>This is the foundational mistake your entire response rests on... It's like dismissing a climate scientist just because they aren't a grifter paid by the oil industry.

Ah, and with this, you have exposed the fatal error in your analytical framework which disqualifies every single objection you have raised to the true Christian conception of God as critically, fundamentally flawed. As a consequence of your atheistic priors, you once again assert - without evidence or justification, mind you, but through mere presumption - that God is a mere "concept" or "sociological phenomenon", initializing this misconception as an axiomatic precondition of modeling behaviors within human society which then "explains", in circular fashion, how God is ostensibly a mere human construct. By begging the question in this way, you and your fellow travellers commit and implicitly cement a fatal category error concerning what God even is, and therefore, commit to deceptively analyzing a mere figment of your own delirious imaginations you have substituted in place of God Himself. To the clear-eyed observer, this reveals that secular methodologies are ontologically incapable of even addressing the topic of the Christian God in the first place, let alone doing so honestly; the hammer redefining everything into a nail. In reality, the internal tradition of the Church is the *only* authoritative source we have of any truth regarding the Divine, as He Himself has established this to be the authoritative mechanism by which He reveals Himself to us in history; "the pillar and ground of the Truth". These are not external questions at all, as you desperately insist, and indeed the very notion that they even could be is illogical. The question does not only not require a secular approach, but on the contrary, a secular approach is incompatible with the subject altogether; a foolish commitment to only ever accepting false results, akin to vowing to only ever try to "decode" an encrypted message with what the original author has repeatedly informed you is the wrong cipher.

Another elementary misunderstanding grows apparent when you say that, if this were the case, then "no belief system could ever be false on its own terms". This mistakes existential certitude in the truth of the belief system from an outside observer with an accurate assessment of the contents of said belief system. A determination of the former does not require the latter; we need not personally possess technical or practical knowledge of the culinary arts to judge whether a seasoned chef has a correct understanding of meal preparation, and we need not personally understand ballistics or gunsmithing to ascertain that the dumb oogaboog who blew himself up trying to engineer a cannon using voodoo magick and child sacrifice did not understand the subject of launching projectiles via explosion. For a clear example of how this concept applies in this context, in my own pre-Christian state, I made the initial existential determination that the Orthodox Christian faith is objectively true based on a variety of reasons that were external to the depth of the faith's internal theology (the obviously miraculous nature of the rise of the Christian church in history, the absurdity of suggesting that the early martyrs would face persecution and die for belief in a specific person (not even one of their own kinsmen of their own religious tradition, in the case of the gentiles) if they had not actually seen Him risen from the dead, the clear moral uprightness of their outward-facing principle and their people in comparison to the naked degeneracy and depravity of atheists and heathen religions alike, the aesthetic beauty of their liturgy, church architecture and iconography, the undeniable wisdom of their clergy - I could go on and on and on). It was only then, from that position, that I reasoned: "if this is the true religion, then logically, I must conclude that the religion's teachings about theology, cosmology, and so on must also be correct". From here - no sooner - could I even *begin* to try and prayerfully cultivate something approaching a proper, accurate understanding of the theology of the Church or the nature of her worship; and even then, a mere neophyte like myself has only just barely begun to scratch the surface. You see? The falsifiability of a belief system and an accurate assessment of the system's contents are independent; your contention has no merit.

Unfortunately for you, that is, indeed, how reasoning works. To stray from such a rigorous methodology is to risk embarrassing ourselves by writing facially ridiculous, easily-refuted fanfiction by equating "external analysis of the veracity of an identifiable tradition" with "secular analysis of the 'true nature' of the tradition's practices", as you have. We might make such idiotic blunders as suggesting that the secular framework is the necessary default starting point for analysis as it is "external" to any positive belief system - ignoring the fact that secularism itself is a particular, positive worldview into which its adherents must be specifically trained, rather than the starting condition of some mythical tabula rasa "universal man", which itself would be equally susceptible to external analysis prior to its existential adoption by an individual. Such are the pretentions and projections of one who is ensnared within the transparent, schizophrenic syncretism of pagan and atheistic snake-oil known as Hinduism; a ridiculous, incoherent patchwork of contradictions and lies designed from its inception to prey upon the hyperinflated ego and intellectual inadequacies characteristic of the lesser races. It's no wonder you hedge your bets by reducing the incoherent mess you laughably call your "faith" to a mere branch of psychology, and it's even less surprising that your self-consciousness would compel you to pretend that every other faith is just as fraudulent; after all, nobody else could possibly be closer to the truth than Your Majesty! Isn't that right, Rajesh?

