Strawmen

[Samurai Rafiki]

I have a friend who I debate with most often about everything from morality and God to the fact that comedies aren't represented well in the Academy Awards (he liked Slumdog Millionaire, I say that Wedding Crashers was a much better movie). Unfortunately, a stumbling block I have with my friend is that he's a virtual master of strawman attacks, and perpetrates them so fluently that he convinces himself that they're true. Oftentimes our debates degenerate into endless clarifications of what one or the other is saying without really touching on the relative merit of the statements. The most recent example of which was when he and I got into it about the Biblical condemnation of homosexuality and why Jesus' reforms skipped that little snippet of Leviticus and it ended up with him demanding that I buy and read "Case for Christ" by Lee Strobel so that I could see that he was right. "Case for Christ", however, deals mostly with whether or not Jesus existed, how reliably the gospels were preserved, and whether he actually claimed to be the son of God.

Strobel, by the way, is a pathetic writer who frames his book as if he's a skeptic trying to defend atheism against the best theologians he can dig up. Unfortunately his 'attacks' are paltry and one dimensional, and as soon as a vaguely legitimate question is given a vaguely legitimate answer, Strobel folds like a pussy rather than offering up even a token defense of his point. He asks almost no follow-up questions, and doesn't even bother to refute answers that are outright bullshit. For example (Pg 49), Strobel tries to say that the Gospels might have had agendas, and his expert bats this objection down by saying that if they'd been trying to make Jesus look good, they'd have omitted parts like him crying out on the cross "Father, why have you forsaken me?". Many of you probably know that Luke and John did in fact edit his outburst to sound more divine, meaning that the reply (which failed to adequately answer the charge) was bullshit in what little it did say.

Anyway, my buddy seems utterly incapable of understanding what he's doing, so that when I speak I'm pretty sure he's hearing the strawman version he'll refute virtually in real time. I'd love to be able to show you guys transcripts of our discussions but I haven't succeeded in engaging him in a written debate yet, so I don't have the option of quoting myself perfectly to you or, unfortunately, to him. I'll be sitting down with his pastor next Sunday where he'll try to talk me back into Christianity, and I'm worried that the discussion will get bogged down in clarifications the same way my talks with my friend do.

My question, then, is does anybody have a method in a face to face debate for heading off semantical strawman attacks? Am I not being clear enough, or should I just ignore his answers to the strawmen and restate my argument? I'm the child of a reading teacher, so my word choice can be unnecessarily complex. Would it help to simplify my rhetoric? It took a long time to set up this discussion with the pastor, and I want to be able to pin him to his statements without having to repeat myself ad infinitum.

[Kitsune]

If you wnat to understand how the New Testament came about, I recommend "Misquoting Jesus."