THEOLOGICAL AND LOGICAL CONTORTIONS ARE USED BY CHRISTIANS TO GIVE THE IMPRESSION THEIR FAITH IS CAPABLE OF STRONG SUPPORT FROM EVIDENCE AND BEING A PART OF REAL LIFE

Christians use theological and logical contortions and distractions to make you think they have a solid case for their faith.

Take the core notion that Jesus is alive and resurrected and with us today.
 
They lie that Jesus must have risen from the dead for he couldn’t have been stolen. But they only assume this. Even the Bible doesn’t actually say he couldn’t have been stolen. It just says the tomb was empty. And as for the body being raised it could have risen in the thief’s lair. And there are no first-hand reports of anybody touching the risen Jesus so was it a ghost claiming to be a resurrected man that they saw? They lie for they ignore the discoveries of scholarship except when it suits them.

Another trick is to dismiss something that contradicts their view and give a bad reason for doing that. For example, the Christian says that Jesus was the Son of God for he rose from the dead and that he has the best evidence for his claims. But the fact is that there are scores of people who did better than Jesus. The Catholic saints have done miracles and raised people from the dead and made claims inconsistent with the scriptures. Hindu saints have done miracles too. We can trust these witnesses better rather than the nebulous apostles for we don’t know the apostles as well. The saints are certainly claiming to be gods who are superior to almighty God. They claim that God is influenced by their prayers. But you cannot influence an all good and all-powerful and all intelligent being for he knows what is best already. They did miracles to testify to their divinity as saints. They lied that their miracles were designed to glorify Jesus their God. So the miracles verify the deity of the saints instead of God!
 
If you tell a Protestant apologist all this he will simply say that Catholic miracles are lacking in credibility and that the uniqueness of the case for Jesus is intact. But that is not good enough and it is obvious to him that it is not. You can’t dismiss something so complicated in a sentence.  That is bias.

Another trick is the straw man approach in which they misstate their opponents’ claims and then ridicule their misrepresentation.

Another trick is to simply tell a good lie. For example, Christians say the gospels not contradicting one another is a miracle and an evidence for Christianity being true. But if you start out with the unwarranted assumption that the gospels or any books agree you will soon get the contradictions to fit. So they lie about their assumption making evidence and then condemn anybody that believes and then falls away!

Another trick is when somebody makes a clear and simple refutation of what they teach they think of as many objections – useless ones and weak ones and stronger ones - as they can in order to stop you from seeing the force of the refutation. Magicians do this with rabbits and hankies and it can be done with facts far more easily. The bulk of the objections makes what they say look possible and gives the impression that they can handle the objection for people are lazy and like to be told what to think a lot.

For example, when you tell them that Jesus erred when he said we should love the Lord with all our hearts which is fanaticism they will say that you have not much to love if you want to love anything else and that you have to put something first so it should be God and that Jesus was proven to be God and so what he said was right and they will go on and on and on and give you many examples of what bad things people did supposedly because they believed that love started with themselves. But the fact is that it is fanatical and they are trying to block you from seeing how obviously fanatical it is by bombarding you with facts and making you unwilling and scared to think.

Another trick is to make you feel terrible about wondering say if God existed or if Jesus were the Son of God. This hypnotises you to be prejudiced when you hear criticism of them and to prevent it from sinking in to be thought about objectively.

Another gimmick is to appeal to the testimony of scholars and renowned theologians as evidence. For example, Josh McDowell’s Evidence that Demands a Verdict is full of testimonies backing up conservative Christian dogma from Bible scholars and philosophers and historians. He speaks of those who said there was a man called Jesus. But an atheist could get as many testimonies from people who said that Jesus never existed. And what use is it for Christians when some saint says that Jesus existed for the saint was not an eyewitness. Different scholars interpret the evidence differently and many are biased. There are many who believe that Jesus did not exist and hold it or unjust reasons just as there are those who believe that he did exist for the wrong reasons and prejudices. The fact is it is not what the scholars say that matters it is what the evidence says. Atheism depends on sound simple principles and is protection against religion and its conjuring tricks.

Another trick is to seem to answer an objection while not doing it at all. For example, if you tell a Muslim or a Christian that it is arrogance to claim that you to have to be a Muslim or a Christian to be saved they will tell you that it was Allah or Jesus that made the claim not them.  So that gets them off the hook! Now suppose I was full of pride and arrogance. If I claimed that God told me I was better than anybody else now would that help? Would that make any difference? Besides Allah or Jesus saying the religions of Islam and Christ respectively are the only way to salvation does not automatically mean that these faiths are not being arrogant!
 
The claim is also saying that if you come to Islam or Christianity with an open mind you will see that it is the only faith that could be true for Allah and Jesus are supposed to want all to be saved. This discriminates unjustly against people who have different perceptions of evidence and different beliefs and experiences that determine that perception. It tells us we should all think the same way which is fascist for we know that the reason that we are all different from each other is because our perceptions are not the same.

When the Christian or Mormon goes to his religious leaders with a pile of objections to the truth of his religion the leaders will, if stuck, come up with an attempt to prove their religion right by a process of elimination. The Christian for example will be met with arguments that Mormonism is a false religion and a hoax as if that proves that Christianity is true!

Another way is by manipulating the questioners prejudices and preferences to get them to assent to your faith and reject others.
 
The way this works is if a Mormon presents evidence that Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon despite his claim that he didn’t and that God is its ultimate author, the Mormon Church will present reasons that a book like that was necessary in the Christian Church and that no other book made the claims it made so it must be true or be the only preferable one. The Church would then continue that that proves that the evidence that Smith wrote it is not good enough to warrant disbelief. Another way it can be done is to show that the Mormon Church is better and wiser than any other religion and the wisest religion is most likely to come from God.

Another trick is to turn failures into successes. For example, the Christians say the gospels proved that they were truthful when they presented the apostles as being reluctant to believe in Jesus so Jesus was what the gospels say he was. But being truthful is no guarantee of being right. Perhaps the apostle’s interpretation of Jesus was wrong and there were many things he got up to that they did not know about. Anyway, if the apostles were so reluctant and they knew Jesus it is evidence that they knew fine well he was a fake. That is the thing it indicates the most. You can’t start twisting failures into successes for if you do that with everything you will get nowhere and learn nothing. The failures are more probably just slips rather than evidences of truthfulness for the gospels definitely did not want to state anything that put Jesus in a bad light for the whole point of them being written was to get converts for him.

Another trick is to refute some arguments against some doctrine of Christianity and ignore and not even say that there are piles of others. Nearly all apologetic books for the resurrection tell you that the soldiers, the apostles, the Jews could not have stolen the body of Jesus therefore he rose again in his body. The many other possibilities are just completely ignored. In this case, what cannot be explained is not necessarily indicatory of supernatural involvement and they just illegitimately jump to the conclusion that it is.

Another gimmick is to use arguments like, if Jesus never existed or never rose from the dead then why did nobody say so? Nobody who knew the very popular rival to Jesus, Simon Magus, said that he faked his miracles and does that mean they were real? And if the arguers believe that silence helps their case then why do they argue, “We believe in God. Some philosophers say that God does not exist but they do not matter”? If they really believed that silence was a help they would admit that the existence of atheists threatens their convictions. We know that many in early days of the Church believed in myth-making and would have taken the stories about Jesus as legend. It’s one of the facts that you don’t need proof for.