What are the contradictions in Christianity?

Home - Quora Link

So one of the biggest “fails” of the Old Testament is that God promises David and by extension, the Jews, that the Davidian line of kings will last forever. A rationalist will try to use this to invalidate God. This follows the same line of argument of “the problem of evil,” i.e. the mere fact that evil exists is supposed to disprove God.

These lines of argument twist up logic until nobody can really make sense of it anymore. Imagined dichotomies in the minds of atheists don’t actually have to limit God. And Christians just don’t bother to think about them until they can approach them from a useful frame of mind. A useful frame of mind is one that allows them to make sense from the insight they’re seeking.

All this is to say, this question betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of the religion. The way you’re supposed to think about it is that it’s not God that’s flawed or has contradictions, it’s man. We can only approach God, never actually fathom Him.

But that isn’t even the best response to these sorts of attacks. The reality is, none of this stuff really affects actual Christian practice, which primarily concerns the specific bit of mysticism that Christianity has developed over 2000 years, the idea of a personal relationship with Christ.

This makes all logical argument, which relies on getting someone else to take your reasoning seriously, utterly moot. Whatever you say, the Christian can just go, “well sure ok whatever, but Jesus helped me after my grandma died and left me alone in the world, where were you?”

This personal relationship, where the spirit of Jesus (or a hallucination of his spirit if you’re an atheist, whatever, you pick what you believe it to be) enters into people’s minds and hearts and advises and protects and cares for them, is the fundamental essence of Christianity.

Everything else, even the words of Jesus as written in the New Testament is just armchair philosophising. You don’t need to fumble over the Bible when you can just ask Jesus yourself.

And it’s unassailable to logical contradiction. No matter what you say, Jesus is something the Christian lives with, while you, denier of Christ, are just someone that’s talking to them for a few minutes or hours. As soon as you’re done arguing, the believer is going to immediately start praying for your soul, not even knowing if such an act is a rational thing to do, but knowing it’s something good to do anyway regardless.