Actually listening to us wouldn’t help Christians wave away the reasons why their numbers are declining.
He just doesn’t understand that Christianity itself does not have much appeal. It promises divine help that doesn’t ever manifest, a system of morality and ethics that somehow utterly fails to reliably produce decent human beings, groups that aren’t worth the price of admission, and a whole series of untrue claims that believers must embrace to belong to the religion. Almost the only difference between Foster’s form of Christianity and that of the repulsive Republicans he criticizes is exactly which untrue claims they each think believers must embrace to earn the title of “Christian.”
What a great summary.
That is interesting. I didn’t realize that, even now, I was still operating under the assumption that there had been an “Original Christianity”.
If there ever was, it’s been lost to history. It fragmented pretty early on, which is why the “heresies” were ultimately stamped out under Constantine. It was preventing them from achieving real power.
It fragmented pretty early on
During the lifetimes of the people who originally wrote the John and Paul gospels.