A far better analogy would be that *your* position is the equivalent of claiming that blind men are exclusively qualified to comment upon the existence and nature of the visible world, and that outside of their own ignorant, imagined speculations on topics of which they have no direct knowledge, they have no epistemically valid way of justifiably concluding that those with functional eyes are telling the truth about the existence and nature of sight, shape, and color. You claim to be conducting a mere external analysis of outwardly observable practices, but in reality, these are nothing more than the pitiable efforts of an insecure Hindu to intentionally contaminate the sample by imposing his own envious, anthrocentric, ego-driven interpretatio graeca of what he thinks Christian worship *ought* to be onto the specimen he is "studying", rather than addressing what it ACTUALLY, FACTUALLY *IS*. 

>This is circular... The question is not what Christianity claims God is, but what the concept of God is actually about.

First, a correction: my statement is not "circular", it is tautologous.

Secondly, another correction: not all true statements must necessarily be "arguments". The fact that the statement "God is not a human projection by definition" is not an "argument" is immaterial - what matters is whether it is true.

Third, I have already demonstrated why your appeal to any other competing belief system or ideology's internal claims to correctness collapses (existential certitude in a system vs. ascertainment of the system's contents). Given this, the consistent, intergenerational testimony of those with direct knowledge on the subject at hand is the most reliable source of information available to outsiders and does, as a matter of fact, inform those outsiders of what the concept is referring to; the old-wives' tales of those who have no knowledge of the subject matter whatsoever and are conflating their own made-up reinterpretations with objective reality, on the other hand, tells us less than nothing.

This is no different than if someone were to comment on the nutritional value of corn, only for you to begin rambling about how he's actually talking about sea urchins. Then, when he painstakingly explains that he can't be talking about sea urchins because corn is specifically a distinct set of objects from sea urchins and the whole reason they called it "corn" in the first place is specifically because the objects they're referring to possess the traits of corn which uniquely identify them as corn and distinguish them from a mutually exclusive category like sea urchins, you object and appeal to the Sea Urchin Institute's "analysis" that all the people who have ever encountered corn are actually growing, harvesting, and eating sea urchins and are merely experiencing a collective sensory and audiovisual hallucination, based on the Institute's implicit presumption that corn does not exist and because interviews with different corn-eaters revealed that their individual descriptions of the corn they eat were slightly different from each other. This is imbecilic, and by extension, so is your entire case.

What Christianity claims God is and what the Christian concept of God actually refers to are *one and the same.* This is a distinction without a difference, and asserting that the distinction between the two is meaningful - as though we are mistakenly worshiping something other than what we have identified God as being - is just more question begging.

>This doesn’t address the argument, you’re restating exclusivism... Calling this “just idolatry” doesn’t refute the pattern, it confirms that religious development was happening and being contested.

Don't play dumb, pajeet - someone like you doesn't need to pretend.

It absolutely addresses the argument by presenting the actual reason for the religious particularism you've described - an explanation which contradicts your theory of gods as mere human constructs "produced" by human cultures as projections of their particular cultural norms. Presuming a particular narrative sans justification while sidestepping competing narratives does not resolve the question of which is actually correct, despite your thesis being predicated on one and not the other. It's like pointing to the fact that "that man is dead" as evidence that he was shot, while ignoring the reality that he was actually stabbed, and when asked to justify the former theory over the latter, simply repeating that the man is definitely dead as "evidence" and then spinning a protracted narrative of how a bullet penetrating the body damages tissue and induces bleeding, ultimately leading to death. It doesn't help your case; it's nothing more than a distraction as you bury your head in the sand.

Once again, your "point" is specious. You are conflating human conceptions of God or gods which exist in the hearts and minds of human beings with their actual external reality and, from this, stipulating that changes in the former constitute changes to the latter. This is reflected in your assertion that the former "produces" the later - this only makes sense if you start from the presupposition that God/gods are mere concepts in their totality, as your secular weltanschauung does implicitly (without evidence or justification). Furthermore, the fact that the character of different pagan deities are reflected in their host societies could as much be evidence that the demons who have led the nations astray have reshaped them according to their whims, OR it may be evidence that they appear in whatever forms are most appealing to their particular human prey.

