The Journey to Jesus
Did you know all historians agree Jesus Christ was a real person from history, including atheists?
Did you know we have a wealth of evidence for God and Jesus outside of the Bible?
I didn't. I was a hardcore science-obsessed atheist. I wanted evidence that God exists, and I found it.
After months of research, these are my conclusions:
1. The only valid and practical philosophy in life is religion.
2. Once you see the philosophical evidence, God's existence is undeniable.
3. Our extensive historical evidence proves that Jesus Christ is God.
Here I will detail the steps I took in my journey to Jesus. I came to Christianity completely backwards, by the hyper-intellectual route, but I found my faith in the end thanks to the evidence.
It is critical to read this page in order, top to bottom, because I build on previous explanations.
Note: You can hover overtap on underlined text to show more.
Why should you even care about religion?
Take a step back and realize this is the most important question in life. Not for explaining our origins or afterlife, but, on a personal level, for shaping our day to day lives, our compassion, our purpose, our motivation to keep going and to find ultimate meaning in life. You already live every day working towards a goal, and that is determined by your beliefs. Stop and think why this is your purpose in the first place, and let's re-evaluate what it should be.
Your life sucks. Everyone's life sucks. You know you need to be better, but how long will you delay? Do you actually plan on ever doing it? The willpower required for life change can be discouraging, but religion replaces it with faith. Religion is the only reliable way to stop destructive habits regardless of your discipline. If you don't care to even look into religion, you are choosing to live in ignorance, only driven by what others have told you to do with your life.
On a larger level, humanity cannot function without religion. All civilizations in human history that we know of were religious, even going back to cavemen, so we can conclude there must be an innate human drive for religious worship in our biology, and from an evolutionary perspective, those without a religious drive couldn't achieve cohesion and stability in their communities.
“But I'm not mentally in a good place to question my life this deeply”
You don't clean yourself before you get in the shower. You get in the shower to clean yourself.
The worst time of your life is the best time to start this journey. Quit finding excuses, you can read this whole page in an hour. There is literally nothing more important than these questions, because these are the questions that determine what is important.
If you don't have the time to research or read all of this, I highly recommend watching the videos by Stuart and Cliffe Knechtle. They do an incredible job at explaining the evidence for God and dispel the many misconceptions about Christianity. There are many videos, so I found it easier to make TikTok/Reels/Shorts algorithms show their content effortlessly, but it is worth watching the full debates.
Let's first explore why religion is a necessary philosophy. Just religion in general, not necessarily Christianity.
The modern world constantly struggles with this question: What is the point of life?
Most people would say “Happiness”
or “There is no point”
, or “You have to find it yourself”
.
The philosophy that says the point of life is happiness is actually called hedonism, so now it should be obvious why it's a bad idea. If the point is happiness, i.e. the chemicals serotonin and dopamine in your brain, why aren't you on heroin right now? Labor doesn't bring us happiness, but how would society survive without it?
If there is no point in life, why do you choose to live every day? Why do you care about others and conform to society? Why does anything have any meaning? This philosophy is called existential nihilism, and honestly even hedonism is better than this.
If the point of life has to be found by everyone individually, also called existentialism, that is just delaying the question. We're trying to answer it, otherwise we will be living with no direction all our lives. If you believe you have not found it yet, you are following another philosophy I mention here, there is no “I have no philosophy”
, since you need motivation and purpose to get out of bed in the morning.
Clearly, most people do not actually practice these philosophies they say they believe in. We need to take our line of thought to its conclusion and put it in practice, otherwise that is not our real philosophy. And I'm not just making extreme arguments: To say that there is or isn't a goal to the existence of human beings in this cold universe is an incredibly profound claim, and if you're not respecting what you're saying, this is simply not what you actually believe the goal is.
There's a common archetype of people I see, who immediately deny any claim against them and any categorization they are put in, often way before the claim is fully spoken. This is a superficial reflex; we need to introspect to find the answers we're looking for.
We can look at what history's greatest existential philosophers say, they should have the best idea of what the point of life is. The problem is they all disagree, and come up with various different points. For some it's love, for others it's knowledge, and for others it's just being content.
These are all nice ideas, but are we supposed to just pick one random philosopher and their ideas as the one true point to live our lives by? What basis do we even have to reason which one is wrong and which one is right? Any philosophy can sound convincing, and in fact anything that sounds wise can be convicing; this clip explains it perfectly. Regardless of the logic you came up with to motivate your philosophy (“because it's natural”
, “because that's how I feel”
, etc), it's all ultimately based on empty assumptions that aren't rooted in anything concrete, it “just is” that way.
What if the problem is that we're only looking at atheist philosophy?
Atheist philosophers such as Nietzsche argue that nihilism is always the inevitable conclusion for an atheist. They go on further to recommend a philosophy to overcome it, but again we don't know which philosophy is correct.
Nihilism is the belief that life is meaningless and nothing matters. Civilization simply cannot survive if everyone was a nihilist, because there is no reason to help each other, and there's no reason not to commit suicide. Nihilism is the death of humanity.
However, most people aren't truly nihilists. In the modern day, people replace worshipping God with worshipping other aspects of life.
Most worship money, or materialism and consumerism. For a materialist, life is an endless drive to get richer, to afford more expensive goods, a bigger house, cars, etc. The vast majority die before they are fulfilled with their wealth, and the poorest live a meaningless paycheck-to-paycheck life.
The lucky few who get immensely rich will all tell you the same thing: Having all these material things is nice, but they still feel empty, and miss the motivation they had all their life, when the process of trying to become rich was their actual purpose. Often they start seeking fulfillment from power over others and acquire political power through their wealth, which is why we now live in a world ruled by the greed and the hunger for power of corrupt politicians.
Others worship political ideology, new-age mysticism, their idols or loved ones, or even themselves. Anything to stimulate some part of the brain and fill the biological God-shaped hole in their heart. None of these alternate forms of worship bring fulfillment, and do not properly answer the question of morality and ethics in a way that would help society.
Religion has brought humanity fulfillment since the dawn of time, and now defines our society's ethics, even for atheists, as I describe below. Christianity teaches the opposite of materialism: That if we have fewer possessions, we will actually learn to appreciate them and be happier. If sin was fulfilling, we would only do it once, not fall into addiction.
So should you continue being godless and worshipping some aspect of life, or pick an arbitrary philosophy to live by? Why not investigate the question of religion, which, as I will show, is not arbitrary?
What is the evidence for God? Let's dissect the atheist argument.
- Core belief
An atheist is someone who believes with 100% certainity that there is no God. Already we can see the problem: How are you so absolutely sure? What evidence do you base your belief on? The lack of evidence for God isn't evidence He doesn't exist, and you also haven't looked into all possible religions to even conclude there is a lack of evidence.
Atheism at its core is still a religion based on faith. It's sad that most atheists don't recognize this. When I say religion, I mean a belief framework, and it's impossible not to have a belief: You either believe in God (theism), you don't (atheism), or you don't know (agnosticism).
Atheists often say
“I don't believe in God, I believe in science”
. This statement makes no sense to most Christians, because science does not exclude God. There is a small group of creationist Christians who believe the earth is 6000 years old because they took some Bible verses literally, but this does not represent the entire Christian faith, or all of religion. Other than this semantics dispute, the Bible does not contain any science, so it cannot contradict it.
The rest of us argue that science describes the process, and God describes the origin: God created the universe, and science explains how it works. Science can never have an answer about the origin of the universe, since we are within it, in the same way that a computer program cannot explain its programmer. It makes no sense to bring up science as a counter-argument.
Please keep in mind: God's existence does not have absolute 100% proof. It can't by definition – God is immaterial and transcends reality itself. Even if He appeared before us, you could still argue for hallucination or conspiracy. Too many atheists expect the evidence for God to be empirical (observational) evidence, which simply cannot exist for this subject; we can only have philosophical and metaphysical evidence.
The argument is that God is the most reasonable explanation of reality, and this shouldn't be a deal breaker, because none of your beliefs can be proven anyway: There is no proof that your eyes show you actual reality, but the evidence of your experience supports it. There is no proof that any of the scientific literature you read is legitimate, but the evidence of their reliability supports it.
Our lives are based on evidence, not 100% proof, so to say that we need absolute certainity to reach any conclusion about the world is simply dishonest, and would prevent us from living life at all if we had actually believed that. We don't chemically analyze all the food we eat to make sure it's not poisoned, and we have the trust to turn our backs to our loved ones without fear of being stabbed in the back.
We have a duty to investigate the evidence if it is reasonable, and then reach our conclusion.
- Moral subjectivism / relativism
There are embarrassingly many atheists who don't even realize what their stance is on morality and ethics. I was one of them.
A logically consistent atheist will say morality is subjective, i.e. what you believe is right and wrong may be different from what I believe due to our cultures, and we should coexist despite that. The reason for this is that, from a purely material worldview, morality doesn't exist fundamentally and cannot come from simple matter. Humans are the only life forms who morality even applies to, since an animal cannot commit crime.
The problem with this view is that, as a believer in moral subjectivism, it's not wrong if someone from another culture murders you or the people you care about, because there is no such thing as wrong.
In Iran, which is 99.9% Muslim, and in other Muslim countries, being gay is a crime punished with death, and women have very few rights. In Papua New Guinea, cannibalism is a normal part of life, and men can buy wives in exchange for a few animals. If you go to these countries, or their citizens immigrate to yours, should you be neutral when they take these actions against your people? After all, this is what their culture says is morally right, and your belief that these are wrong is just your opinion. But opinion determines action, so this is not a purely intellectual subject.
Then where does morality come from? There are 5 possibilities:
- Morality is defined by what worked best for evolution.
- Morality is defined by society's laws or leaders.
- Morality is defined by your culture.
- Morality is defined by everyone's individual opinion.
- Morality is defined by God.
What is the right answer?
If evolution/darwinism completely explains the human story along with morality, then survival of the fittest is the rule of the world.
But then why do we still care about the survival of the least fit? Why do we donate to the poor, feed the hungry, house the homeless, accomodate the disabled? By this philosophy, shouldn't they be left to die? And why are we not helping evolution along by implementing eugenics?
The answer is that we still adhere to a set of strict moral and ethical rules, despite what evolution dictates.
