APOLOGETICS - CHRISTIAN
 
Christianity claims that it can show that it has a reasonable, that is a non-contradictory - faith. A faith that is unreasonable is simply a faith that is not inspired by God assuming God is reasonable. If he is not then he is pure evil. For example, if it makes no sense to say that Jesus is two separate natures God and man united in one person then this doctrine isn’t true. Christians feel that God gave us the power to think to help us work out the truth. They say that silly religions insult God who gave us the gift of reason and degrade our nature for we have the power to think for ourselves and it is given to be used and not as an ornament.
 
We will look at how useless and superficially convincing Christian defences of the faith are.
  
The Christian apologist distorts the facts to give his religion plausibility. The apologists are bigots. They ignore the rule that hearsay is no good in court to verify the resurrection accounts and then they laugh at accounts of miracles from other religions such as Islam and Mormonism. They dismiss those as hearsay!
 
Christian defences of the faith offend against the rule of plausibility. Using their standards, any contradiction at all can be fixed up and we will never be able to learn anything if we start doing that! 
 
Christianity is notorious for ignoring the refutation of its arguments. Ideas that have been refuted centuries ago are still used today. Apologetics does little to make converts. It is just a trick to reassure believers that their absurd faith makes sense. It leads to believers becoming so cocksure that they set out to take away the civil rights of those who disagree with them. Remember how the Catholics of Ireland fought to stop the right to divorce and contraception and persecuted those who complained against clerical sex abuse?
 
Christianity argues that Jesus rose from the dead for many of his friends believed he did. That does not follow. Also, it is really putting faith in the testimony of people rather than in God. It would in fact be evidence then that God was not behind whatever happened. God wants to be honoured for being God. There is something sectarian about taking a group's interpretation of God and what he has done in preference to that of other groups.

Christian apologetics is largely about defending the doctrine of the apostles. Jesus left no writings behind so it was left to the twelve apostles he chose to preserve his message. The Church believes the apostles were appointed by Jesus because the apostles said so. Why should we believe them then and not the many modern apostles who have as much claim to authority from Jesus? Christianity is not about Jesus at all but about the apostles’ interpretation of him. It is following men not God. The apostles were undoubtedly just out for the pleasure of telling people what to think for they had no reasonable claim to authority. Many in the early Church denied their authority. Christians have no right to say it was just sour grapes for nobody knows if their reasons were weighty or not.

All religions accept the fruits doctrine. Basically what it says is that if the religion has good fruits then it is the true religion. Jesus said in Matthew 7 that you can tell bad prophets by their bad fruits. Christianity believes that Jesus was the Son of God for Christianity has good fruits. Roman Catholicism decides that a miracle or apparition - say Lourdes - must have been done by God when it has good fruits. If God is good then that follows from that. But when all religions think they have enough good fruits to be the true faith it is obvious that the fruit argument is worthless. To use the argument is the height of arrogance, “My religion is better than yours” and "Those who believe in my religion can be and are better than those who believe in yours". That is what religion and the miracles are really supporting. The only thing that produces good fruit is healthy self-love and religion is unnecessary for that for self-love implies that you are to be independent of God and you are to be your own person. The fact that fruits are the attraction about miracles though they should not be, is sufficient proof that the miracles produce only the bad fruit of leading people astray.
 
The Catholic Church teaches that good fruits come from prayer, faith in God's Church and the sacraments. We hear today of the conversions at Catholic apparition sites. The most cited reason for taking these apparitions seriously as supernatural events is the fruits. The Church says it observes that the fruits do not come from the apparitions - which may even be hoaxes - but from the Catholic spirituality applied to the pilgrims. To say fruits come from an apparition directly is to contradict the doctrine of the Church that we do not have to believe in them. It shows that it is hard to know what is causing the fruits. And people tend to look at the immediate ones and not the long-term ones. A false or man-made religion will show its true face in time - consider how Catholicism practiced its own version of relativism which has led to the dreadful spin off relativism that tyrannises the world.