us other books to stimulate and question our current relationships with our family members and friends. Or when it came to apologetics they had already pre-packaged, pretty print answers that “defended the faith” but more so in actuality dealt with any questions that did not support the growth of their denomination and Christianity in general. So in short, when it did almost touch the boundaries they set, they gave you the answer to the question rather than considering all the different vantage points. So your questions and answers were already carefully considered so that it may have seemed like you were questioning and critically thinking all sides, but truly your questions and answers given to you were already bias to the religious denomination before you even asked the question.
I’ll give an example. Within the grand megachurch Bayside, they had this apologetics conference I attended. I was super excited as a high school student to learn proper rebuttals against those who didn’t believe in our faith and went to as many sessions as possible. There was a session on the accuracy of the Bible which now makes me laugh, but then I didn’t realize how the way they set this up, was to shepherd me to the questions they wanted to answer for us and critically think for us according to their biases. So for example, when it came to the validity of the scriptures in the Bible, they only mentioned how it is most likely accurate because we have so many copies, and all these copies give us this pretty statistic that shows it most likely was true. However, they used much more biased terms such as, “With these statistics and how many copies we have, we know it is true and God did preserve his word.” Then any questions revolved around their bias belief that it was true based on a statistic that only considered copies of copies and no originals.
However if they actually allowed a discussion for people to critically think and analyze beyond the boundaries they had created, we would’ve had an atheist there as well as a Christian in order to have a wider perspective on the topic. The atheist would’ve shared all the contradictions he found, then the Christian would be trying to find ways to show how maybe it wasn’t a contradiction. The atheist would’ve pointed out we have no originals whatsoever which means we cannot properly conclude they are correct. The Christian would say God still would preserve his word. The Atheist would point out the jealousy, wrath, anger, genocide, slavery and unequal laws that supposedly the Creator enacted while the Christian will ignore those instances and focus on the verses where it talks about how God is love and loves everyone. This type of format would actually challenge the audience to consider more than one point of view, more than one bias and help everyone expand.
So with this, I know that most of my friends follow this format for questioning and critically thinking about their religious denomination within Christianity. They will only read “pre-approved church material” or biased books that support the religious denominations viewpoint on the Bible and it’s approved interpretation of that denomination. When I ask if they read books from other people’s perspectives, from other religion’s or from an atheist perspective and they say no. Why am I not surprised? Because that’s how they’ve been conditioned by their religious denomination, and they did a darn good job of it too because most of them are scared out of their mind to go beyond the boundaries that religious denomination has drawn for them to stay within.
What I mean by this is within our mega church denomination, we often would get these books which would stimulate and cause us to consider our current state of “hope”, or as they like to put it, our Hope Quotient. Or they would give us other books to stimulate and question our current relationships with our family members and friends. Or when it came to apologetics they had already pre-packaged, pretty print answers that “defended the faith” but more so in actuality dealt with any questions that did not support the growth of their denomination and Christianity in general. So in short, when it did almost touch the boundaries they set, they gave you the answer to the question rather than considering all the different vantage points. So your questions and answers were already carefully considered so that it may have seemed like you were questioning and critically thinking all sides, but truly your questions and answers given to you were already bias to the religious denomination before you even asked the question.
I’ll give an example. Within the grand megachurch Bayside, they had this apologetics conference I attended. I was super excited as a high school student to learn proper rebuttals against those who didn’t believe in our faith and went to as many sessions as possible. There was a session on the accuracy of the Bible which now makes me laugh, but then I didn’t realize how the way they set this up, was to shepherd me to the questions they wanted to answer for us and critically think for us according to their biases. So for example, when it came to the validity of the scriptures in the Bible, they only mentioned how it is most likely accurate because we have so many copies, and all these copies give us this pretty statistic that shows it most likely was true. However, they used much more biased terms such as, “With these statistics and how many copies we have, we know it is true and God did preserve his word.” Then any questions revolved around their bias belief that it was true based on a statistic that only considered copies of copies and no originals.
However if they actually allowed a discussion for people to critically think and analyze beyond the boundaries they had created, we would’ve had an atheist there as well as a Christian in order to have a wider perspective on the topic. The atheist would’ve shared all the contradictions he found, then the Christian would be trying to find ways to show how maybe it wasn’t a contradiction. The atheist would’ve pointed out we have no originals whatsoever which means we cannot properly conclude they are correct. The Christian would say God still would preserve his word. The Atheist would point out the jealousy, wrath, anger, genocide, slavery and unequal laws that supposedly the Creator enacted while the Christian will ignore those instances and focus on the verses where it talks about how God is love and loves everyone. This type of format would actually challenge the audience to consider more than one point of view, more than one bias and help everyone expand.
So with this, I know that most of my friends follow this format for questioning and critically thinking about their religious denomination within Christianity. They will only read “pre-approved church material” or biased books that support the religious denominations viewpoint on the Bible and it’s approved interpretation of that denomination. When I ask if they read books from other people’s perspectives, from other religion’s or from an atheist perspective and they say no. Why am I not surprised? Because that’s how they’ve been conditioned by their religious denomination, and they did a darn good job of it too because most of them are scared out of their mind to go beyond the boundaries that religious denomination has drawn for them to stay within.
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