An e-mail conversation with friends, Part 5

This e-mail from me does not address everything from Pistos' last e-mail. Just a quick one:

Pistos,

Without the time to address everything in your e-mail, let me thank you for engaging me in this. I've felt so alone in this struggle for so long. [… 2 personal sentences omitted …] I have literally obsessed 24/7 about this issue since our conversation.

I think I may have found a proper definition of an apologist. Paraphrasing a podcast (http://www.rzim.org/radio/radio.php) by Ravi Zacharias whose archives I've been listening through, the job of a Christian apologist is to remove the intellectual obstacles of a seeker in order to let the seeker see that their problems are moral, and no longer intellectual, in nature. I feel like I've been playing both apologist and seeker for myself for quite some time. My claim now is simply that I cannot be both, and I should most accurately be called a seeker.

How do I know if the roots of my intellectual doubt are moral in nature? Even if they are, do the questions themselves become any less relevant? The simple presence of sin in my life does not prove, even when working in a Christian framework, that the questions are rooted in moral shortcomings, for Christians sin as well. Why does the source make a difference in the validity of a question about a truth claim?

Another comment on our Saturday discussion: You're right, I'm not an Agnostic in the purest definition of the word. I am a Theist. I am agnostic not in the sense that I firmly believe that truth about God is unknowable; I am an agnostic only insofar as I don't believe I can claim to know truth about God currently. Thus, I am not a Deist, for they make truth claims about God's actions and relationship to the world. I am agnostic Theist, in that I believe in God, but I don't know what to do with it.

I admit that's a pathetic position. It's certainly not a position I recommend as far as letting you get to sleep at night.

Anyway, this was meant to be a simple e-mail expressing my gratitude for your attention. There's just so much I feel I want to say when I know there is an ear that is listening to me.

I'll get back to the matter of the resurrection. I'm reading the link you mentioned. Makes me want material by Craig, considering the reverence the atheistic author seems to have for him.

Your friend,

Zeteo