Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
I suppose the way I'd put it is that, in my view, He's got a good pitch. That is, I find the deeper claims of Christianity map well onto the world I observe: things like sin and its consequences, What it has to say about how humans work, what is necessary, which things remain constant over time, etc. It promises things that I want, and in my experience it delivers on those promises in tangible ways in the material world. The arc of my life diverged markedly for the worse when I became an Atheist, and diverged markedly for the better when I became a Christian again. I don't expect my personal experiences to be persuasive to people who are not me, but they are very persuasive to me.
But that merely provides evidence for the idea that Christianity has significant pragmatic value for ordinary people navigating their lives and for societies organizing themselves, something which even atheist thinkers have been freely acknowledging for a while now.
But to tie this to OP's original question, you'd have to somehow demonstrate how these benefits imply the truth of the various historical and metaphysical claims Christianity makes. This is IMO very hard to do, especially given that the same psychological benefits are often believably claimed to be enjoyed by the practitioners of other, mutually incompatible religions as well.
As with many other atheists/agnostics with a sympathy towards Christianity, my problem is that I see the wholesome effects of dedicated Christian practice on an individual and societal level, I can even fully entertain the idea that there is and will never be a secular project with the same effects, at least at scale, but when I get to the part where I try to believe in the whole religious complex of ideas I inevitably run into a brick wall made out of serious scholarship on the Bible, early Church history and the surrounding historical sources, the non-specific/non-Christian/universalist nature of the strongest philosophical/theological arguments for the existence of God, the weaknesses of the theological arguments for a specific/historical version of God, and the plethora of presented evidence of similar epistemological strength for other, completely different religions that I'd have little principled reason to reject if I were to start accepting the equivalent Christian arguments.
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Would you mind going into more detail on the return to Christianity? Not necessarily "how the arc of your life changed" (though if that's not too private, by all means), but more what got you to step back through the door? It seems all so strange in the particular to me that I find it unbelievable. Why Jesus at all? Why was he born there? Why the crucifixion? I don't expect a theologian's answers, but I'm trying to give the flavor of why it seems so strange in time and place and detail to me.
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