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Atheists of America Agree: Christianity Makes Eminent Rational Sense!

Atheists of America Agree: Christianity Makes Eminent Rational Sense!

Last updated on: February 29, 2008 at 6:53 pm by John Shore

Atheists of America Agree: Christianity Makes Eminent Rational Sense! 2008-02-29T18:53:35-08:00 John Shore

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As I’m sure my readers will agree, in my last post, There’s No Arguing It: We Can’t KNOW If There’s a God or Not, I conclusively proved that it is exactly as reasonable to think that there is a God as it is to think there’s not. Not one of the 50 or so people who commented on that post questioned the validity of that assertion. (I’m kidding. I actually think Atheists of America have taken out a hit on me.)

Now watch how easily — nay, how inevitably — one must move from the understanding that there’s at least a 50/50 chance of a God existing, to the conclusion that Christianity is the greatest religion in the history of people yearning for spiritual succor.

My blog posts are always too long, so I’m going to keep brief the logical steps from Probable God to Christ. Those steps are:

1. There’s a 50% chance that God is real (which has already been proven).

2. If there’s a God, then God created everything, including humans.

3. If God created humans, God must love humans, because who doesn’t love what they create?

4. God loving humans means God longs to express his love to humans, because it is the nature of love to express itself.

5. God is prohibited from in any direct or overt manner conveying to humans his love for them, because if he objectified himself in the way that would necessitate — if he just appeared to people, and told them that he loved them — then he would ruin their lives by obliterating their free will, by robbing of them their right to choose for themselves whether or not to believe in him. (For more about this particular dynamic, please see my, Why Doesn’t God Just Prove He Exists?) It is precisely God’s love for people (that is, for the qualilty that most wholly defines people, which is their free will) that stops God from proving to people that he loves them as much as he does.

6. People feel guilty all the time for the stupid, petty, selfish, greedy, ego-driven things they do. Feeling guilty is a necessary result of free will, since free will means that in life one is bound to make stupid, petty, selfish, greedy, ego-driven choices.

7. God hates it that people suffer from guilt. And he certainly understands that feeling guilty and feeling unlovable are intimately connected. He also hates it that people’s lives are defined by fear (which they must be, since no one knows what happens to them after they die).

8. God wanted a way to prove his love for people, relieve them of their guilt, and put to rest their fears about their ultimate fate.

9. Becoming the mortal known to history as Jesus Christ is how God accomplished all three of those things — and how he did it all without compromising anyone’s free will. He proved his love for people by becoming a human, taking into his body all the guilt all people ever had or would experience, and then slaughtered that guilt into oblivion. And he put to rest people’s fears about their ultimate fate by explicitly promising everlasting life to anyone who believed in him (which, remember, he had to make part of the deal in order to leave in tact people’s free will). God spent 2,000 years telling everyone he was going to come to earth to do exactly what he did; he did it; and then he went back from whence he’d come.

10. Before finally taking his bodily leave of us, God installed within every human the whole of himself, in the form of the Holy Spirit. All anyone has to do to awaken and access that Holy Spirit is believe that that’s possible, and ask for it. God never enters where he’s not first asked.

And thus, in 10 E-Z Steps, do we have positive, irrefutable prove that believing in the reality of the Christian story makes at least as much sense as not believing in it.

God—>creation—>humans—>love of humans—>respecting humans’ free will—>wanting to relieve humans’ guilt and fear—>Jesus—>Holy Spirit.

See, atheists? We’re at least as rational as you!

And I know you agree! Which is so great!!

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