Ironically, this point actually works against your thesis due to the fact that the narrative of the Tanakh, as well as the God and Israelite patriarchs/other ancestors depicted therein, uniquely do not serve as a vehicle for ethnic competitive advantage through Israelite national self-glorification - and in fact, they have the opposite effect. The progenitors of the Israelites are depicted as sinful and wicked people in need of repentance, descended in large part from liars, cowards, traitors, thieves and prostitutes. This is unique in human history - the Spartans claimed descent from the heroic demigod Heracles; the Romans claimed descent from the glorious figure or Romulus, etc. etc. Meanwhile, the Israelites' forefathers include: Abraham, who deceived foreign kings into nearly raping his wife Sarah on two different occasions to save his own skin; Jacob, who through treachery stole his brother Esau's birthright; the sons of Israel whose jealousy led them to sell their own brother Joseph into slavery and then lie to their father that he was slain; Judah in particular, who hired his own daughter-in-law Tamar as a roadside prostitute because she had disguised herself; the sons of Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, who abused the priesthood and were slain for their insolence; the entire generation at the time of the Exodus who refused to enter the promised land and were thus sentenced to wander the desert until they had died off; the various generations at the time of the Judges; even their own kings, such as Saul, David, Solomon, Ahab, and so on, the sins of whom are all greatly emphasized in the Biblical narrative; and countless more examples besides. If the Israelite religion and God were mere "sociological constructs" that reflected their own cultural values, as all gods and religions supposedly are, then why would the famously ethnonarcissistic Israelites and Jews "invent" an ethnoreligious narrative that revolved around their lowliness and penance while constraining the conditions under which they might lawfully practice warfare, slavery, conquest, and so on? It wouldn't be until the original invention of the religion of Judaism in the period following the destruction of the Second Temple and then the scouring of Judea/the diaspora that more self-serving, ethnocentric eisegesis of prophetic texts by Talmudist komers would finally become doctrine.

To claim that the Christian God of Israel is the "product" of the culture of the time - either that of Israel or of the pagan Roman Empire - is putting the cart before the horse. He was clearly not a product of either world; in fact, in more ways than not, their ways were antithetical to His. This is why the faith served as a corrective force against the Israelites' demonstrated baser nature, and why embracing Him (via transmission from a foreign culture, mind you) reshaped the Roman Empire into something entirely different from what it once was.

As for the alleged evidence of "evolution", let's go in order:


>Tribal war god national god universal moral lawgiver (centuries after Jesus)

*centuries before Jesus
None of these traits are mutually exclusive, nor do they require the God in question to "evolve" - they are simply descriptive of actions He has taken at different points. Narrative development and character action does not a dynamic character make. These "changes" are simply the revelation of further details about what always was, without altering or contradicting that which came before, rather than an actual change in the underlying character.

Also:
>metaphysical absolute (the current version, created by apologists over a millennia after Jesus).
is a hilariously ridiculous lie which shows you haven't done your homework. This was our understanding of the Christian God from the days of the earliest Church Fathers. Here are just a few examples:


>Justin Martyr (c. 100–165 AD):

First Apology (Chapter 10);
>"There is, then, God, the Father of all, uncreated, unbegotten, invisible, infinite, and incomprehensible, who is above all creation."

Dialogue with Trypho (Chapter 4);
>"God is not as human beings are, but is unchangeable and eternal."


>St. Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130–202 AD)
recounting the teachings of
>St. Polycarp of Smyrna (c. 69–155 AD):

Against Heresies (Book 2, Chapter 1);
>"God is not a created being, but is the Creator of all things, invisible, incomprehensible, and without beginning."

Book 4, Chapter 20;
>"God is the source of all being, and He is without beginning and without end."


>St. Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215 AD)

The Stromata (Book 2, Chapter 2):
>"God is the only one who is eternal and uncreated, the cause of all that exists."

Exhortation to the Greeks (Chapter 10):
>"The Uncreated is not as the created, but is above all creation, being the cause of all that is."


>Tertullian (c. 155–240 AD)

Against Praxeas (Chapter 3):
>"God is one, invisible, uncreated, and the source of all things."

Apology (Chapter 17):
>"He is eternal, uncreated, and the author of all creation."


