Jesus Is Not Your Invisible Magic Friend

Jesus is not your invisible magic friend by Lydia McGrew
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An atheist on the internet pointed out that I literally believed I had a magical invisible friend who could grant me wishes.

So what I ask of you is this: Try to rattle your own faith. Shake it up. Cause as much doubt as you can. Read what the best of the opposition has to say, and take it seriously. Describe your own faith in the most contentious terms possible (e.g., “an invisible friend who grants me wishes”) and recognize that this is, though not how you would put it, still literally true about what you believe.

... "grants me wishes" or "could grant me wishes." Again, here we see the interesting combination of mechanism and capriciousness that was evident in the rhetorical impact of the word "magical." A genie grants you wishes. You call up a genie out of a bottle, and he says, "Master, what do you wish?" Then he has to do what you tell him. Or perhaps the genie says, "You have three wishes," and then you have to choose your wishes carefully. The wishes can be whatever you select, and the genie is bound to honor your requests.

God is not like this, and even the addition of the word "could" to the phrase does not help. God's interaction with our requests is that of a wise and loving Father who decides what is best for us and who often refuses our requests. Most often, as far as we can tell, God does not perform any miracle to bring about that which we request, even when what we ask comes about by Providence and secondary causes. God is simply not in the business of "granting wishes." In fact, Christians are called upon to take up their crosses and follow Jesus. I don't know about you, but taking up a cross was never one of my wishes.

Again, here the saccharine version of Christianity... This is not to say that God could not intervene miraculously to bring about some state of affairs or that God never does (after all, the Bible is full of miracles). It is rather to say that God's actions should not be thought of as "granting wishes," as though our feelings were primary and as though God is like an indulgent or capricious grandfather (or a genie) who gives us what we want just because we want it.

...In general, I have found that deconversions are all too likely to happen when the inquiring Christian is unwilling to "graduate" from a simplistic or childish concept of God to a more complex, difficult, and deeper concept of God. It is rather like a person's deciding that all of science is bunk when he realizes, to his annoyance and dismay, that all physical phenomena cannot be accommodated by Newtonian physics.

I do not have any single antidote for such deconversions, but it would certainly help if we would challenge our young people to move beyond a shallow concept of friendship with Jesus and in particular not to be emotional dependent upon religious experience.

Tough-mindedness is indispensable for those who are going to encounter a ridiculing world.