>I'm going to play devil's advocate for a minute (for both you and Charles)
>
>Suppose Rick (or anyone else) made similar posts, but in reference to the Quran and Allah and Muhammad instead of the Bible and God and Jesus.
>
>Would you reply with statements about "ramming down people's throats" and "delusions", etc.?
I agree with you about Rick's complete right to proselytize in any way he likes here in the religion section.

I once did have an interesting conversation - face to face and in a moslem country - well, Turkey, but a pretty conservative region - with an imam who was explaining that the moon landing was a fake because the Quran said the moon was a beam of light.

I use delusion to refer to the idea that one can come up with the idea that someone named John has been alive for the last 2000 years because of a tortured interpretation of one line from a document attributed to that same person and originally written in Greek.

What really irks me is the number of illogical leaps that have to be achieved before even faith kicks in in being completely ignorant of all scholarship done in the last 1400 years on the very topic that seems to be the center of his world and how all his faith in an extremely literal interpretation is based on translation that cannot hope to maintain any linguistic nuance if one is to depend on it to be reliable in the way he'd like to rely on it.

People have a right to believe what they like. When I read Rick's post I said to myself "I believe I will mock his delusion". <g>

I think relying on faith in matters that are unknowable - what lies beyond the sensory realm or the meaning of life - is a matter choice but choosing ignorance of empirically demonstrable facts is delusion.