Here are just five examples (four if you attribute the teachings in Irenaeus' texts to Polycarp), two citations apiece, of early Christian writers who explicitly articulate God's absolute state of being, transcendance, metaphysical primacy and status as the source of all existence (the arche - as in "monarchical trinitarianism"). I can name more, but you get the point - and these were just the writings that survived, all of which is ultimately sourced from the oral tradition as per the direct instruction of the Apostles themselves.

You were only, oh... about nine-hundred years off. kek

>comparative mythology
Using offshots and corrupted deviations of the original faith to argue that the original faith was a development from its own deviant strains is like arguing that someone's mutant son is actually his grandfather because they're related. When the father himself is still alive, directly speaking to you, and telling you to your face that he's the kid's father and you're retarded. 

>textual stratification of the Hebrew Bible
This is where the interpolation I mentioned earlier comes into play. Why, exactly, are we meant to believe that the existence of several different human authors (supposedly J, E, D, and P) writing at distinct time periods magically proves "evolution" from a fundamentally different god or religion? Simply making an inference or assumption about (a selective subset of) the available data based on a presumption is not evidence of the presumption's truth.

>archaeology (syncretism with El, Baal, Asherah)
Again - interpolation. Again - this is evidence that the biblical account of Israel's unfaithfulness is accurate, not that the Israelite religion was an evolution from a different, non-monotheistic faith.

>internal biblical evidence of evolving theology
Do you mean the internal evidence of new revelations which do not constitute evolution, or the entire internal narrative itself which explicitly denies that the faith is evolving and describes each conflict with heretics and syncretists as a return to the genuine faith? Quite a bit of cherry-picking and interpolation required to frame testimony of something not happening as evidence that it actually was happening, just to confirm a set of speculative academic preconceptions.

>historical evidence of the doctrine of each Church,
Why change the topic? The innovative doctrines of heretical, schismatic sects have no bearing on a discussion about actual, orthodox Christianity - except to prove that as sects fall away and "evolve" new religions of their own, they necessarily cease to be Christians at all, demonstrating the mechanism by which the Church has remained completely true to its foundational doctrines even two thousand years later.

>Calling this “just idolatry” doesn’t refute the pattern, it confirms that religious development was happening and being contested.
The pattern of idolatry and syncretic deviation confirms that heresies were branching off and developing *outside* of the original faith, which is why they were being rejected and systematically purged (or as you conveniently put it, "contested"), yes.  

Do you finally see? The only "evidence" you have provided is that you have failed to comprehend even the most basic tenets of the doctrine and history of the Christian faith. All you have as a secularist reviewing the academically attested historical record is a series of dots on a page; by ignoring the clear instructions on the page itself the proper order to connect the dots in and trying to reconstruct the sequence based on speculation rooted in presumed sociological mechanics inspired by a totally different field, you have obscured the real picture from view under a nonsensical series of incoherent, meaningless scribbles.

>Syncretism is evidence of development... What we see is a progressive refinement of an ideal, not the sudden appearance of a fully formed metaphysical absolute.

Sorry, but even if I were arguing against any "development" in its totality (I'm not and never was), syncretism is not evidence of development. A different religion emerging when a sect of adherents establish derivative creeds has no bearing on whether the original from which they deviated has experienced any change itself - if anything, it proves the opposite, as established above. The idea that Yahveh "absorbs" attributes of other deities is yet more interpolated speculation that runs contrary to all primary sources and first-hand attestation; furthermore, "competing conceptions" of God proves additive and clarifying revelation which build upon rather than retcon the original faith on the one hand (development of orthodoxy) and subversive demonic influence and human hubris drawing individuals to innovate and invent their own new religions on the other (entropic degeneration), not "evolution" of the faith itself , which, as a direct analogy to Darwinian theories used in the biological sciences, postulates a process by which random memetic mutations and cultural diffusion results in fundamental changes and revision to core doctrine following competition under environmental and sociocultural selection pressures, culminating in adaptations which confer a reproductive advantage to the given religion as a meme. That is not what we actually see in the historical record; such a process is simply presumed as an explanation for events and artifacts in the historical record, without ever being directly observed or proven. What we ACTUALLY see, as I've mentioned, is successive revelation events which adds detail, precision and specificity to the theological model without contradicting tenets of the faith established prior. Thus, none of this contradicts the proven immutability of established Christian theological doctrine nor of God Himself, neither of which actually experienced transformative mutation through the processes you describe. That is, as you put it, "progressive refinement" - NOT "evolution" in the sense the term is used by critical secular scholarship. By the way, you've got it backwards again - the Israelites were not "wrong until they got it right", they were right until they got it wrong. That is both a theological claim AND a historical explanation. And no, none of this requires the "sudden appearance" of a "fully formed metaphysical absolute"; you pulled that out of your ass alongside your newest Hindu god.

