Christian Salesmanship and the Trivializing of Fiction
The prospect of an atheistic religion that could replace our childish frivolities
How obnoxious is it when a born-again, Bible-believing, Americanized “Christian” accuses you of being myopic and hard-hearted for rejecting the saintly, self-sacrificial love of a deity who crucified his only-begotten son to save humanity from the punishment we deserve for exercising the rationality and freedom he would have given us and for growing out of our species’ Edenic, childhood innocence in which we relied on fairy tales to cope with the outer wilderness?
Imagine the audacity required to psyche yourself up and launch into some such preposterous theological harangue, and to accuse the secular listener of being too narrow-minded to understand God’s greatness, too satanically hubristic to abase himself or herself before the glory of Christian “revelation”!
Explaining the proselytizer’s audacity
Assuming Christianity is far from objectively factual, meritorious, and even relevant to twenty-first century problems, we might wonder how these Christians could be so oblivious to their chutzpah.
Much of this is due to familiar social dynamics. To avoid being lonely or to increase your chance…