things I don't understand.

Would-be atheists and those attracted by the historical claims of Messianic Jews.

So for some reason I was enticed to post on a Christian message board in their general theology section about prayer and doubt - don't worry, a one-liner - and some guy IMed me with a blatant cry for help. He often wondered whether Christianity was just made up and how a good God could create evil and stuff like that. So I asked him what sort of god it was he didn't believe in, and he was like, any of 'em, but the Christian one as well. And I was like, no, tell me about this Christian God you don't believe in, and he went into very standard atheist arguments against God. The point was to get to the point where he sees that Christians probably don't believe in the god he doesn't believe in, either, and that we aren't just being stupid here. We may be wrong [I certainly hope we aren't], but not stupid. Anyways. So I asked whether he'd read much theology, because it seemed from his discussion that he had only read atheist apologetics, so I wanted to know if he knew anything about Christianity. And he was like, sure, yeah, I've read plenty of theology. I asked him what he had read, and he named a universalist comparative religions professor and said most of his reading was internet stuff, including "Internet Infidels". And I replied, "Okay, so you don't know much about Christianity." And he was like, "Do you have an argument against what I said?" I basically replied that he'd better read some primary sources on Christian doctrine if he wants to know what Christianity teaches. He said, essentially, that I seemed to be saying that one could only critique the logic of Christianity if one had read books by Christians and that he didn't necessarily agree with that. I was going to tell him to demand a refund from his university, but instead implied that he was intellectually lazy, recommended some D B Hart, and told him that, if the 100-page book was too long, I had a couple links, one 1 printed page and the other 5 printed pages on the same subject. He didn't say much after that.

What I don't understand: he presented himself as a person struggling against atheism and a former Christian. His reading list indicates that he was not interested at all in remaining a Christian, as all he read was bad atheist apologetics. Why, then, present himself as such? I can understand wanting to rid oneself of one's Christianity, but one should be honest about the process. And if one does so, I imagine that one would want to engage the best arguments for it if one were going to put on the facade of arguing yourself out of it. I mean, hey, I can give a very sympathetic reading to Nietzsche. I even gladly do so. Why on earth should the above person be so unwilling to do so with good Christian theology?

One other thing I do not understand is people who buy the historical claims of Messianic Judaism. Not the sort which is just Protestantism dancing with a Torah, I mean the sort which questions the Trinity, claims true continuity with the Jewish convert communities like the Nazarenes mentioned by St. Jerome [though he appears to claim they were trinitarians with orthodox christology], and other such silly things. And I'm like, whatte the swyve? I can't even begin to mock such views, which is, unfortunately, only going to add to their persecution complex. I mean, sure, whatever, keep the Law, circumsize, meet on the Sabbath as well, do what you will as long as you submit to the Church. The stimulus for this rant, of course, was this guy who was like, "I'm not sure whether the Orthodox or the Messianic Jewish version of history is the true one, so I have these horribly inane questions...". I've really got to learn to respect religious arguments which just seem stupid, but today isn't the day.