>This is demonstrably false... An unchanging external standard does not require centuries of reinterpretation to align with shifting moral intuitions.

As if showing that you don't have the faintest clue of what the Church Fathers taught wasn't enough proof of your conceited ignorance. The Church's stance on each of those issues has NOT changed - our position has remained *exactly the same* on every single point from the beginning, pure and untainted by even the slightest concession to the fallen, worldly morality of mere men:

>Slavery: once tolerated and even encouraged or mandated, now condemned.
False. Slavery is NOT condemned by the Church. It, much like war, is part of the regrettable condition of living in a fallen world, but the practice is absolutely still accepted under orthodox doctrine, not anathematized - just as it was in the past. To illustrate this, consider that the institution of slavery is ubiquitous in the continent of Africa, and yet, the Patriarchate of Alexandria has not declared the practice to be illicit, sinful, or heretical; they do not excommunicate slaveholders, they do not help runaway slaves to escape their captivity, they do not agitate for abolition, and so on. 

>Usury: once forbidden, now normalized.
False. Usury is sinful and forbidden today, just as it always was - it is nothing more than an elaborate form of theft, after all. Refer to Fr. Josiah Trenham's reflections on debt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpZmsyNMiPQ

>Gender hierarchy: once divinely mandated, now softened or reinterpreted.
False. On the day I was baptized at the Jordanville monastery, I attended the liturgy at their cathedral and received communion for the first time as a newly baptized neophyte. When I entered at the back of the line to receive the mystery, a sweet local lady approached me, and explained to me that the men go in front of the women in line. Being an American, I was as shocked to hear this as I was elated, and promptly took my place with the other men. Even today, our men still lead, and our women still follow, whether the fake, worldly "morality" of the modern liberal West likes it or not.

>Violence: once sacralized, now problematized.
False. We still adhere to just war theory as exemplified by the rule of such pious Emperors as Constantine and Justinian; the use of force in its proper context is still regrettable and must be repented of, as we have held from the earliest days of the Church, but it is still acknowledged as a service to the flock and a sacred duty owed to the legitimate earthly authorities. Picrel speaks for itself (that's a priest blessing one of Russia's S-300 missile systems).

It occurs to me that you might be confusing *Christian* teaching with that of the Latin heretics and their Protestant offshoots. If so, that is a cop-out which once again proves that you do not know what you are talking about. Regardless of what non-Christian outsiders may do, the fact stands that the actual faith and those who practice it have not changed, free of any supposed "reinterpretation" to conform to the standards of worldly cultures which has not been established. By creating a new, modified version of doctrine for themselves, the schismatics have ceased to be Christian (in the case of Rome), or never were in the first place (in the case of the Reformationists, Restorationists, etc).

>No, they prove institutional convergence... They don’t.

Yet another distinction without a difference, as the institution itself revolves around the metaphysical standard in question (and was, in fact, founded by it). Even if we were to pretend you were correct about the target not objectively existing for the sake of argument, through this admission, your original accusation that Christians "worship themselves" instead of an external metaphysical absolute still fails. You are conceding that maturation in the Christian monastic tradition results in convergence on an external, rather than internal, standard - namely, the standard set by the institution of the Church, which is ontologically distinct from the individuals belonging to it. This distinct entity, according to your revised position, is what they are conforming themselves to, and more specifically to the idealization of a uniform set of traits which are distinct from the traits any particular monk might have personally possessed before adopting the monastic lifestyle. I'm not "marveling" at this, on the contrary, I'm pointing out that it's the only logical result which anyone with a functioning brainstem would take for granted. Of course this also happens with all the other traditions you mentioned - because no matter how much you may insist that they are just as bad as you, the fact is that they *don't* worship or conform to "projections of themselves" any more than we do, irrespective of the objects of their worship being false idols. If they did, then as I said previously, you would expect each individual's development to follow divergent paths, rather than converging on *any* point. And no, none of this requires universal convergence of different faiths on the same external endpoint; it's frankly mystifying how you came to such an illogical conclusion from the premises we've established.

