After all, they never let people who hold opinions *they* disagree with, get away with that. Wow...that sounded bitter.

I've had people get aggressive with me because I've let drop, during the course of the conversation, that I don't eat meat. Such people immediately assume that I have some holier-than-thou reason for not eating meat and ask me to my face why not. Then they usually don't like the answer - that I saw a documentary at the age of seventeen which showed the treatment of animals in the food industry, and decided I wanted no part of it - and start using arguments such as "You're wearing LEATHER SHOES, you HYPOCRITE!" or "Well, you've KILLED lots of carrots haven't you!"

*sigh* What I'm trying to say is that people always get aggressive if they think you're trying to "get one up" on them. Declaring belief in a moral system definitely falls into the category of "Expect the ignorant to take potshots at you".

I thought that was so incredibly sad. Like, they wanted so badly to believe it but just couldn't make that final leap.

Yes, that IS sad. Mind you, if they felt that strongly that the Christian message had some truth to it, they might come to it later on.

I suspect that Lewis preferred a Jesus who didn't have doubts at the end because he was too well prepared and was pretty sure he'd come out of it okay. Which is very normal, most people don't want to deal with a Jesus who might have had doubts or hadn't planned it.

That's strange to me, because I much prefer a Jesus who had faith, but at the same time was human enough to wonder whether he was right. After all, He's supposed to be both human and divine, and the whole point of being human is that you're not given all the answers. "Jesus went through the same doubt you're going through" is a more sympathetic message than "Jesus wasn't risking anything by crucifixion", he had all the answers before he started and was just playing along".

But maybe that's just me - and, like you say, if it works for some...

Oh I know, after all, I've had to do that with Pullman

*nod* I enjoyed the first instalment in HDM but found the second one cold and unsympathetic and the last one a big long unmemorable anti-religious rant. He's an example of an author who had an agenda but who eventually stopped bothering to render it in dramatic terms.

And it's not as if he's not capable of dramatizing his agenda: THE TIGER IN THE WELL, his third Sally Lockhart, had a clear liberal agenda but that was at least dramatized in his central premise of a middle-class Victorian girl being stripped of all her possessions and rights and having to survive on the London streets. With THE AMBER SPYGLASS I kept having to ask myself "And why is this happening?... What's the big deal?... Zzzz....")

You can always choose another explanation if you want but people keep knocking themselves out trying to fanwank answers to things there are already answers to. Maybe the answers I think I have are just fanwanks too, I dunno.

I doubt yours are ;) It is a question of Occam's Razor, and people can only fanwank so long.