In the trials of Nuremberg, after World War 2, German lawyers argued that the Nazi leadership cannot be held accountable for their crimes against humanity, because they were simply following orders. It was almost the nail in the coffin for the trial, until this counter-argument: While it is true that they were following what their culture, laws and leader defined as right, morality is a law that sits above the law of the land, and according to this absolute law, they are guilty for their evil actions.
What is evil? Simply put, evil is the corruption of something good: Lust is the corruption of love, revenge is the corruption of justice, pride is the corruption of humility.
Evil cannot exist if good doesn't first exist. When we call something evil and wrong, we are presupposing that there is an intrinsic value of good and correct. When we strive to not be evil and call others out on it, and even when we call the police to report a wrongdoing, we are revealing our belief that things ought to be good, and that there is such a thing as good.
If society creates morality, then society can also erase it. The logical conclusion of a subjective morality would be that countries shouldn't be punished for the genocides they commit, and that genocide isn't even wrong if a culture believes it's good.
There is no basis for morality outside of religion.
Politics is the clearest example of this: On one side we have atheists trying to bring equality regardless of race/gender into the culture, and on the other side we have atheists who try to bring human rights for the unborn into the culture. But if morality is determined by culture in the first place, where are they getting these ideas from, and on what basis are they trying to change their culture which believes the opposite?
It's simple: These atheists do actually believe in objective morality; despite what everyone else believes, and even if the entirety of society was against them, they have a real sense of what is right and wrong and will even fight for it.
Those virtues I mentioned, universal equality and human rights? They both historically originate from Christianity. Atheists took Christian morality and now preach it as if it has an actual basis in reality, while according to their worldview, it shouldn't. Consistent atheists will admit this, and then use their subjective opinion of morality to go and stand against killing, stealing and cheating. Yet this is actually insensitive to other cultures to stand against, according to their worldview. That in fact, if we see Iranians and other Muslims killing gay people on the streets, we should respect their culture and not intervene, because that is morally right for them.
Why do you think suffering is bad in the first place? If morality is subjective, there is no such thing as bad. So just let them suffer, we're all mindless atoms anyway, right?
If all this is wrong, then there must be such a thing as an objective, absolute morality, that is not reducible to individual opinion, social agreement, or evolutionary advantage.
This is the philosophical argument: If moral rules are absolute, then they require a source of absolute authority, and only a Lawgiver with supreme authority over people can enforce these rules. The only name we have for this supreme Lawgiver, who defines good and absolute morality, is God.
Once we accept morality is objective, the existence of God is inescapable. God designed reality with these values of morality, they are the Truth and define absolute good. And yes, it just is good because God says it is, in the same way “It's good if society says it is”
.
This is the crux of religion, as irreligion cannot properly define morality. This is why we logically need to conclude that God exists. Our conscience literally tells us what is good and evil, and that is not a coincidence.
- Atheist miracles
“I don't believe in God because I don't believe in miracles”
But there are miracles that atheists believe:
- Nothing created everything.
Einstein's theory of relativity tells us that the universe started at the Big Bang; the atheist argument is that it did this all by itself? Why was the universe in the pre-Big Bang state in the first place and what caused it to explode everything into reality?
Who or what actually caused the Big Bang? According to the same theory, time and space originated at the Big Bang, and did not exist before it. So it follows that the cause of the Big Bang must be outside of time itself. What would such a phenomenon be called if not God? As a being outside of time that has the power to trigger the Big Bang, God should have the power to shape it in such a way to eventually create our world as it is today.
The question that is always raised after this is
“If God created the universe, who created God?”
, this is another non-sensical question, because you can then ask “Who created the creator of God?”
, then “Who created the creator of the creator of God?”
, and so on. Logically, at some point we need to have a creator that has always existed, in our case just being God.
Einstein was disappointed to find out the universe had a beginning, because the belief back then was that the universe is eternal, and this would give more credibility to Christianity. Many other physicists have converted after studying the impossibilities of physics.
Here is a a funny version of this argument.
- The intelligent design of reality is a coincidence.
It is undeniable that the universe is perfectly tuned for our existence. Life is possible thanks to extremely specific physical constants (α, αₛ, αw, G, mₑ/mₚ, mᵤ, m𝒹, m𝒹−mᵤ, mν, Λ, Q, ηᵦ, Ωdm, ΩΛ, S₀, D, and more). Almost every single constant sits in a microscopically narrow range that allows long-lived stars, chemistry, and complex structures to form. If these constants were different in any miniscule way, the universe would be sterile, everywhere, forever. And of course, the universe started out in an extremely low-entropy state to allow all this in the first place.
Even aside from constants, nature follows stable patterns we can describe with very elegant mathematics, i.e. the laws of physics, and symmetries like fractals or those in biology. But hold on, stop, why are there universal laws in the first place? Science bases its argument on these laws, but they don't strictly have to exist. Why does the universe have matter and why does it even want to move? Why are these very specific rules written into the fabric of the universe, and why can they be described rationally through mathematics? If you think deeply enough, this by itself is reason enough to believe in a Creator.
This is the point where atheists bring up the multiverse argument.
“There are infinite universes and we live in the one where all constants and laws happened to be perfect. We can't exist outside of it, so the chances of being here are 100%”
.
This might sound smart the first time you hear it, but it just shifts the question one layer up. How then did the multiverse have its perfect rules already in place to allow the infinite formation of universes to occur, all with varying ranges of constants, which maybe I could see, but somehow variable laws? How do you program a game where the rules change every time... a rational mind to change them perhaps? Or if all universes share the same laws, again, what set them up this way?
You say the multiverse has always existed, again with these laws and constants written into its fabric by no one, and I'm supposed to accept that as a complete theory of reality? Then we return to the first question, how did the multiverse start existing?
And no, we don't live in a simulation either; science has recently debunked that theory. Though I would've asked the same question here, who set up the simulation, or the reality the simulators live in?
It should become apparent once you actually ponder these existential questions enough that the only logical conclusion is an intelligent, rational Mind behind the origin of reality, and this is why many physicists have arrived at the same conclusion: The intelligent design of reality demands an intelligent Creator. It doesn't matter how many layers up you go, the maddening fact is that there is purposeful reason to this madness.
“Because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them.
For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse”
Romans 1:19-20 (NKJV)
- Atoms are conscious.
The one thing we can be 100% sure exists is consciousness, but what is it? There are scientific hypotheses that it might naturally emerge from sufficiently complex biological structures, but proving it is impossible. Why are you attached to this specific body at birth and every time you wake up, why at this point in time millions of years after humans appeared, and what happens to your consciousness when you die?
There must be more to consciousness than simple matter and energy, so we cannot have the pure atheist worldview. And this is because, while God is a personal being in Christianity, He is defined as everything in reality in religions like Hinduism. Believing there is more to reality than science can ever explain is already rejecting atheism.
What happens with our morality if nothing makes people any more special than a rock? Nihilism.
- Abiogenesis.
While this isn't strictly necessary for the larger picture and it is in some ways the “God of the gaps” argument, I think it's still important to shine light on a major misconception: We have no evidence that life can form by itself from inorganic matter, and have not been able to replicate the formation of the first celullar forms of life that are theorized to have appeared in primordial soups on a young earth. There could be a scientific process we don't know of that explains it, and God could just be the cause of this process, but our inability to accomplish this after much trial and error does point to God intervening on earth.
- Reason explains itself.
There is also a philosophical argument that we cannot use our reason to explain the origin of our reason, which demands God as the source. I am not smart enough to discuss this, but it is a common point and is explained in these books.
- Morality comes from matter.
Explained above. If morality is a social construct, that means it's most natural to be a nihilist, but nihilists would not follow morality in the first place, so why do we act the way we do?
If morality is absolute, and we can't accept God as the source of it, then where does it come from? How can simple matter create an abstract concept transcendental to reality?
Atheists leave no room for a concept like God to ever be able to explain these miracles, instead replacing Him with non-answer. In any case, if God has the power of creation, then miracles aren't out of the realm of possibility.
- Free will
Not too long ago, many atheists believed in determinism, the idea that the future of the universe has been pre-determined from the moment of its inception. However science has shown that this is not true, due to the inherent randomness of the universe described by quantum physics.
Partly due to determinism, many also do not believe in free will. Or so they say, since it is almost guaranteed they already do, indirectly.
For example, let's study our idea of what love is: Hypothethically, suppose you fall in love, it goes on for years, the relationship is amazing and perfect, and tomorrow you plan on asking her to marry you. But tonight, your dad calls you and tells you he has been paying her $1000 a week to be with you, and provides the requisite proof that he is telling the truth. Be sincere, would you still marry her?
No, right? Why is that? There are love chemicals in your brain, suppose there are even love chemicals in her brain, everything should be in place materially. Here's the problem: If she doesn't use her free will to choose you, it's not real love. That's what you want out of love, because love fundamentally depends on free will.
You can still reject free will on an intellectual level, but understand that this means rejecting the concept of love, thus rejecting your humanity, and ultimately arriving at nihilism.
Furthermore, laws are based on free will. The difference between killing and murdering is that murder requires intent, i.e. free will. Rejection of free will is the rejection of society itself. If free will doesn't exist and determinism is the rule of the universe, of course we will end up with a nihilist philosophy.
And yes, we also have many influences, but our free will decides ultimately. The entire history of humanity is a story of constant rebellion. If the atheist argument is that we are only defined by our influences, why are there dissidents even in countries with the most intense propaganda, such as North Korea?
It becomes obvious when you think about it deeply enough; while you likely don't have any psychopathic genes or influences, you can decide to murder someone for no reason, right now. Nothing stops you, aside from a conscience that you can ignore and power through.
- Parasitism
A society of atheists cannot survive, and many atheists have concluded this. Western society is still (barely) functional due to its foundations on the Christian faith. Christianity is the basis for human rights as defined by the United Nations, Christians have abolished slavery and have instilled Christian values into the core of the culture, such as equal justice and the belief in equality between all humans regardless of sex, ethnicity, or religion. Going against Christianity while believing in human rights as an authority doesn't even make sense.
