The mistake is thinking one must coddle people by answering their questions, ‘concerns’, or objections in whatever condition they’re in. I find that to be a Protestant-American approach, but not an essentially Christian one.

When dealing with relativists who can’t even distinguish subject from object, solipsists who don’t even know if anything else is real, and nihilists who don’t believe anything has meaning, there are deeper issues of epistemology to resolve before anything else. If there’s no truth, or truth has no value, or truth isn’t distinct from my whims, then we don’t go down other paths, because it just cheapens the truth, misleads with the truth, and indeed, adds confusion to their confusion.

If they’re not capable of distinguishing a fact from an opinion, an ad hominem from an argument, we either work on that, or we leave the conversation aside. This is one reason I cut a lot of conversations short. After all, would you debate the concept of meaning with someone who didn’t have an elementary education? They’d have to first grasp that a proposition is independent of a personality, etc.

I don’t dumb it down.

And the other thing is that, I’m neither a religious philosopher, nor a prophet. Whenever anyone asks me to elaborate, I really prefer not to. The implication is that I am offering something new that is not contained within our faith or tradition, or else that I am a luminary of that tradition. When I speak at all, it is a kind of personal confession, but if I take my own thoughts so seriously that I must expound upon them, soon I’m engaged in religious propaganda, a kind of religious version of politics, and then I’m both deceiving myself and anyone who listens to me. It is all I can do to repel those who continually invite me to the table of Protestantism where, presumably, through hashing out our own personal inclinations, apart from the fullness of the one true, right, correct, real, and holy tradition, we will somehow formulate our religious formulae, our “perspectives” – we will build our religion out of propositions as surely as heathens do out of wood and clay and fire. I will only stand my ground with them, and refuse to engage in apostasy. But to elaborate on orthodoxy, beyond what is needed for my soul, is like having enough bread, but walking out on a tightrope across a chasm in search of a crumb, because perhaps there’s more. The Faith is rich and has all the answers to the questions that have answers. It will provide all anyone needs. I am not needed. I’m just driftwood, meandering toward the fire, and praying for enough water to keep some cinder of me from utter destruction. The fathers will help you; they are all around us, after all.

Very interesting. Can you give me an outline of how you would go about communicating this in a real conversation?