![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wingedbeastSome of my tips, to date, have been about answering questions and issues put before you without attempting to shift topic or evade the question. It's a personal pet peeve of mine, and generally annoying to most, when one asks a straight-forward question and one gets a blatant diversion. Evading saying something, such as James White avoiding saying "no, you don't have the power to do other than God deems you do" is one potential reason. Another is being over-prepared for a script to the degree that you're not responding to what the other person is saying. But, there's another potential reason.
I've touched on the move, The Encounter, here before. In The Encounter, Jesus responds to the problem of Hell by making the classic "is it more loving of me to force you to live with me?" question. An evasion of the basic problem of creating Hell in the first place.
In the movie, Late One Night, a Christian character responds to the question of why a loving God would create Hell with another question. "Why would anybody reject God's love?"
Neither one answers the question directly. These are Christian movies, meaning these are movies written, produced, directed, and usually acted by conservative Christians who believe in Hell and don't have a good track record of creating respectful depictions of non-Christians. This tells me that, for a good number of Christians who believe in Hell (not all Christians, I know, that's why I'm specifying), even when controlling both sides of the conversation and in position to create a complete straw-man of the opposition, still don't have an answer to that question.
That's okay.
No, really. That's okay. It's okay to say "I don't know".
It's not okay to stop thinking entirely. It's not okay to pretend you know something you don't know. It is okay to honestly not know.
And, yes, sometimes not knowing something like how Hell can be morally acceptable is... well... troubling. Sometimes, you should be troubled by not knowing something important. Sometimes it means that you need to seriously challenge some notion that you've held. Sometimes you have internal work to do.
But, what it doesn't mean is "you lose". Yes, some nonbelievers will treat that as such. Some nonbelievers will treat this conversation as every bit the game that can be one on technicality that I'm advising you not to. And, well, they will be wrong to do that.
Sometimes honest conversation will require you to honestly say that you honestly don't know.
I've touched on the move, The Encounter, here before. In The Encounter, Jesus responds to the problem of Hell by making the classic "is it more loving of me to force you to live with me?" question. An evasion of the basic problem of creating Hell in the first place.
In the movie, Late One Night, a Christian character responds to the question of why a loving God would create Hell with another question. "Why would anybody reject God's love?"
Neither one answers the question directly. These are Christian movies, meaning these are movies written, produced, directed, and usually acted by conservative Christians who believe in Hell and don't have a good track record of creating respectful depictions of non-Christians. This tells me that, for a good number of Christians who believe in Hell (not all Christians, I know, that's why I'm specifying), even when controlling both sides of the conversation and in position to create a complete straw-man of the opposition, still don't have an answer to that question.
That's okay.
No, really. That's okay. It's okay to say "I don't know".
It's not okay to stop thinking entirely. It's not okay to pretend you know something you don't know. It is okay to honestly not know.
And, yes, sometimes not knowing something like how Hell can be morally acceptable is... well... troubling. Sometimes, you should be troubled by not knowing something important. Sometimes it means that you need to seriously challenge some notion that you've held. Sometimes you have internal work to do.
But, what it doesn't mean is "you lose". Yes, some nonbelievers will treat that as such. Some nonbelievers will treat this conversation as every bit the game that can be one on technicality that I'm advising you not to. And, well, they will be wrong to do that.
Sometimes honest conversation will require you to honestly say that you honestly don't know.
