Humpty Dumpty and religious debate

[Cactus Wren]

" ... There's glory for you!"

"I don't know what you mean by 'glory,'" Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'"

"But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected.

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."

"My religion? Oh, I don't have a religion -- I'm a Bible-believing Christian. Christianity is God actually coming down and sacrificing himself for humans. Religion is humans trying unsuccessfully to reach God."

Or,
Me: "How can you worship a God who consigns people to infinite torment for finite wrongdoing?"
TrooBeleever: "See, you're approaching the issue from a fallible human concept of fairness. Of course it doesn't seem fair to you, because fairness is as flawed and imperfect as every other thing flawed imperfect humans create. But if God decides to send someone to hell for the 'sin' of never having heard of him, it may not be fair in your eyes, but rest assured it is JUST, because God is infinitely JUST and so everything he does is by definition JUST."

Anyone dealt with these, or similar arguments: people deciding, like Humpty Dumpty, to re-define words to meet their preferences? How do you deal with it?

[David Swidler]

It's bogus, and I say that as a believer.

It's not the meanings of words that must be changed to defend religion, but people's assumptions (including those of many, if not most, believers).

For example, I don't believe in the common perception of Hell, nor in Hell as the fate of those who don't believe - and that position is backed up by mainstream sources.

One of the common sources of confusion is reading these sources - primarily the Bible - as a series of texts independent of other information, such as oral traditions that were recorded in writing later, without which one gets a distorted, blatantly contradictory Bible. Yet it is only the text that most people ever read, if at all.

I'm not about to defend Christianity, but one thing to keep in mind is that the early Christians, especially those who wrote the NT, were well versed in the mechanics of interpretation that the Jewish oral tradition preserved - a tradition that heavily informed their thinking. Outside of a yeshiva, few, if any, of us have access to this wealth of additional information that would enable a completely different understanding of the ideas underlying Western theology.

Bottom line, I agree with your implied insistence that words be used properly. If they though it through, even the staunchest believer would likely prefer proper communication to a linguistic free-for-all.

[Marquis de Carabas]

"My religion? Oh, I don't have a religion -- I'm a Bible-believing Christian. Christianity is God actually coming down and sacrificing himself for humans. Religion is humans trying unsuccessfully to reach God."

Or,
Me: "How can you worship a God who consigns people to infinite torment for finite wrongdoing?"
TrooBeleever: "See, you're approaching the issue from a fallible human concept of fairness. Of course it doesn't seem fair to you, because fairness is as flawed and imperfect as every other thing flawed imperfect humans create. But if God decides to send someone to hell for the 'sin' of never having heard of him, it may not be fair in your eyes, but rest assured it is JUST, because God is infinitely JUST and so everything he does is by definition JUST."
A minor nitpick before I answer your question. Justice is not precisely synonymous with fairness. If God has some standard by which he sends people to hell, and applies that standard across the board with no exceptions, then he can be rightly said to apply it fairly. This says nothing about whether the standard itself is just or not.

Anyone dealt with these, or similar arguments: people deciding, like Humpty Dumpty, to re-define words to meet their preferences? How do you deal with it?
It depends. Once someone has entered the realm of redefining things willy-nilly, they have pretty much escaped all possibility of rational discourse. It's a similar situation to the whole God is not amenable to logical argument position. It's fine if one wants to believe that, but it rather curtails the usefulness of any further debate.

At the very least, then, I would cease any attempt at discussion about God with such a person. From there, my actions would depend on my personal feelings for them. If I knew or liked them not, I'd probably tell them to sod off and I'd go find something else to do. If I liked them, I'd politely suggest we go roll some hippies or something and forget this whole God business.