Atheists in western society are afforded the luxury of living in a Christian culture without their ultimately anti-society nihilist philosophy being the norm. In this sense we could, rather harshly, call these atheists parasites of society.
While it is theoretically possible for a society to exist with atheists who are taught Christian values, and western societies are pretty much that right now, without faith there is no backbone to prevent society from deviating from these values, and it so happens that is exactly what's happening today.
- Deeper issue
The arguments above should be enough to convert any rational atheist into an agnostic. The core belief argument is usually successful at accomplishing that by itself, but still there are atheists who persist.
When you ask these atheists,
“If Christianity was correct, would you be Christian?”
, they'll frequently answer “No”
. I think here we find a problem bigger than rationality: It's that most atheists don't want God to exist. Or rather, they hope God doesn't exist. Because the existence of God implies that you can't continue living a selfish life, going around doing the wrong things you are doing now. That you are being watched and judged, and that everything you do has consequences.
It's just too scary of a thought to make them care about the evidence. They've set their will against God before even considering the facts, and cannot bring themselves to think clearly.
Some become deists, hoping instead there is some type of God who doesn't care about them.
It's a heart problem, not a head problem. Going further, deep seated issues and traumas need to be addressed for why they hope there is no God, and this must be done on a case by case basis.
If you are one of these people, I sincerely hope you have someone in your life to help you through this. Please, don't get to your deathbed with these issues still in the back of your mind, and start asking for help now.
These books go into more detail about the arguments against atheism (all of them free to download at the provided links):
- Norman L. Geisler, Frank Turek, (2004, March 12), I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist
- C. S. Lewis, (1952, July 7), Mere Christianity
- Richard Swinburne, (2016, July 12), The Coherence of Theism (part 1 of the trilogy)
- Richard Swinburne, (2004, June 3), The Existence of God (part 2 of the trilogy)
- Richard Swinburne, (2005, December 8), Faith and Reason (part 3 of the trilogy)
Why do you need to choose whether God exists or not in the first place? Let's talk agnosticism.
- Core belief
An agnostic is someone who believes that we don't know if God exists and maybe we may never know. They don't reject the idea that He might exist and are open to the possibility, but for now do not pick a stance. While this might be an attractive belief to many people, and many who call themselves atheists tend to actually fall in this category, it is still an impossibility in practice.
This is because agnosticism has the same issues as existentialism (the belief that everyone must find their own purpose in life). It is just delaying the question, and during this time without an answer we have to live life every day, while the ethical decisions we make along the way expose our actual beliefs.
We have to decide whether we should be selfish or not, whether people have value or not, and we have a motivation and a life goal that is shaped by our real beliefs.
Again, there is no in-between in practice. Morality, purpose and motivation are only defined by your beliefs, and seeing as you have these, your actual belief should be clear. It's probably one of the ones mentioned above, like hedonism or materialism.
- Forever agnostic
Agnosticism should be an intellectual intermediary step to determining one's actual belief. But many live their entire lives being agnostic, which is the same as having lived their lives as an atheist.
What is the difference between someone who lived his whole life as a hedonistic atheist, and someone who lived as a hedonistic agnostic? Simple: Only what came out of their mouth when they were asked about God.
It should be clear by now that your philosophy in life is determined by what you practice, not what you preach. There is no actual difference between these two hedonists; they are defined by hedonism, not their faith.
By not picking either side they have indirectly picked atheism, which means that agnosticism is not the neutral belief it claims to be. In this sense, agnosticism suffers from the same issues as atheism which I explain above, such as moral subjectivism. Your actual beliefs regarding morality are given away by your every day actions.
So, being sure God doesn't exist makes no sense, and not being sure is also off the table.
Does that mean you need to blindly adopt a religion? No. You need to find out what God's nature is, what He is about, so suspend any preconceived notions that religions are nonsensical and actually investigate their merits and evidence.
Why should you be Christian?
- Christian values
Even for non-believers, you most likely already hold Christian values or see their value in society:
- Do you believe mercy and forgiveness is the solution to conflict, not revenge or disconnection?
- Do you believe we should self-sacrifice and put others first to achieve cohesion and peace?
- Do you believe in equality between all humans? Who should have which rights aside, I'm asking if there are some we should be able to murder or enslave for no reason other that they are inferior.
- Do you believe loving and helping the people around us regardless of our mutual disdain and differences is the best way to strengthen community?
- Do you believe we should be modest and control our impulses to become better people?
- Do you believe we should help the poor, oppressed and marginalized?
- Do you believe we should be fair in our justice and defend the vulnerable?
- Do you believe we should treat others the same way we want them to treat us?
- Do you believe you, your loved ones and our society's leaders should have compassion, humility, honesty, loyalty and integrity?
If you do, you already see the merits of Christianity. These might be obvious due to its influence, but it was not always this way: 2000 years ago, it was counter-culture, radical and revolutionary. And if we continue to ignore it, it will rapidly become an extreme worldview again.
Even if you don't value these, I still encourage you to look into the evidence for Jesus Christ either way. Belief should come first.
- Christian ethos
To be Christian doesn't mean that you need to stop everything wrong that you're doing right now. And it doesn't mean that you should be Christian just because you want to get into Heaven, or because you fear Hell. As a Christian, these are the least of my worries, and this is not what Christianity is.
Being Christian means to believe in Jesus Christ and to follow in His footsteps. And by doing this, you will sincerely want to stop your destructive behavior, and you will see the positive results of your transformation.
Change doesn't come easily; this is why to be a Christian means to sacrifice and suffer through this process. But any self-change will be difficult, and if you won't start changing for the better now, then when?
Christianity calls us to be the most loving people we can be. This is a great quote:
“You only love God as much as the person you love the least”
. We must love and forgive even those we want to hate the most, and I think this is one of the biggest virtues necessary in life. Hate and revenge are an endless cycle that only spawn more hate and revenge – Eventually someone has to love and forgive to break out of this loop, so why not be the change you want to see in the world?
- Personal transformation
Any Christian will tell you they feel much happier after converting, and it's visible on many faces. But this is not just anecdotal.
Christians dominate personal statistics compared to atheists: Rates of divorce reach as high as 50% of marriages for atheists while Christians sit at ~1%.
Christianity is also proven to have biological benefits: Rates for depression, anxiety, happiness, even cancer are much better, ranging from tens to hundreds of percentage points higher.
Praying is also shown to have great biological benefits, and it fulfills the modern self-help guidelines of gratefulness, reflection, self-accountability, self-forgiveness, optimism and setting personal goals.
Nowadays people are put off by religious terms like “sin” and “faith”, but these are actually very important even outside of religion. To put it in modern terms: All the problems in your life that are in your control are caused by corrupted desires, bad habits, false and invasive thoughts, uncontrolled emotions, and so on – These can be summed up as inner compulsions, the trained reflexes that run your life without your consent. This is what we mean by sin.
Changing for the better means to put your foot down and finally stop allowing yourself to be controlled by sin. You might've heard a lot of self-help advice on how to do that, like meditation, or
“Acknowledge the thought, then dismiss it”
. These methods do work... for a while. In my experience at least, I would always eventually fall back on “Whatever, I don't care about this stupid method right now, I'm just doing it”
, because my desire for rehabilitation wasn't as strong as my desire for immediate pleasure, or dopamine. If you train yourself to always have that escape at the end, you'll learn to use it every time and never intend to stop in the first place.
This is a constant struggle that has no solution outside of religion, because you don't have an actual grounded reason that you respect profoundly enough to impose restrictions on yourself, a strict moral code to motivate you to better yourself and learn to firmly say no to sin, out of principle, not out of willpower. This is where the biological need for faith comes in: We simply cannot stop these behaviors if, deep down, we believe the world has no meaning and all that matters is the next hit of dopamine. If any of our struggles matter, faith that the world is more profound than the eye can see is mandatory to solve our deep issues.
By allowing God to become our unbreakable moral code that grounds us, we can truly be saved from sin. When I encounter temptation now, even if it feels irresistible and innevitable, praying with heartfelt sincerity saves me from these impure thoughts; God is my refuge of purity in my darkest times. When an atheist/agnostic wants to quit drinking or smoking, they make an attempt; we make a life-long vow that we are determined to fight for.
- Christian society
Society just makes a lot more sense when we consider its foundation on the Christian faith:
- Hospitals, orphanages, homeless housing and charities owe their existence as organized institiutions to Christianity, which commands us to care for the sick and disadvantaged. Historically, Christian churches were the institutions that provided these services, and they still play a major role in these areas today.
- Universities and literacy were preserved and spread because monasteries and cathedral schools were the main centers of learning for centuries, as Christianity needed educated clergy to read and interpret Scripture, and taught that faith seeks understanding.
- Divorce and cheating on your partner are seen as high moral offenses because Christian marriage is a serious, monogamous, life-long vow.
- Provocative clothing, casual sex and talking about sex publicly are shunned because Christianity forbids sex before marriage. Those sexual books for children that are popping up recently are a perfect example of what happens when society ditches its Christian roots.
- Masturbation is shunned because Christianity teaches that lust is a sin and sex is a covenant that unites man and woman in one flesh.
- Alcoholism and drug use are looked down on because Christianity condemns them.
- Swearing is socially unnacceptable because Christianity deems it a sin. Notice people are using swear words that mock God's name now?
- We have regular free days on weekends because Christianity celebrates the Sabbath (Saturday) and the Lord's Day (Sunday).
- Prisons exist as a place of rehabilitation and have replaced historical violent punishments because Christianity teaches that no one is beyond redemption and repentance.
- Limiting personal vengeance and expecting injustices to be handled through law is a norm because Christianity discourages revenge and elevates justice, patience, and peacemaking.
- Women are equal to men because Christianity teaches that all people are made in the image of God, and belittling others means belittling God. In the ancient world, women were seen as lesser than men, even non-human. This book presents an argument that we can trace advances in women's treatment and privileges directly to the areas that Christian population historically spread to over time:
- You are not a slave right now, again because Christianity preaches that we are made in the image of God. Before Christianity spread, a significant portion of the world's population were slaves, and have been that way for thousands of years. In the Roman Empire, failing to pay debt would make you and all your descendants slaves for life, or it would force you to sell your children into slavery. This book explains how every abolitionist movement in history has been a Christian movement:
And no, current capitalist society is not slavery, saying so is disrespecting past slaves who had it much worse, and you are freer to do what you want today than at any point in history – Otherwise, where do you draw the line between “too much work” and actual slavery? Work is sanctified according to Scripture, and all our ancestors had to work hard for their food regardless of the society they were in. Selfless work is necessary for society to exist.