>This concedes the core mechanism... A mirror doesn’t stop being a mirror because people polish it.

Sorry, but you have failed to established that the human tendency towards self-idolatry is a "core mechanism" of anything other than heresy and schism. Similarly, you have failed to established that correction comes through "evolving tradition"; failed to establish that the transmission, interpretation, or enforcement mechanisms of the Church are somehow purely "human" despite being a Divine institution which is guided by the Pentecostal gifts of the Spirit, or why you've shifted the goalposts to "unmediated" access to the external standard in question (but I'll humor you - "unmediated access" to Divine guidance is provided to the episcopate when they convene in synods and issue conciliar decrees. Christianity 101 - should've done your homework); failed to establish the existence of a feedback "loop"; and failed to establish that religion is a mere "mirror", a claim which curiously backpedals on your earlier concession to the fact that Christians (and indeed, other non-Hindu religions) conform to an external institution rather than mere projections of their own idealized selves. All you've established is your obsession with repeating the same hollow, meaningless assertions and unfounded presumptions on loop while pretending that they constitute an argument. Oh, and also that you are utterly unqualified to discuss the topic, malinformed, and out of your depth.

>This confuses directional discipline with objectivity... If anything, the fact that growth requires renouncing oneself to adopt a predefined model reinforces that the model is socially maintained and normatively enforced.

There's no confusion, pajeet; you have completely conceded my point and contradicted your entire thesis for a second time now, this time supplementing your concession with yet another unsubtle goalpost-shift. Your original position was not that religious ideals exist "independently of human construction"; your position was that those ideals were projections of the worshiper's own self. You have now explicitly expressed your agreement that this is not the case, and that you were initially mistaken. Renouncing the self to be reshaped through conformity to an institution via adoption of an external set of ideals which is socially maintained and normatively enforced does not somehow prove that we are worshiping ourselves; it proves the exact opposite, no matter how much schizophrenia or Orwellian spaghetti logic you try to hide behind.

>This collapses into semantic equivalence... You haven’t escaped idealization, you’ve renamed it “nature” and declared it absolute.

It's a good thing that God is not "only", or even primarily, known through human moral categories then, but through direct relational experience - not as a concept, but as three *persons*. Otherwise, this paragraph is nothing more than compounding layers of presumption (this time, of an immanent Aristotelean model of universals), misunderstanding (that I have any need of "escaping idealization", whatever that's supposed to mean) and unabashed hallucination (nobody has declared an idealization to be "nature" - read the previous post again, nice and slow) with schizophrenic word salad, sans any coherent underlying syllogism being conveyed or even any discernible logical structure.

>Again, this is just an assertion with no evidence to back it up... Saying “Christ founded the Church and the Spirit guides it” is the claim under dispute, not a premise you get to assume.

Cute evasion, but the doctrine of kenosis IS the evidence against your fanciful, unsubstantiated claims of "human projection". If one of your fellow phenotypically and spiritually brown mongoloid cousins were to approach me and accuse me of being a vegan, and in response I showed them a picture of myself eating a cheeseburger earlier that day, that picture is not an "assertion"; it's dispositive, irrefutable proof that your cousin is wrong. In the same way, when you accuse us Christians of "worshiping ourselves", I can prove you wrong simply by citing the well-established Christian practice of self-denial, self-mortification, and renunciation of the world to prove that we do the exact opposite.

And no, the claim that "Christ founded the Church and the Spirit guides it" is NOT the claim under dispute and never was - you've gotten yourself confused again. Your claim which is now under dispute is that "Christians worship mere human concepts or projections of their own idealized selves, not an external absolute as they profess"; this is a claim about the nature of Christian doctrine and practice, and as such, yes, the Christian position on the origin and operation of the Church may be taken as a given. Not that it matters, because no matter how much you screech and cry foul, we *can* in fact assume the nature of the Church as a premise because the established corpus of proof is voluminious, overwhelming and airtight; you say "no evidence"... yeah, except for aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaall the evidence, kek. Think of how mathematicians can assume theorems that have been externally proven in the past when constructing proofs of new postulates, without having to rederive the assumed theorems in the early steps of the new proof. The same cannot be said for your preferred, unproven, and self-defeating premise of secular atheism.