repoman

I recently attended a course at a local Presbyterian Church called the Alpha Course taht was made in England. It is really very slick in the most part making many appeals to reason (seemingly) and emotion. What I most noticed was the way taht he made false analogies with catchy imagery that bypass critical thinking.

THe jokes and other stories the presenter told (it is a video) were very vivid, I'll relay 3 of them.

I nthe first one he is trying to parody the lack of faith that many people have, he tells of an atheist who falls off a cliff and grabs onto a root and who yells out to God "I know i don't believe in you but if you're their please give me a hand" god replies I am here, let go and I will not let you die." Then the atheist asks if anyone else is up there.

In the second he talks of a painting in an English church where in a painting of Jesus waiting outside of a house there is no knob on the outside of the house. When the painter was asked he said that the knob is on the inside because it is our choice to let Jesus in.

In the last one he talks of the cleansing of sin by the sacrifice of Jesus which will allow god to be able to look at us to reach us. He used a lot of body language placing the bible from one upraised palm to another. I almost busted up laughing during this because I was thinking about sin and Beer's law of light transmissivity -- like how much sin would lead to a 50% reduction of god to human visibility.

Anyway, the imagery that he was able to evoke is something that is hard to shake, and if it weren't for the logic I've learned on the IIDB I might have bought more deeply into that fluff.

Personally I think that this kind of imagery is truly the best tool that Protestants have for converting people nowadays.

Godot

heh. Pretty funny joke, really.

Marduk

An atheist is swimming out on an old Scottish Loch when suddenly he is being pursed by a large nasty looking monster, “Jesus Christ!, Help me!!
Jesus voice booms out “but I thought you didn’t believe in me?”
The atheist says “cut me a break, until a minute ago I didn’t believe in the Loch Ness monster either”

Zadok001

I do like the atheist joke.

In my experience, you're correct - Some Protestants recruit through strong appeals to basic sensibilities. Humor, guilt, and even reason (though those arguments are never actually *good*, they just look good). That, I believe, is the reason they get so many 'born agains'. What they do to convert people is AMAZINGLY effectively, if their target doesn't have basic critical thinking skills.

Logic should be a required high school course...

lpetrich

Diana has also posted something about heavy use of analogies -- C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, she reports, is absolutely full of them.

I suspect that analogies are a convenient form of "reasoning", because it is easy to slip in false analogies.

It might be nice to construct similar colorful analogies to explain our positions on various issues.

Like someone building a house and thinking:

It looks complete, but it's lacking one thing. Some houseness essence, some house-stuff. All I see is a big collection of wood and nails and bricks and mortar and plaster, so that's why I can't call it a house.

So before I can live in it, I will have to find some house-stuff to add to it.