These norms were brought to society by Christianity's values, and we are quickly turning away from them, without the backbone of faith to support their existence.
It's important to mention that the downfall of religion (secularization) in western society is a new event in history, first taking root in 1859 when darwinism was introduced, then reaching a massive turning point in the 1960s and only ramping up more since then. People started to lose the Christian way on a large scale, everywhere in Europe, USA and other culturally associated territories.
Before the 1960s, there was never a point in human history where entire societies were predominantly secular; religion was ingrained in humanity, and Christianity was the core of western society. There were political movements that tried to aggressively suppress religion beforehand, but that tended to reinforce it harder – Just look at the percentage of Christians in formerly communist countries.
Losing the Christian way doesn't just mean losing faith. Many people identify as Christian today and yet don't hold Christian values, traditions, morality, or anything really: “I believe Jesus is God; I've read the Bible once; I pray sometimes; I go to church on Easter”
– That's not the Christian life that Jesus calls us to. Christianity is a continual, living relationship with God: It expects to fully dedicate our lives to Him, to put Him above all else, to study and truly absorb His teachings and to follow them as closely as we humanly can. It's a life-long commitment, not a superficial label, and a relationship without attention and communication isn't much of a relationship.
Many modern cultural norms originate from the secular crisis. Sex before marriage wasn't common before the 1960s, and even when it happened, it would usually be with an already long-term partner and end up in a marriage. The wide-spread western culture of casual, uncommitted sex didn't exist before this point. What do we actually want in our lives and in our societies, quick hits of dopamine with depraved partners, or stable, permanent relationships? Is it really necessary for everyone to go through a decade of adultery and heartbreak in our formative years to come to our senses and finally start looking for a long-term relationship? Are we really going to accept the propaganda that degeneracy forms our character, and that we need years of experience to qualify for a real relationship? Love isn't a professional career, and body counts aren't trophies.
What did we accomplish by radically changing our culture to make immoral sexuality acceptable? Birth rates are plummeting in every single western society since the 1960s, and western population is halving generation by generation.
History shows us that Christianity's approach worked for the last 2 millenia, while giving rise to the most succesful societies on earth. Are we willing to throw all that away for a culture that appeared less than 70 years ago, and that visibly ruined society to its core in these short few years?
- Politics
Although I do not believe any political party is correct:
- For those leaning “left wing”:
Christianity is the historical foundation of your belief in equality and compassion, and if you take God out of the picture, what basis do you have to proclaim these are our most important values? Christianity abolished slavery and gave rise to the movement against racism, the pursuit of global peace and the care for the poor and oppressed, for which it leads many charities and healthcare organizations today.
- For those leaning “right wing”:
The rise of secular society is the fundamental cause for all you oppose, i.e. the extreme forms of feminism, LGBT, abortion, and even the western immigration crisis, all of which appeared since the 1960s, when worship of God was replaced with the worship of empathy. And of course, communism, atheism's love child, which declared Christianity a mental illness.
This is why western society isn't split into left vs. right, the real war is a spiritual one – Secularism vs. Christianity. Both political ideologies are evolving more and more radical beliefs, all of them fueled by secularism. Which team do you want to associate with, the nutcases or the loving Christians who are on the side of humanity and that have been this way for 2 millenia? If you are passionate about politics, it's time to join the real war.
And isn't it odd that the modern world respects everyone's religion... except Christianity? How it's normal for influencers and politicians worldwide to mock Christianity and even advocate for getting rid of Christians to put it lightly, but to say the same of a Muslim, Buddhist, Jew or Hindu is grounds for inprisonment nowadays? More about this discrimination here, here, and here.
Christianity teaches us to respect God's morality over what governments tell us. The leaders of society are afraid of Christianity, and this is how you know Christianity is right.
Okay, now you know Christianity has its merits, but why should you believe in Jesus Christ?
What evidence do we have that Christianity is correct?
Again, reading this document in order is critical. If you jumped to this right away, of course it will be hard to believe if you don't understand why this matters or the evidence for God, for example.
This is not a comprehensive list of all the evidence by any means.
For in-depth and easy to digest presentations of the historical evidence, I recommend:
- Important clarification
As I detailed above, we cannot 100% prove God, and this is also the case with Christianity: Jesus Christ was a historical person, and in the study of history we have no way of proving any event happened with absolute certainity. Again, the argument is that Christ's divinity is the most reasonable explanation of reality.
Christianity is a unique religion in the sense that the God of the Bible has provided us a decisive way to either prove or disprove its entire premise: If the Resurrection happened, Jesus Christ is God, and if it didn't happen, He isn't, and you'd be a fool to put your faith in it. The same cannot be said for the other religions. If the Resurrection was true, Christ's claims and His validation of the rest of Scripture are certainly reliable.
There are multiple types of evidence: Scientific evidence is different from historical evidence, and they have different criteria. In the study of history, we don't have the luxury to say
“Well this still isn't proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, I'm not convinced”
, this is a convention of scientific, mathematical and legal evidence, which is only reasonable there. In those fields, you default to not believing any claim until it is proven otherwise, while in historical analysis, we use inference to the best explanation (IBE) to draw the most reasonable conclusion, i.e. “What's a more reasonable explanation of the events according to this evidence, X or Y?”
.
Hypothethically, if the only evidence we have for some mundane every day event is one random piece of parchment, we could be decently certain that the event did take place, something inconcievable for scientific evidence.
And yes, according to IBE, an extraordinary event like a resurrection is much less likely to occur and would require extensive evidence. This gets a little wobbly however if we consider that, well, God exists according to the Bible – If that is the case, then it's certain. The Resurrection is a unique event in that regard, and we need to balance our caution with the possibility of the supernatural when using IBE. Either way, I would say the evidence is rather extensive.
All I'm asking is for you to be reasonable, because the study of history is based on reason, and to not lessen the validity of Jesus Christ's story simply because you believe the supernatural can't happen – That isn't doing justice to this case. For you to ever be able to be convinced of His story, you'll need to accept miracles can happen in the first place. Of course you'll walk away not believing in God if you are going into this presupposing that God doesn't exist. Regardless of the debate, you're not being fair if you're not even willing to consider it a possibility that the other side is right.
With that out of the way, let's get right into it.
- Existence
Yes, the introduction is true, Jesus is not only universally agreed to have existed, but He is also the most documented person in history. We have around 25,000 texts and manuscripts about Jesus Christ's life, teachings, death and Resurrection, dating as far back as the first century. The next most documented person is Homer, due to 1800 manuscripts of the Iliad. For comparison, even Julius Caesar, a major historical figure, has around 240 manuscripts. As for major events in more recent history, the pieces of evidence we have for the Plague are in the thousands, for Christopher Columbus's voyage around 80, and for the First Crusade around 20.
The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts provides a sizable repository of digitized New Testament manuscripts; not all manuscripts are digitized.
But it's not just random manuscripts that attest the existence of Jesus Christ, the biggest non-Christian historians and writers of the time such as Tacitus, Josephus, Suetonius, Lucian, Pliny the Younger, Mara bar-Serapion and Thallus also talk about Jesus and the early Christian movement in their works, almost all in the first century.
It's obvious by now that rejecting Jesus Christ's existence leads to rejecting all of history, for which we have much less evidence, and this should make it clear that the use of inference to the best explanation is essential to reach a conclusion about historical events – No one is debating that the First Crusade never happened in spite of the relative lack of evidence.
- Crucifixion
For the best piece of evidence for the Crucifixion, look no further than the Shroud of Turin, the most studied artifact in history.
The Shroud is a long piece of linen cloth that was used to bury the body of Jesus, and has been preserved by churches all this time. It had a controversial history, however more recently the truth has come to light.
In 1988 it was initially carbon dated to 1000+ years after Christ by various institutes, however the sample of cloth they had analyzed turned out to be a patch added later to repair some of the damage it sustained over time. More studies came out since then disproving that theory, culminating in a study that dated it using infrared and spectroscopic analysis to precisely within the time of Jesus.
At first glance, the Shroud bears a vague silhouette of a man and some burn marks from the two major fires it had been in. However, in 1898, after the popularization of cameras, a photographer took a picture of the Shroud, and discovered the negative of the photo reveals much more detail. When analyzed closely, the negative reveals a clear image of a bearded man with long hair, over 100 scourge wounds across the body, puncture wounds in the head consistent with the Crown of Thorns, deep piercing wounds in the hands and feet, with blood flow consistent with a Crucifixion position, and a wound in the right side of the abdomen that would have hit the lung and heart, producing blood and watery liquid. The red spots were also determined to be human male blood of blood type AB, though the type could be incorrect due to contamination. It appears His eyes were covered with Roman coins, a common burial practice at this time, though not enough detail can be discerned.
Another study ran statistics on this data, and using a Bayesian-style model concluded the chance that this body is indeed Jesus Christ's is 99.999999999999...%, with 83 nines total.
The silhouette imprinted into the Shroud is somewhat of a mystery to modern science, as it is not pigment or dye, it's a simple discoloration of the top part of the fabric only 200-600 nanometers thin (400 times thinner than a strand of hair). Theories about the origin of this imprint range from complex chemical processes to paranormal bursts of high-power UV radiation, altough no conclusion can be drawn.
The evidence is conclusive: This is an image of Jesus Christ.
It cannot logically be a fake because the imprint method is unfeasable with the technology of the time, it is not even visible to humans until the present day, and the faker would've had to have knowledge that negatives exist and in 2000 years people would be able to see it. And since there is no trace of brush strokes or paint, he'd also have to murder someone in the exact way Christ was murdered, in the same time period, taking into account all the different wounds, blood flow and anatomy, and then trick churches into preserving it.
The image is topographical, meaning that parts of the body closer to the cloth have a darker color, and those farther away have a lighter color, another impossibility for a forger, which has allowed us to make a 3D rendition of Jesus Christ's face, which looks strikingly similar to traditional icons depicting Him, and one museum even 3D printed and painted His whole body, both of which can be found online.
