It's a cult tactic.
Not exaggerating - apologetics is for the cult members, not anyone else. It's the same with door-to-door proselytizing, like the Jehova's Witnesses do, or the Mormon missions.
The intent is not to convert new people. if it happens, it's a bonus.
The intent is to make the cult members feel even more rejected by the "outside world." To recognize unbelievers are "lost" or "evil." Make them more dependent on the church, make them more socially isolated except for the specific relationships the church wants to foster.
In the case of apologetics...similar to conspiracy theories, you wind up with a tribalized separation of "enlightened" believers who "know the truth," and the poor misguided or even maliciously deceptive unbelievers. It's all about establishing a difference between the in-group and the out-group, reinforcing the in-group identity subsuming the individual identity, and ensuring that the believer will feel isolation/alienation/threatened by the out-group.
It has
never been about cogent arguments or establishing rational belief through evidence.
-->“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.” - Francis Bacon"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
“A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.” – Albert Camus
"...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." - Barash, David 1995...
"Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends." - Gandalf, J. R. R. Tolkien: The Lord Of the Rings
"The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death."
1 Corinthians 15:26King James Version (KJV)
-->Nihil supernum -->
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