I love Christian Cross Talk! Especially the diagrammatic representations of how atheism will destroy the world. Someone there could make a fortune designing business presentations.

Be warned, the guy is a kook of the first degree. He has talked about mourning the fact that he can't shoot up an abortion clinic, carrying a gun to defend himself from "evil doing skeptics" etc before. He's bipolar and unstable and a self-proclaimed fundamentalist. I only keep up on his stuff because its like watching a train wreck. He does have his lucid moments from time to time though.

Look at the evidence. To begin with, he sits down with Abraham, and says, "Right Abes, here's the deal: you get all your kids, and their kids, and so on, yada yada yada, to worship me - just me - and in exchange I'll make sure you have loads of offspring, right, just... you won't even be able to count 'em all, trust me. Shake on it? Oh, by the way, you have to cut the ends of their dicks off too. Yeah, did I not mention that? Yeah, that's part of the deal too, 'kay?"

Only problem is, he can't keep track of all Abraham's wayward descendants, running all over the place, worshipping false gods and all, so he figures, "screw this," reneges on the contract and packs them all off to Babylon. Big change of plan there. But there still seem to be some good 'uns amongst the exiles, so he lets them go home. Change of plan, again. Now he's thinking, "Mmm, all this sacrificing is stinking up the joint a bit - maybe that was a bad idea. I know - we can do a one-off sacrifice special, atone for all time! Yeah, that would be great! Hey, Jesus! Jesus! I've got a job for you, son..." Another change of plan.

So Jesus dies, and comes back to life, and apparently that means everything's hunky dory again. Except now, all the non-Jews are getting in on the act as well. That was never part of the original plan! Well, the more the merrier, thinks God. Hey wait, those Arab tribes don't seem to have much of a clue, though. "Yo, Mohammed! Yeah, you! I've got a message for you. No hang on, I've changed my mind... Ah sod it, tell 'em everything, they can pick the bits they like." But that didn't go down well at all.

Personally, I reckon we're about due a new Messiah. Michael Trevasser (well, if I was called Wayne Bent I'd be on the phone to Deed Poll too...) was a bit of a non-starter, although he did have a suitable beard. Any takers for the position?

Once on a newspaper blog I asked why "God" didn't just hang Jesus in the Garden of Eden and get it all over at once. You wouldn't believe the variety and the incomprhensible responses I got to explain that. When questions like that are offered, there is not limit to the human imagination to come up with new theological explanations. When minds are entrenched in irrationalism, there's just not much you can do about it. I'd like to think at least one of the people that read my question really started to think about it.

The only solution I can think of for theists to use is that God wants to see how much logical inconsistancies the mind can take- a "stress test".

Interesting idea. I think some religious believers almost take pride in how illogical their beliefs are and therefore how strong their faith must be. Isn't the Catholic Trinity one of those?