Even as a non-believer, consider for a moment the chilling realization that God had the foresight that we would go through a global crisis of faith in 2000 years, and He made the world's first selfie in advance, in 3D, to send into the future at just the right time as proof of His divinity.
The evidence for the Shroud of Turin investigations:
- Raymond J. Schneider, (2014, October 10), Dating The Shroud Of Turin: Weighing All The Evidence
- Paul A. Dreschnack, (2023, July 6), An Analysis of the DNA and Hematological Findings of the Shroud of Turin and the Sudarium of Oviedo
- José Humberto Cardoso Resende, (2000, August 28), Jesus’ Wounds
- Giulio Fanti and Emanuela Marinelli, (1998, June 6), Results of a probabilistic model applied to the research carried out on the Turin Shroud
- Alan D. Adler, (1999, June 18), The Nature of the Body Images on the Shroud of Turin
- J.H. Heller and Alan D. Adler, (1981, July 27), A chemical investigation of the Shroud of Turin
See shroud.com for more studies on the Shroud of Turin.
While not exactly evidence, I would like to point out the poetic nature of Christ's story. To all accounts He lived a humble and sinless life, was betrayed by His friend Judas for a few coins, carried His own 500lb (~135kg) torture device up a hill, was stripped naked, scourged, took the place of a guilty murderer on the Cross, was ridiculed by His fellow people, humiliated by the most dishonoring execution of the time, and died as an innocent man, forgiving His enemies, while suffering the most painful torture designed by humanity. In these short events, He suffered all types of human pain. God has entered our world once, and we have let off all the hate our minds can imagine on Him.
As for the pain of the Cross: Jesus was thoroughly scourged all over the body, wore the Crown of Thorns digging into His skull, had nails hit into the center of the nerves in His feet and the base of His hands to maximize pain, was stabbed in the abdomen, had ribs and organs exposed, and was forced to lean on the nails in His hands or push with His legs to rise up and breathe, as the position made breathing impossible. Rising up would scrape the exposed flesh on His back against the Cross, and after 6 hours of agony, He died, most likely from asphyxiation.
- Historicity of the Bible
The best historical evidence we can have about any event in history are eyewitness accounts or accounts from those who have spoken to eyewitnesses.
The earliest such accounts for Jesus are the Gospels found in the Bible, two of which, Matthew and John, are eyewitness testimony, and the other two, Mark and Luke, use eyewitness sources. Luke in particular is a historian and wrote his Gospel and the Book of Acts as historical accounts, after interviewing multiple witnesses.
I know,
“You can't use the Bible to prove the Bible!”
. Yes we can. We are using the first pieces of historical evidence we have to prove the historical person of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. These pieces of evidence eventually made it into the Bible 400 years later when it was put together, but this doesn't discredit their historical validity.
It is important to mention that we have very good evidence of the following:
- The authors of the Gospels weren't making up stories of Jesus, it is actual eyewitness account.
- The Bible wasn't altered by malicious actors along the way.
- The Bible is not a copy of a copy of a translation of a translation etc., the original is accurately transmitted through time.
And here is that evidence, this is a necessary watch before going forward:
The Gospels are remarkably congruent. Despite being written by different people, at different times and in different places, they agree on the major events that are described. To disprove the claim that they might have been copied from one another, we can look at one of the pieces of evidence often used against them: There are several contradictions between what one Gospel says from another.
While it does sound negative at first, this makes sense if we realize that they are eyewitness testimony: For example, if we were on the sidewalk and a car has an accident down the street, our testimonies might differ: you'd say the car was red, I'd say it was brown, you'd say there was one passenger, I'd say there were two, etc, but we will both say that there was a car accident over there.
This is what is happening in the Gospels. There are rare inconsistencies between the minor details, but the major events are all the same, this is another piece of evidence that boosts our confidence in their claims.
The Bible has been used by archeologists to uncover forgotten ruins and artifacts, and the geographical information within it has all been found to be accurate; we are yet to find any discrepancies.
A few examples:
We can't have better evidence for the Bible than this: Historical evidence can't be absolute, the practice of writing anything down in the first century was in its early infancy, nothing was written down systematically, writing materials were very expensive, and literacy was almost non-existent in Judea, with estimates of around 3-10% of the population.
The fact that Jesus had 4 complete biographies written by eyewitnesses is already a miracle in itself. The only other person of that time to have as many as 4 biographies was Augustus, the founder and first emperor of the Roman Empire after whom the month of August is named, and one of those 4 biographies was written by himself! Clearly Jesus was widely revered in the first century, enough to overshadow emperors.
- Prophecies
Jesus Christ historically fulfilled over 350 messianic prophecies from the Old Testament, which was written hundreds to thousands of years before His life. For a fake Messiah, the sheer odds of fulfilling this many prophecies, even intentionally, involve more zeroes than the number of atoms in the observable universe, so we might as well say it would be impossible.
The evidence for each individual prophecy:
While this evidence is based on the Gospels, keep in mind the Gospels were accurate and unaltered, this is the mind blowing fact that we need to come to terms with.
Even if we don't trust the Gospels as accurate accounts, using the Shroud of Turin we can attest that Jesus Christ's Crucifixion was completely accurate with the Gospels, which already fulfills some of the most important prophecies. This short clip explains more, I highly recommend watching:
How do we know these prophecies are unaltered and written before the life of Jesus?
The earliest historical evidence we have of the Old Testament are the Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of scrolls discovered in the caves of Qumran between 1946-1956, dating as far back as the 3rd century BC, containing many fragments of the Old Testament, including the prophecies.
One of these scrolls, the Great Isaiah Scroll, contains a complete copy of the Book of Isaiah from Scripture, with over 95% word-for-word accuracy to today's Old Testament, the rest being minor spelling and punctuation differences. This is excellent evidence that the Old Testament hasn't been changed in 3000 years! Chapter 53 of Isaiah prophesizes a Jesus-like figure, who was silent while on trial and
“pierced for our transgressions”
.
Another scroll, the Great Pslams Scroll, contains parts of the Book of Pslams from Scripture. Chapter 22 is included in these fragments, which prophesizes the Messiah's Crucifixion from His point of view, including His torture, mocking, bystanders gambling on His clothes, the piercing of His hands and feet, and watery liquid pouring out at the stabbing, all of this being written centuries before crucifixion was invented.
It should be noted that the people living 2000 years ago did not know why watery liquid poured out when Jesus was stabbed. We know now that this is a medical phenomenon caused by lung or heart fluid when pierced in that part of the abdomen, yet it is still prophesized in the Old Testament and documented in the Gospels.
One of Jesus Christ's last words on the Cross was the very first verse of Pslams 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
, pointing us to the chapter prophesizing the Crucifixion in His last moments.
- Witnesses
According to Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, after His Resurrection, Jesus appeared to over 500 people, with a few of them being named, and according to Luke's Acts of the Apostles, this happened over the course of 40 days in which Jesus continued to teach the Apostles. Of the witnesses who were named, all were historically followers of Jesus, as you would expect from someone witnessing the Resurrection, but some were openly hostile and had not yet converted until later.
These claims were written within the lifetimes of the witnesses, therefore we would expect to have evidence of people vehemently disputing this, just as we have many instances of people disputing Christ's divinity at that time, but we do not.
According to historical evidence, many Apostles suffered excruciating deaths due to their beliefs, some were even crucified. Many were given a choice whether to stop saying Jesus Resurrected or face death, yet all insisted they saw Him die and come back to life. This is highly unusual for the Apostles, as they were extremely scared for their lives because of the Crucifixion beforehand, and believed their movement had died along with Jesus. There were other people before and after Jesus who claimed to be the Messiah, but all of their movements had died along with them.
There are 3 possibilities, either they lied, they were tricked, or they were honest:
- The Apostles lied about the Resurrection.
What is the benefit, when they could simply admit it to get out of trouble and then go somewhere else to preach? Why were they willing to sustain torture and death for boldly proclaiming to the authorities that they saw Jesus come back to life? While action movies may depict torture as rarely working, in reality it is a flawless way to get information out of people.
Even if they had all conspired to spread this lie of Christianity, what would the motivation be to determine all these people to sacrifice their lives to spread word of Jesus? I don't see a way to explain this unusual behavior other than religious fervor, but we know they were Christian, so how could religious people who were the ones to invent their own fake religion have this much real conviction?
The Apostles had nothing to gain from dedicating years of their lives to promote a banned religion that would certainly get them killed, and not even fame, as crucifixions were highly dishonorable.
After the Resurrection, the Apostles came back to Jerusalem where Jesus died to spread word of His Resurrection, to groups of people who would've witnessed His death on the Cross, and could've disproven their claims by walking over to His tomb and checking if His body was still there. This took place after Stephen was stoned to death for the same claims, so the Apostles knew even then that it would cost their lives. Following these events, the Christian Church grew massively in Jerusalem, the very place which could disprove it.
There is also the criterion of embarrassment argument. Writers who try to fabricate persuasive stories, especially if they seek credibility or fame, avoid details that make themselves or their heroes look weak, foolish or dishonorable. Yet the Gospels are full of such details everywhere, indicating that the authors were constraied by publicly known facts:
- The disciples repeatedly misunderstand Jesus and are portrayed as very self-interested.
- Peter, the key witness/leader, is portrayed as failing publicly, and denies Jesus multiple times.
- The disciples abandon Jesus at the crisis. Instead of brave loyalty, they flee.
- Jesus Christ's death is depicted as shameful and publicly mocked. A fabricated “victory” story could skip or soften this, but the Gospels emphasize it.
- Jesus is associated with a socially “disreputable” origin story – Suspicion of pregnancy before marriage.
- Jesus’ hometown dismisses Him as “nothing special”, and His own circle doubts.
- His family thinks he’s out of His mind and tries to restrain Him.
- Jesus is accused of being in league with demonic powers.
- He expresses deep distress and anguish, is abandoned by His disciples and feels “forsaken”.
- The disciples fail at basic spiritual practice by not being able to stay awake with Him.
- Judas, a fellow disciple, betrays Jesus for money and then kills himself.
