WHY AM I A CHRISTIAN?
I wrote this title a while back, but since then I have come upon some new insights.
What I wrote on this last year is still very applicable, however, I want to appeal to a new side.
I wrote my last blog on faking Christianity, but now I want to let everyone know why I chose Christianity.
My parent’s both got saved a year before I was born. They both jumped head first into their new faith and brought me along on the ride. I have grown up hearing about Jesus and living in a very close Christian home. So everyone assumes, ‘she is a Christian because she was raised that way.’
Wrong.
Did you know that 70% of teenagers leave the church once they reach 18? a
Almost 80% of those teens who leave have already checked out of their faith while in still attending church.
So to say a person is a Christian because her family is, is unstable.
I do not think that a person should ever be something just because her parents have said so. I think that a person needs to find thing out for herself or himself. Listening to wise counsel of people you trust is always good, but at the end of the day it needs to be you.
Last summer I began looking around at other religions besides Christianity. I was searching for answers that did not come from the background I had been raised in. How was I to be certain I wasn’t being lied to? What if there is another religion out there that has truer answers? Was Christ the final answer?
I am a very spiritually in tuned person, which means the idea of there never being a God is impossible for me to imagine. I can feel my life at war, somewhere there is an invisible struggle being fought over me. Over what I should do, want to do, need to do, am supposed to do. This means there is a right and a wrong; if there was not a right and wrong, why would I struggle so choices?
It has been argued that there is no absolute right, nor an absolute wrong, because there is no such thing as an absolute truth… However, for that to be considered true, wouldn’t that be an absolute truth?
So if there is a right and a wrong, a high standard which every human almost instinctively knows, where does it come from?
‘Religion’ is the most obviously answer. We have passed down multiple religions throughout the generations. Some last, some die, but what we do know is we are never without it. So the truth must lay away in one of these many beliefs, otherwise religion would have died out long ago.
Dr. Norman Geisler suggested to pool the worldviews into seven simple possibilities: theism, atheism, pantheism, pantheism, deism, polytheism, and finite godism. Theism is the belief in a supernatural ‘First Cause’ who is incaused, one, personal, moral, and infinite in all His attributes including power and intelligence. He manifests himself in the universe, yet is also beyond it. Atheism says that there is no God. This universe just randomly showed up out of nowhere and the only authority that is real is the power of man. Pantheism holds that creation and the Creator are one and the same. God is nature and nature is God. Deism, which is closely related to Theism, suggests that God is beyond our world and not in it miracously, the trials and evil we face here are started by free choice and ignorance and can be won by both God alone and/or man alone. Polytheism, like the Roman and Greeks, states there are multiply gods, two for certain, however, there could be more. The evil and harshness of this world are merely the gods fighting amongst themselves. Finite godism is the idea that there is one God whom is both in our world and beyond it, the trials and evil that tortures us here is God’s internal struggle with himself and it can be defeated by God or man. Within each of these categories there are hundreds of different religions, but by breaking them down to the nitty gritty definitions, you can easily see which ones appear to hold truth and which ones seem more of a made up feel good fairytale to escape something deeper.
I cut out atheism fairly quickly with simple reasoning. Everything around us is so complex and unique that the possibility of it happening by chance is a bit too extreme. Humans alone are an organism we ourselves, actually being human, have yet to even master. So how could nothing making something so intricate? A big bang? We make big bangs all the time when blowing up stuff, yet for some random reason, that explosion never magically makes us a another living organism or house after the debris has settled. It just leaves a pile of dust.
Pantheism is a bit more real to me. It makes since in some form. Didn’t the Indian’s believe this? However, if God is nature… Is he good or bad? Nature is both. It can be good and healthy, but it can also be cruel and dire. I have a hard time grasping the reality that a God who cared to make us so special and with so much emotion would harm us so much.
Polytheism is fun to research, nonetheless it died out long ago as a major religious thought. If the truth can die then it was never true to begin with.
