My local Freethinkers group had this guy on a recent Sunday meeting (yes we meet opposite of church time). I’m glad they are bringing in believers, very moderate ones. We asked some hard questions, but he managed to skirt them. It was a reasonable discussion, but also, typically, left a lot unresolved.
One that stood out was a question about hypocrisy. I’m not bothering with the time stamp, it’s not that important. His answer was that Jesus called such people, a whited sepulcher. I asked him later to clarify. Sepulcher is a burial monument of some kind, and whitewashing it is symbolic of avoiding the pain, something like that.
IDK, again, it doesn’t matter. Just saying, when confronted with contradictions and problems of religion, people will pull out two words from the Bible and claim that’s the entire theme, and the right way to do Christianity, blah, blah, blah.
He spoke briefly, then opened up for questions, which I really admire. Things turned to end-of-life issues, which are important to me. So, all in all, it was a good session. But again, he avoided my question of how Catholics are a big part of the culture of keeping people on life support and repressing the conversation of assisted suicide.