- The first witnesses struggle to believe and are described as fearful/confused.
- The first witnesses of the Resurrection were women outside of His tomb, and it should be noted that back then women didn't receive education and weren't seen as reasonable people, much less reliable witnesses. From the point of view of a con artist who would want to lie about this event, using women as primary witnesses would've made no sense.
All of these actions would be non-sensical if they had conspired to lie about His death.
Few of us today would be willing to die for telling the truth, it just doesn't add up to say that they were willing to travel to other countries and die for a bold-faced lie.
- The Apostles were deceived into believing the Resurrection happened.
The problem here is that we have extensive evidence that Jesus Christ did indeed die that day in front of the Apostles, therefore someone else would've had to lie about the Resurrection to them later on – But then why would the Apostles go and die for this cause without demanding to see Him first, to verify this extraordinary claim? Even if His body had disappeared from the tomb (despite the Roman guard outside), that wouldn't prove to them that He walked out, but that His body was stolen. No one would die for a random unsubstantiated claim, and this wouldn't explain why in the Gospels the Apostles say they saw and talked with him afterward.
As for the evidence that Jesus was Crucified that day:
- The decisive evidence is the Shroud of Turin, detailed previously. The Shroud has blood on it consistent with a burial while Christ was still bleeding, as well as open wounds that had not healed.
- It was common practice in Roman crucifixions that those who survive on the crosses until sunset would have their legs broken, so that they can't push on them to rise up and breathe and thus guarantee imminent death by asphyxiation. According to the Shroud, Jesus doesn't have broken legs, indicating earlier death on the Cross.
- Roman crucifixions were not survivable: There have never been survivors, and the wounds Jesus suffered on the Cross were fatal.
- It doesn't take much medical analysis to conclude that Jesus would've died anyway due to the wounds He sustained before the Crucifixion.
- If Jesus had somehow survived: First off He would want to immediately go to a hospital, not continue teaching the Apostles for 40 days, and secondly, the Apostles were there to see if He would've survived and had not actually died and Resurrected.
The evidence that the Apostles were there to see it is that their detailed description of His death was corroborated by the Shroud of Turin on every single point; all wounds match Gospel description. If we theorize that they were not there and wrote down this description from others, this implies they were lying about this and the Resurrection, which brings us back to the first point above.
There simply is no room to argue for deception.
- The Apostles were telling the truth.
By process of elimination, this is the only explanation, the Resurrection was indeed true.
I know it's hard to digest, but how can any other explanation make sense of their sudden switch from a ragtag group of scared and demoralized young adults into fervent zealots traveling the world and willing to die horrible deaths for what they claimed to have seen? Are we going to argue for group hallucination, to people in different countries, lasting for years?
- The decision
That is it for the evidence that convinced me. What conclusion do we arrive at?
As I said previously, history is not a matter of fake until proven real, since rejecting other possible explanations implies their evidence was falsified. Consider carefully:
What is the best explanation?
Conspiracy
- The Gospels were faked, because they prove the older prophecies every step of the way.
- Prophecies proven outside the Bible, e.g. Crucifixion are coincidences.
- The witnesses never objected or Paul lied about them.
- The Apostles lied or were deceived.
Divinity
- The Gospels are accurate testimony.
- The Apostles were honest.
- The prophecies were fulfilled.
- Jesus Christ truly Resurrected.
This is the actual choice and the question you need to ask yourself.
Leave aside “Am I convinced or not?”
, the real decision is whether divinity is a more sound argument.
Is it more reasonable that Jesus is God? If so, welcome to the party! Go to church and ask your local priest about the next steps. Intellectualism only gets you this far, the real journey begins now.
If not, you will need to come up with an alternative explanation that would make sense of this evidence. Please tell me if you do find one. Realize this is first and foremost a question of what evidence will satisfy you. The problem with skeptics is that they have unrealistic standards of what that evidence would even be. Think critically what piece of historical evidence first century Judea can spawn to be enough. Are 4 biographies not enough, do you want 10 peer reviewed biographies? In a court of law, 4 eyewitness testimonies will get you a life sentence in prison – Be realistic.
If you made it so there is no way that historical evidence can convince you, how do you expect to ever recognize the God who has revealed Himself historically? This is jumping to the secular conclusion before entertaining the very idea that it might be possible for it to be wrong.
Either way, I know there are always doubts. If God was proven, it wouldn't even make sense for us to go through the process of life and have free will, belief would just be forced, and that would not be much of a free will.
Christians still doubt, including myself, and it's healthy to be a skeptic. We shouldn't fall into the trap of hyper-skepticism however. If there is a spark of faith, that should be enough. Read the Bible, starting with the New Testament (the Gospels) to see what the eyewitnesses are saying, and continue with the rest of the Bible.
By the way, praying for faith is a surprisingly good way to strengthen your belief.
Regardless, people always raise counter-arguments, I will answer all the ones I can think of below.
Even if you made up your mind already, I still recommend going through them.
If you've seen the Truth, it's time to choose a Church.
If you are already Christian, I honestly respect you and I don't have any problem with your Church/tradition/denomination, as they all hold core Christian beliefs and have given rise to beautiful cultures. The more followers of Christ, the merrier.
I would encourage those that are unsure to explore Eastern Orthodoxy, which is the original, authentic Christianity that was started by the Apostles. It's not a denomination as others would call it, it sits before all denominations and is their origin. It also has a much more loving view of reality than others. This YouTube channel is a good resource for the logcal reasoning of Orthodoxy: OrthodoxKyle
Keep in mind, being Orthodox means rejecting consumerism, including wasting the day away watching videos, even if they are about Christianity. Learn enough to be able to defend your faith, give up these distractions, get a physical Bible, go to church and start catechesis.
I tend to disagree with the generalist Christianity preached by good people like Cliffe Knechtle. It's a very good starting point and has helped me immensely, but to be disconnected from the churches that have been guiding Christianity for millenia isn't using the resources available to you to their fullest potential. Scripture is hard to study, and theologians have the best training to help us in our path to God.
To look at atrocities committed by churches in the past to reject their reasoning today is unfair, as I've explained above. Churches claim to have found what Scripture actually means and follow the teachings of the Apostles and their disciples. To not investigate the validity of these claims is not doing them justice.
Note: Jehova's Witnesses, Mormons and other such groups are not widely considered Christian, as they reject the basic Biblical teachings. They may come to your door with clever interpretations of the Bible, but be critical and look up the counter-arguments.
From my experience there isn't a single inconsistency that 2000 years of theology, philosophy and history can't answer, or a single contradiction in the Bible's teachings. Apologists wouldn't have this much traction if they could actually be disproven.
“Christians cherrypick what they want to believe out of the Bible, it's all up to interpretation”
When studying the Bible, you must read in context. The literary styles differ between parts of it: For example Genesis 1 is a Hebrew poem, which is why we don't necessarily take it literally that God created the earth in 6 days. In literature you cannot take any poem literally, so unfortunately parts like these need to be interpreted, though we've had 2000 years of scholars studying the Bible in its original languages to arrive at the actual meaning.
However, other parts like the Gospels of the New Testament are not poetry, they are written as eyewitness testimony for the historical biography of Jesus Christ, “At this time, in this place, this happened”
, this is why the story of Jesus is taken literally. Then again, Jesus Himself speaks in metaphor many times, so this needs to be interpreted again.
We are not cherrypicking, we are doing our best to understand it, and the various Church schisms are a result of the different interpretations, but we've done an amazingly good job if you look into it. The Bible is the most studied and criticized text in history, and organized education exists as it does today because of the Bible's influence; it would be highly dishonest to dismiss all our efforts as malicious.
“Why doesn't God stop genocides?”
,“[Because God doesn't prevent suffering] God is either not all powerful or not all good”
– Quote by Neil deGrasse Tyson
God is both omnipotent and good itself, but gives humans real free will. The atrocities commited by humans are the fault of humans and not from God willing them; God simply tolerates suffering.
God does not cancel our free will by force, because forced goodness is not goodness. He ultimately judges all evil and restores all justice, even when we don't yet see it in history.
“Why didn't God create the world without suffering in the first place?”
He did, it was called the Garden of Eden. Humans were created with free will, but without the knowledge that evil exists, so they could not cause suffering. But as we know, humanity fell because of our rebellion against God.
As for natural disasters and disease, Scripture teaches that the world is fallen because humanity turned away from God; and that creation “groans” under the corruption of sins.
These disasters are also intensified by human action, through war, pollution, deforestation, climate disruption, etc.
“Why doesn't God just eliminate all the evil that causes suffering?”
He did, it was called the Flood of Noah. I don't think you want that to happen again.
“Why doesn't God at least do something about suffering?”
Again, He did, when He sent Jesus Christ to begin the healing of creation itself.
Sometimes, the sinless and the young suffer and die for no apparent reason, but Scripture speaks with profound hope for them, as their lives, altough short, are not meaningless, and they will be received into God's mercy.
Death exists because creation is wounded and is awaiting ultimate healing. The world is in a state of patient rescue, and removing death now would require removing human freedom.
Suffering and death were not God's original design, but suffering is not meaningless. God can use it to strengthen us, correct us, or push us toward compassion and humility. Keep in mind that life on earth is temporary; God restores all things in the life to come. We shouldn't act as if life on this fallen world is the end goal, and we shouldn't raise it on a pedestal as the most important aspect of our existence.
“You are Christian because you grew up in a Christian home”
,“Most people follow the religion they were born in”
While it is correct that people are most exposed to the religion of their household, and many don't bother to look into other religions because of that, we still have a free will and can choose to rebel.
Many Christians in the modern day go through this process, being born into Christianity, refusing it due to society's secular culture, and later coming back after seeing its values and evidence. I am one of them.
To say that the circumstances of your birth determine your beliefs is disrespecting our free will, and to be honest, our intelligence.
“People turn to Christianity or religion because they did horrible things they regret”
Just not true statistically. I argue people turn to religion when the atheist façade of convenience and comfort starts to crumble, when you stop going through life as a mindless zombie chasing pleasures and actually think about your meaning and goals.
I looked into it because of pretty much what every “deep” book/movie/song/etc talks about, directly or indirectly: The never ending search for the meaning of life. Why did I get myself to this point, where am I supposed to go next, and why should I be motivated to do it?
