In an ongoing effort to be in dialog with those who think and believe differently than I do, the following conversation has been initiated between a friend and I over the nature and beliefs of Christianity and atheism. It started out as an email dialog, but he has graciously given me permission to post our conversations on the blog. The original documents that we typed in became fairly unwieldy due to interleaving of comments whose threads were often difficult to track, so I have tried to tidy up the conversation by compartmentalizing it topically. The first sections of correspondence will be listed chronologically, but as the thread gets more cumbersome, I will likely have to break it down with new, thematic postings (listed above this one) and their related entries. Other than these categorizations, none of my interlocutor's words will be edited or altered in any way unless it is for clarification and flow. Any of those amendments will be clearly demarcated by brackets [such as this]. This will not change the meaning of anything and indeed is the literary standard for clarification purposes. Even so, these will be kept to an absolute minimum.
Thanks for reading. May the journey continue.
-CL
