 I do believe that Christianity, as a religion and as a worldview, is without a question intellectually respectable even if we have our questions about the Pentecostal Appalachian sneak-handlers. For example, Christianity is well represented in the world's leading universities like Oxford or Cambridge or Yale or Harvard which employ tenured professors who are Christians who write on Christianity. So are the teachers of Jesus himself actually intellectually respectable? When Jesus said that certain men should castrate themselves, was that respectable? Is it respectable to frighten young children with the teaching that they are born depraved and that their sins have been to send them to hell where they will burn forever? Is that a respectable teaching that we should be telling our children? When Jesus refused to condemn his genocidal father for ethnic cleansing and for rape, was that respectable? Why did Jesus never denounce slavery? When Jesus said that you should beat your slaves, of course he qualified it by saying that the slaves who didn't know better should not be beaten as hard as the slaves who did know better. Is that respectable? Maybe you think so, but some of us don't.