Looking back now at that media, it's sad to see how all these artists struggle pondering the unanswerable existential questions of atheism while trying to avoid nihilism. Had they looked into philosophy, they would realize that's impossible.
Talking about life with atheists is just sad at this point. Seeing them grasping at some form of meaning, materialism or hedonism most of the time, I can't help but wonder why I ever thought that's a normal mental state for humanity.
“If you need God to be a good person, you aren't good”
That's more or less what we're saying. Without God, people are doomed to become nihilists, because belief in God is baked into the foundation of human life.
With the help of His teachings, we can all become good people and upstanding members of society.
“Christianity was created by the powerful to control the masses”
How exactly? In the first couple of centuries, Christianity was illegal and suffered state-sponsored torture, imprisonment, execution or exile. Early Christians fled to deserts to worship in peace.
Christianity is a religion born among the poor, and taught the radical idea that even the lowest of society are equal to its leaders, some of whom were literally worshipped as gods.
Even the Jews whose religion Christianity rose out of persecuted Christians. Christianity was always and still is the most widely persecuted religion in the world. Fighting peacemakers turns out to be extremely easy, yet Christian love spreads regardless.
Today, the Bible is the most banned book on earth. In numerous non-Christian countries, ownership of the Bible is punished with death, torture, large fines, deportation, imprisonment or forceful work in labor camps for decades or for life. In these countries, Christians congregate in underground churches.
Since 2024 and still continuing today, people have been arrested in the UK for simply saying or displaying Bible verses in public, and even for mental prayer.
This claim makes no sense historically, presently or ideologically.
“There are too many rules to follow in Christianity, how am I supposed to know if I will get to Heaven?”
Being Christian is not about tricking your way into Heaven or escaping Hell; selfish motives alone lead nowhere and God can see your real intentions.
You cannot keep all commandments perfectly, no one can. Jesus died for our sins because we cannot save ourselves.
You already know right and wrong by what your conscience says. Many have silenced that “voice in their head” telling them to stop pursuing bad actions. Christianity tells us to listen to it.
Walking with God means sincerely trying to avoid sin, repenting when you fall, and getting back up again. God looks at the heart, not perfection.
“If God loves us, why does He throw us in Hell?”
“70% of the world is not Christian, so they are all going to Hell?
This answer depends on Christian tradition; I will give the Orthodox response, which is contrast to this question assuming Protestant Christianity.
Hell is not God throwing people away, it is the state of rejecting God's love; by letting sin corrupt you, God's love will feel like torment for you.
Non-Christians are not automatically condemned to Hell. God doesn't judge your knowledge or beliefs, He judges each heart with perfect justice and mercy.
Those who knowingly reject God reject the only source of life, but those who never had a real chance to know Him are judged accordingly.
“What about the people who lived before Jesus, that never heard His name, or young infants and the unborn that die? Do they go to Hell?”
We do not claim that these souls are damned. God judges all people according to the light they were given.
Babies and the unborn have committed no personal sins, and Scripture shows God's compassion toward them.
Those before Christ were not abandoned, God offered them grace in ways we cannot fully see.
“Why did God choose to intervene on earth that late in human history, and why in the middle east?”
We obviously don't know God's plan, but it is pretty clear that the point chosen was very influential:
- Christianity is the world's largest religion, at around 30% of the population.
- The whole world measures years by Jesus Christ's birth.
- Every major religion recognizes Jesus and sees Him as a positive figure, aside from Judaism, which recognizes Him but is openly hostile.
- Historically, the middle east has always been the center of trade in the world.
- The Bible is the most sold, translated, stolen and banned book in history, was one of the first books as we know them today (codexes) and was quite possibly the biggest influence in book adoption and literacy. Codexes had just begun to appear around the first century, so this was the earliest time a book could've even been written. The word for library in many languages, “biblioteca”, is derived from the word Bible, due to its major influence.
“There were churches and priests who murdered, raped, owned slaves, etc.”
First, these people were not following the Christian faith to the slightest extent, which values all human life equally.
Second, we shouldn't dismiss a religion, philosophy or ideology because there are examples of people who say they believe in it but do the opposite of what it dictates. With this logic, all ideas should be dismissed. Christianity is what God says it is, not what people practice.
Why do I hear this argument so much, when it makes no sense statistically? There are over 2 billion Christians worldwide, the number of churches who committed these atrocities is an astronomically low proportion of all churches that there are or have been.
Christianity has built the entire continent of Europe and founded countries like the USA, yet I haven't heard claims like “All of Spain is filled with rapists and murderers”
that would make sense of the proportions people ascribe to this claim. I have heard “All americans were slave owners”
, but if you look into these statistics, even the official propagandized number is under 8% of americans, and nobody is mentioning that you can still buy a child slave right now in Africa for a few hundred dollars.
Clearly, Christianity is the target of a smear campaign that has been going on for decades: 0.00000..1% of Christians were corrupt at some point in history and this somehow represents the other 2 billion of us? Get real. Christians are the biggest group on earth who vehemently stand against these practices, evidentiated when Christians abolished slavery. We are literally commanded by God to condemn these injustices, how can you twist this into the opposite?
There is one more claim like this:
“What about the Crusades, Inquisition and Salem witch trials? Christianity promoted violence!”
Many Christians back then and those of today do not endorse these horrible events.
It should be noted however that the preamble and beginning of the Crusades, between the 7th-11th centuries, were legitimate self-defense against invading Muslim expansionists, and are a major reason why Europe is not Muslim today. During the 500 years before the First Crusade, Muslims had violently invaded Algeria, Armenia, Egypt, France, Jordan, Lybia, Morocco, Palestine, Portugal, Sicilly, Spain, Syria, Turkey, and more, all through Islamic holy war. All of these countries were Christian at the time, and suffered massive genocides.
Still, we do condemn the loss of life and the resulting campaign. It is deplorable that the name of the Lord was used to justify war and murder. In the grand scheme, the estimates of all these events are around 9 million deaths, which is absolutely terrible, but still pales in comparison to the death toll of atheists, if we count Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, etc. The estimates for these killers are in the hundreds of millions, so Christians should not tolerate an atheist taking this moral high ground.
Again, one bad apple doesn't spoil the whole barrel. Christians are called to be peacemakers, not aggressors.
“The Bible promotes slavery, racism, sexism, etc.”
By now it should be clear Christianity does not endorse that. The Bible historically describes the events that were going on 2 millenia ago, which were foul.
If you are referencing the Bible verses that talk about the mistreatment and price of slaves, these sources explain why that is a misconception:
“How can I trust the Gospels when they are suspiciously only written by Jesus Christ's inner circle?”
It makes sense that we would only have testimonies from people who actually followed Jesus around, and it makes sense that these people would be Christians if they witnessed His Resurrection.
This is the only way it could be if Jesus is indeed God, what more do you want?
“Most Christians have no idea this evidence exists and yet believe regardless, they are gullible sheep”
By this logic, aren't you also a sheep if you believe the science you never researched? What differentiates us, your tribe saying they must be more rational, their lab coats providing more credibility and society praising them like omniscient gods? Please. We're on equal footing until both of us study the evidence of our beliefs. Until then, neither can claim the moral high ground.
And let's not pretend science isn't being abused today to pass off products that are not quite proven to be safe at all, like every compound word additive in processed food, that the masses literally eat up. Talk about a cult.
Even for the early Christians who only had word of mouth, the amount of evidence one requires also changes in time, and 2000 years ago, belief in God/gods was as normal as any part of life, it wasn't even questioned, and until now communication was much harder.
Are you willing to call the entirety of humanity up until the 21st century, all of which were religious, gullible sheep? Including the physicists who laid the foundation of our current theories about the universe?
Today we live in a hyper-scientific society, which demands more scrutiny than ever. Yet the Bible holds up, and acquires vastly more evidence over time.
Thanks to the early Christians, Christianity has not died and we now have a mountain of evidence to unearth the truth, much better than anyone up until now. Gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette.
“How can one God be 3 different people? 1+1+1=1?”
– Common Muslim argument
An omnipotent God can obviously transcend our conceptions to be in 3 places at once, but the theology of the Trinity is explained in detail here:
“Jesus never claimed to be God”
– Another common Muslim argument
This is simply not true if you actually read the Bible before making this audacious claim:
- John 8:58 –
“before Abraham was, I AM.”
(“I AM”
is written as YHWH, God's name, in Hebrew)
- John 10:30 –
“I and My Father are one.”
- John 10:36-38 – Jesus defends the charge of blasphemy tied to
“I am the Son of God”
and says “the Father is in Me and, and I in Him.”
- John 14:9-10 –
“He who has seen Me has seen the Father... I am in the Father, and the Father in Me”
- John 17:5 –
“O Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was.”
- John 8:24 –
“You are from beneath; I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world... if you do not believe that I am He, you will die in your sins.”
- John 13:19 –
“...that... you may believe that I am He.”
- John 18:5-6 –
“I am He”
, then the officers “drew back and fell to the ground.”
- John 5:17-18 –
“My Father has been working until now, and I have been working.”
John: “He... also said that God was His Father, making Himself equal with God.”
- John 5:23 –
“He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him.”
- Mark 2:5-12 – Jesus forgives sins; scribes say
“Who can forgive sins but God alone?”
Jesus responds with His authority.
- Matthew 9:2-6 –
“Your sins are forgiven ... the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins.”
- Mark 14:61-62 –
“Are You the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?”
Jesus: “I am. And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.”
- Matthew 26:63-65 –
“Tell us if You are the Christ, the Son of God!”
Jesus: “It is as you said. Nevertheless, I say to you, hereafter you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Power, and coming on the clouds of heaven.”
- Luke 22:69-70 –
“Are You then the Son of God?”
Jesus: “You rightly say that I am”
- John 20:28-29 – Thomas:
“My Lord and my God!”
Jesus responds without correction.
- Revelation 22:13 –
“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, the First and the Last.”
And no, the Bible wasn't corrupted.
“Jesus died and Resurrected? How can God die?”
God the Son took on a full human nature through the body of Jesus Christ, who truly suffered and died, while His divine nature remains beyond flesh.
