>>108814856>>108814915> This is about Christianity’s internal theology; outside analysis is illegitimateThis is the foundational mistake your entire response rests on. Internal theology explains what believers say God is. It does not explain how the concept of God functions, arises, stabilizes, or changes in real human societies. Those are external questions, and they are not invalidated by doctrinal self-descriptions. If internal theology were sufficient to settle questions of origin and function, then no belief system could ever be false on its own terms. That’s not how reasoning works. Christianity’s theology is the object under analysis, not the tool that gets to veto analysis.
You dismiss "secular scholars" outright, even though this field of study requires a secular approach. For your information, this doesn't mean they have to be atheists; it just means their religious beliefs shouldn't corrupt their reasoning. It's like dismissing a climate scientist just because they aren't a grifter paid by the oil industry.
> God cannot be a reflection of believers because He is defined as absolute and externalThis is circular. You are asserting that God is not a human projection because God is, by definition, not a human projection. That’s not an argument, it’s a definitional closure. Any belief system can do this. A political ideology can define its core values as “objective.” A cult can define its leader as “beyond human influence.” That tells us nothing about whether the concept is actually independent of human values. The question is not what Christianity claims God is, but what the concept of God is actually about.
> “Different gods across cultures don’t prove projection; pagan tribes were just wrong”This doesn’t address the argument, you’re restating exclusivism. The point is that the structure of god-concepts tracks human societies: warrior cultures produce warrior gods; legalistic cultures produce law-giving gods; ascetic cultures produce renunciatory gods; imperial cultures produce cosmic monarchs; etc.
Yahveh in particular follows this pattern, alongside its evolution, which you can read in the Bible + Professed Doctrine itself: Tribal war god national god universal moral lawgiver (centuries after Jesus) metaphysical absolute (the current version, created by apologists over a millennia after Jesus).
You dismiss this as “modern academic presumption,” but it’s supported by comparative mythology, textual stratification of the Hebrew Bible, archaeology (syncretism with El, Baal, Asherah), internal biblical evidence of evolving theology, historical evidence of the doctrine of each Church, etc. Calling this “just idolatry” doesn’t refute the pattern, it confirms that religious development was happening and being contested.
> There is no evidence Yahweh evolved; Israelite syncretism proves the oppositeSyncretism is evidence of development. The fact that Yahweh absorbs attributes of other deities, competing conceptions of God coexist, and later texts reinterpret earlier ones, demonstrates evolution of the God-concept, not its immutability. Saying “the Israelites were wrong until they got it right” is a theological claim, not a historical explanation. What we see is a progressive refinement of an ideal, not the sudden appearance of a fully formed metaphysical absolute.
> Christian morals don’t change; deviations are just correctedThis is demonstrably false.
Slavery: once tolerated and even encouraged or mandated, now condemned.
Usury: once forbidden, now normalized.
Gender hierarchy: once divinely mandated, now softened or reinterpreted.
Violence: once sacralized, now problematized.
Each time, Christianity does not say “we changed”; it says “we now understand better.” That is precisely how human ideals evolve while preserving the illusion of immutability. An unchanging external standard does not require centuries of reinterpretation to align with shifting moral intuitions.
> Monastics and saints prove convergence on an external targetNo, they prove institutional convergence. You are selecting people trained in the same texts, the same practices, the same evaluative criteria, and the same authority structures, and then marveling that they resemble one another.
This happens in Buddhist monasteries, Stoic schools, Sufi orders, Confucian academies, etc. Convergence under shared constraints does not imply an external metaphysical target. It implies successful internalization of a norm. If convergence proved external reality, mutually incompatible traditions would converge on the same endpoint. They don’t.
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