Thanks for helping me out here. I'm having trouble with a lot of these issues lately.

Why do you get to be Christian if you believe in 'Heaven' as a pit stop on the way to re-embodiment? That may be a more accurate expression of biblical spirituality, but Christian tradition and belief are quite clear. You're good, you go to Heaven. You're bad, you go to Hell.

I was thinking about this in the context of J.R.R. Tolkien's belief in reincarnation. Can a Christian just re-arrange the afterlife? I don't think so. To question the standard formulation of the afterlife is a deep expression of skepticism in key clerics and vast populations—and their religious self-identification as 'Christian' involves a belief in their high level of spiritual knowledge and the divine rightness of their tradition.

You end up calling them and their clerics deceived, not able to read their sacred text, and yet you wish to identify as the same category??

I'm charmed by the idea of your going to get an Evangelical to respond to me. It's very kind. But I think my point is that Evangelicals don't do "apologetics." That's where C.S. Lewis the Anglican comes in, or Ravi Zacharias the HIndu. They're accepted as Evangelical apologists because Evangelicals don't engage with anyone on principle, and only 'adopt an apologist' to fill a perceived lack in the religion's theater. In fact, the religion is little more than a cultural coalition whose key sacrament is the valorization of ordinary males, as expressed in everything from drab fashion to conservative politics.

One struggles to be a spritzed-up version of a blandly 'normal' male, or the women who love them. What the Bible says, and the character of Jesus, are irrelevant.