The Person who died is truly God, but God did not cease to be God.
“How could God make mistakes like the ones in the Bible?”
This is a non-sensical question; an omnipotent and omniscient God can not only see the future, but correct it after the fact. Even if you make the atheist argument that Scripture is made up stories, why would the writers so obviously contradict themselves? You are missing the theology.
“Jesus should have XX chromosomes because He was only concieved by a woman!”
The Shroud says otherwise, and why does it have to be XX? Again, God is omnipotent, anything is possible.
“If God made all the drugs on earth, why can I not use them?”
God also made all the poisonous plants and animals, this doesn't mean you should eat them.
Our conscience tells us to stop indulging in alcohol, cigarettes and other drugs, and while Scripture doesn't outright say whether one is always right or wrong, it does say that alcoholism and deliberately damaging your God-given body is a sin. All drugs in existence damage the body or mind to some extent, including marijuana, so be mindful of moderation, and avoid the severe ones altogether.
According to Scripture, prayer also requires a clear and sober mind, so connecting with God means to use the reason He gave you to its fullest extent.
“Verses like John 5:4 are missing, the Bible was corrupted!”
This is a historical correction:
“Jesus was a fraud who adopted John the Baptist's teachings into His own religion”
The evidence says otherwise:
“You can't push your religion on others, stop being insensitive!”
This is a slogan invented in the 1960s to defend the rise of secular society, and it suffers from the same problems as relativism. Religion, and by extension morality, cannot survive if it's not being pushed, so yes, we can and we will push it. Society is as messed up as it is today because religion is not being widely taught anymore.
Do you think 2 billion people became loving Christians because we built churches and waited for people to show up out of curiosity? No. The Old English root of the word “Gospel” means “good news” – To know that Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life and to keep from my fellow neighbor the good news that he can be saved from sin and live an eternal life in Heaven is the highest form of betrayal. I owe it to you.
If you discovered the cure for cancer, would you keep it for yourself because you don't want to force it on people? I don't think so.
But, if you prefer to live a depressing life with no direction and plug your ears when I try to tell you there is a better way, it is your choice.
“There's no hate like Christian love”
Another 1960s slogan.
Loving someone doesn't mean affirming everything they do. It means to bluntly tell them the truth when they're wrong or hurting themselves, even if they don't want to hear it.
Wanting a God who approves of sin isn't love, it's just wanting a God who agrees with you.
“Christianity is an oppressive white man's religion”
Christianity spread to Africa before Europe, and Jesus was ethnically a Jew, so no.
Oppressive is the farthest from the truth, as Christianity teaches we are all equal and we should love our neighbors.
“The Bible is offensive”
Good. That's how you know it's working. Christianity isn't your average new-age lovey-dovey cult where anything you do must be right for you.
You are engaging in sin. What you're doing is wrong, and you must correct your immoral behavior.
“The Bible is anti-LGBT”
It is an abomination, according to the Bible. But it doesn't mean Christians devalue gay people or don't view them as equals.
I'm a Christian plagued by more sins than I can count, I won't judge someone else for just another one of their sins; we are equals.
Keep in mind though, Lucifer's sin was pride. In fact pride is the deadliest sin and the origin of all sins, according to Scripture.
To be Christian means to reject your natural impulses: Just as someone may have been born with homosexual desires, I was born with polygamous desires, to sleep with every beautiful woman in sight. But, marriage is a holy act, desgined by God to be between one man and one woman, and the relationship only consummated after marriage, so we must practice discipline and restraint.
The journey to God is a life-long process, nothing needs to be immediate, but be mindful of it.
“Why do you call God “He”, and not other prononuns? Is God male?”
God has no physical body, so it makes no sense to assign Him a gender. It's just a convention: There is no personal neutral pronoun in this language, and God chose a male body to come to earth as Jesus Christ.
“If Adam and Eve were the only first humans, does Christianity agree with incest?”
No, incest and marriage between siblings is forbidden now. We recognize that incest and even polygamy were necessary in the beginning, and God tolerated it until we could uphold His proper moral standard.
This is consistent with evolutionary theory, by the way. We have scientific evidence that the population of humans was extremely low at some point in history, which explains why we are not much more genetically diverse now. If you trace back your genealogy (2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great grandparents, and so on) you will reach trillions of people way before the start of humanity, which could not exist. Yes, our history includes incest and polygamy, but this doesn't mean that we should view it as acceptable in a world of 8 billion people.
“Why did God not want Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge? Did He not want them to become gods by gaining His omniscience?”
I'll just address this here since it's a common misunderstanding.
It's not the Tree of Knowledge, it's the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. It's obvious from Genesis that they already have knowledge in general, and as I explained evil is an intrinsic byproduct of good; so it was strictly a tree that would grant them knowledge of sin. A sinless world would be what a perfect world looks like. God however still allowed us to use our free will to its fullest extent by adding the tree.
And regarding “Did He not want them to become gods”
– This question was asked before, by the serpent in the Garden of Eden.
“If all books were destroyed, science would eventually rewrite them back exactly as they were. The Bible will be lost forever.”
This argument is presupposing that God doesn't exist and that He wouldn't make people rewrite the Bible in the same way He made them write it originally, drop it down from the skies or even send another Messiah.
And that He wouldn't see this apocalypse coming in the first place and prevent it, or alter reality to preserve the Bible.
The atheist mind spawns some of the wierdest mental gymnastics.
“Christmas and Easter are pagan traditions”
They have Christian roots that the pagans appropiated; here is the evidence:
This myth is sad, and what's even worse is that a few hundred years ago America has corrupted the traditional Christmas holiday, arguably the holiest Christian day, from celebrating Jesus Christ's birth with church songs, into celebrating an unrelated Santa figure with pagan songs, and even shuns the “Merry Christmas” greeting today. The same with Easter.
Celebrating my Lord's birthday is socially unnacceptable, while other religions don't get this treatment? Absolutely tragic.
And worst of all, modern Christmas seems perfectly engineered to teach all children to lose their faith from a young age, when they find out that Santa isn't real. Santa, as in the God-like figure, who always watches us and judges our “sins”, and with a name awfully close to “Satan”...
The modern world is carefully designed to alienate us from Christianity.
“Lol, Christianity in 2026?”
2026 years since what?
Again, more answers to questions like these can be found on the YouTube channel Give Me An Answer.
There are other common arguments I haven't included because they can be simply answered with “The evidence on this page for to the existence of God and the divinity of Jesus Christ is more reasonable.”
“How are you so sure that your specific religion is right and all others are wrong?”
The best reason is that the evidence of Jesus Christ is compelling, while the other religions do not provide much evidence to verify their historical authenticity, or are not based on historical events at all, but there are other issues as well:
- Islam
The Quran was written ~500 years after the life of Jesus, yet claims that He was not Crucified. As we know now through historical evidence, the Crucifixion was a real event, and Muhammad wouldn't have known it better than the eyewitnesses 500 years after the fact.
The Quran also has a bizarre paradox where it says the Bible is true, and the word of Allah can't be corrupted, yet the Bible was corrupted. We also know now through historical evidence that the Bible wasn't altered.
More about the historical problem of the Quran:
Muslims also insist that the Quran can only be read in Arabic to be able to best understand it, and it seems strange that the God of the whole world would only reveal Himself in one language, and more than that, that even Arabic speakers must go to their Quran teachers to understand its true meaning.
Historically, many of the Muslim countries of our present day have become Muslim through the genocide of the native Christians. Christians are still facing genocide at the hands of Muslims in a few countries as of the time of writing.
- Buddhism
Buddhism is an ethically respectable religion, but it's non-theistic. The evidence for God as the Creator of the universe is much more conclusive.
Another problem is that Buddha's solution to suffering is cutting off your desires. There are good and bad desires however, and we shouldn't cut off the desire to love and help others, this is the fundamental ethical difference from Christianity.
- Hinduism
Hinduism teaches that all of reality is part of God, which begins to break down when humans persecute other humans, wiping out the distinction between good and evil that we build morality out of.
Gandhi's inspiration for going against the caste system was not Hinduism, but in fact Jesus Christ's Sermon on the Mount.
- Judaism
Quite possibly the most hateful religion on earth. I will not include the revolting things written in the Talmud here, much less those about Jesus and non-Jews, but you are free to look it up.
Jesus:
“I know your works, tribulation, and poverty (but you are rich); and I know the blasphemy of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan.”
Revelation 2:9 (NKJV)
- Gnosticism
There are many gnostic religions, all with pagan roots influenced by the mythology of ancient societies, but some have even partly adopted Christianity while saying that our history of Jesus is false.
These latter religions believe that the texts that were not included in the Bible, such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Philip etc. are lost history, dismissed for the purposes of painting a specific picture of Christianity.
This is historically not true, and here is the evidence:
- Relativism
“All religions are correct, what is right for me might not be right for you, all roads lead to God”
This is demonstrably false, because all religions contradict each other on the most basic points. If I believe in Jesus, other religions will say I'll go to their version of Hell regardless of how good of a person I am. Some religions say murder and rape is okay against certain groups, often other religious people. There is no in-between, one must be correct and all others false, this is what they all say.
Being a relativist even after taking this into account means being an atheist or deist who doesn't care what anyone believes and how we should shape society. “You believe in your fairy tales, you believe in yours, and leave me out of it”
– Unfortunately, preponents of one fairy tale may start genociding all the others if their religion becomes the majority, and this is happening at the time of writing in places like Nigeria where Christians are being killed by the hundreds of thousands.
If religion is relative, then morality is relative, and again we get into the issue of moral subjectivism, explained above.
Jesus did not teach that all religions are okay, but that He is the only way to God. The very first of the Ten Commandments specifically say you may not have any other gods other than Him. Obviously the God of the Bible claims to be the one true God, it wouldn't make any sense if He was alright with people worshipping anything else.
And Wes Huff's logical argument: If you take an all-inclusive approach to accept all religions, do you still include the people who exclude everyone else, which make up a big portion of religious practicioners? Total inclusivity is not possible either, because the exclusivists are excluded.
And that's about it. I wish you luck from the bottom of my heart in your journey to Jesus Christ, wherever it may lead you. God bless.
© CC0-1.0 2026
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