Deism… hmmmm…. This idea is as close to Theism as you can get, without actually giving ‘God’ any major power. If man can win any trial brought on him by both him and God or just him, or just God alone- why does man fail so often? If man can overcome evil without a god, then why are there so many broken and hurting people? Why do they cry out in the mist of tears ‘I can’t do this anymore!’? Evidently, they cannot do it alone. Deism doesn’t work.
Lastly is Theism. This covers the most influential modern religions: Christianity, and Islam.
Islam has never been able to grab my attention as an actual steady religion, due to the fact that it is in consistent in the teaching (from the Quran) and their history does not match up with the rest of the time line of world history. Example?
”And they (the people of Noah’s day) said to each other, ‘Abandon not your gods: abandon neither Wa’dd nor Suwa, neither Yaquth nor Yauq, nor Nasr..’” S. 71:23
The problem primarily arises with the names given to the idols of Noah’s time. These are the names of the idols worshiped at the time of Muhammad in Mecca, nearly three thousand years later! How is it possible for Noah’s people to worship Arabic deities with Arabic titles several thousand years before these idols ever came into existence? The Muslims’ attempts to reconcile this obvious anachronism have failed so far. b
Christianity seems pretty fairytale like (miracles, turning water into wine, food sent from Heaven), except the whole Jesus thing. This guy does not only show up in the pages of religious books, but also in other historical documents that have nothing to do with religion. To disprove Christianity, you would need to be able to disprove the resurrection of Jesus. Seem simple right? Wrong. Many people have spent their whole lives researching the resurrection of Jesus as a hoax, yet it never adds up.
The whole New Testament is based on the life and preaching of one man, Jesus. This is where the whole story begins, so why not start disproving this man’s whole life? Because here is the deal:
If Jesus did rise from the grave, then everything he said must be true.
If He did not rise from the grave, then everything he said is a lie.
If we can just prove this area, we can conquer it all in one shot.
Since the NT is an old historical document, then let’s check its reliability first.
In the 19th century archaeologist took to disproving the accountability of the Bible, mainly the New Testament, by their accuracy and finding gaps in the writing that would misplace the whole timeline set up by the New Testament. However, during their search, instead of finding evidence against it, they found over 15,000 manuscripts to support it. Most of these papyri’s bridged the gap between Christ and the already existing manuscripts. Depleting the ‘missing gaps’ case. Sir William Ramsay spent 15 years of his life trying to undermine Luke. His wish was to undermine Luke credentials as a historian and in doing that refute the reliability of the New Testament. However, at the end of 15 years, he concluded, “Luke is a historian of first rank…. This author should be placed along with the very greatest historians.”
So Luke is reliable huh?
Time and time again history has done more to prove the Bible’s reliability than it has to diminish it. In fact, secular history have never been able to weaken the Bible, only verify it. I will post some links down below for anyone interested in researching this subject (both Christian historians and secular)
If we are to count the reliability of an ancient document (which the Bible is) then it out shines every other accent manuscript we count as reliable times ten.
|
Work |
When Written |
Earliest Copy |
Time Span |
No. of copies |
|
New Testament |
A.D. 40-100 |
A.D. 125 |
25 yrs |
24,000 |
|
Homer (Iliad) |
900 B.C. |
400 B.C |
500 yrs |
643 |
|
Sophocles |
496-406 B.C |
A.D. 1000 |
1,400 yrs |
193 |
|
Aristotle |
384-322 B.C. |
A.D. 1100 |
1,400 yrs |
49 |
|
Caesar (Gallic Wars) |
58-50 B.C. |
A.D. 900 |
1000 yrs |
10 |
Do we question Homer? or Aristotle? no…
So the Bible has been proven reliable and Jesus did in fact rise from the grave. Not just in religious manuscripts, but in secular records as well.
This evidence was enough for me to dig deeper into Christianity. Its claims have been proven, so now it was a matter of what did God want with me?
~A.
a- LifeWay Research
b-http://www.faithdefenders.com/articles/worldreligions/Contardictions_and_Inconsistencies_Quran.html
c- studies from Josh Mcdowell, Mere Christianity, Jimmy Willaims, The Bible
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