How should you live your life? What should you believe and why should you believe it? What values should you cherish and why should you cherish them? Is there a God, to give life meaning, or is it all just random and therefore ultimately all meaningless and purposeless and valueless?
Do you ever think about that? You know, for longer than the commercial break at some point during your favorite television program?
So many people just never bother.
It’s kind of interesting, the question-the-Bible thing: there comes a point where someone OUGHT to have questions: giving your life to Someone Else is not an easy proposition. Even Jesus told us we need to count the cost. But there comes that point when you ask your questions and you have an open heart to an ANSWER and you have your greatest questions ANSWERED. And you decide to take your stand on what you believe, what you have come to believe is true based on your own investigation.
That’s exactly what I did. I was raised in a Christian home, but when I was in the Army, my faith was eroded by the life I was living and then it was ultimately mangled. I got out of the Army spiritually broken. And I lived my life like a pagan for YEARS.
But the backslidden Christian is the most miserable person on the face of the earth, because on the one hand you can’t enjoy sin (because you’ve got the Holy Spirit in you constantly comparing your thoughts, words and actions to the Truth as you keep hearing a voice that says, “This is the way, walk in it“); and at the same time you aren’t living a pure, righteous life that honors God and cannot enjoy any of the benefits of the Christian life. And so you are “double-minded, unstable in all your ways” (James 1:8); you are wavering between two opinions (1 Kings 18:21) – and you need to make up your mind and decide who or what you will follow.
I came to realize that the person who follows himself and his own path and his own way is a selfish, self-centered narcissist: let’s talk about me for a while. And let’s KEEP talking about me; in fact let’s ALWAYS talk about me and NOTHING BUT me, because that is ultimately all that is important in this universe. Is that seriously all there is to life? Is there nothing more? Is there nothing beyond me that is more important than me that ought to shape who I am and who and what I become? And I came to a point where I needed to live for something beyond me, something greater than me. Something I could marvel at.
Another thing that came to me was a simple question: if there is no God, if the evolution that I always hear about is true, then what is right and wrong, and who decides? Another way to put it is, “How can you be a bad atheist?” Now, the ONLY way you can be a “bad atheist” is to believe in God; there ARE no moral requirements to being an atheist and no possibility for any moral requirement. You are nothing but the product of your DNA and your experiences that were outside of your control; more, you think whatever the hell you think merely because the atoms in your brain randomly happened to arrange themselves however the hell they arranged themselves.
I want you to understand very clearly where I am going here: I am making the point that when you consider the Bible, or Christianity, or religion, you are NOT doing so in a vacuum. No, you are considering one alternative from the rest of the alternatives. And so if religion is wrong, then embrace the alternative and embrace its consequences. And understand what those consequences are.
There IS no “right” or “wrong.” Not if Darwinian evolution has any credibility. And it turns out the consequences of that alternative truly matters.
Now, SOMEBODY – you know, like Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or somebody like that – manufactured some rules for the entire herd to follow. And the herd has to follow these rules. And if you don’t follow the rules of the herd, you don’t get to be in the herd. Or at least the herd frowns on you and says you aren’t a very good herd member. But there are HERD animals and there are PREDATOR animals that HUNT and KILL and EAT the herd animals and do so without any shame or regret or guilt whatsoever. And you can alter or edit or change this morality willy-nilly, it turns out – such as when Obama was opposed to gay marriage but then was suddenly for what he’d been against – his contortions are actually even worse than that – but now it is incumbent upon all humanity to get in line with Obama or else be deemed “intolerant” and “bigoted” and “hateful.”
Because whatever is deemed “politically correct” is whatever the hell somebody else says it is until it isn’t that any more.
Now, I reject Obama and his bullcrap-bogus-pseudo morality and I reject political correctness and there had BETTER be some better reason why I ought to be “moral” – whatever the hell “morality” even is – or else in the words of that song, “Let the bodies hit the floor…”
And let it be YOUR body, or the body of your wife or your kid. Because nobody and nothing matters. This whole universe is nothing more than something that accidentally exploded into existence and will ultimately be swallowed up by the same meaningless process of nihilism that spat it out in the first place.
Me personally, I’ve always most identified with the predatory animals. Ask me what all my favorite animals are and you won’t hear me telling you, “Well, I like sheep and cows…” Nope. I favor the wolves and the lions that chase down and kill and eat their fill and are content and happy with a lifestyle that really kills the buzz of those helpless herd animals.
So start running, herd animals. Because we’re hot on your heels and we mean to chase you down and drag you down and end you and your morally idiotic evolution only justifies our doing it to you.
Rape. Burn. Slaughter. Loot. It matters not. For the madman who rips out your still beating heart with his bare fingernails is no morally different than the firemen who went up the stairs to their deaths during the hell of 9/11 when everybody else was fleeing as fast as they could.
I recall the line from the movie Alien:
Ash: You still don’t understand what you’re dealing with, do you? Perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.
Lambert: You admire it.
Ash: I admire its purity. A survivor… unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.
Why not be that way? Be pure, be a survivor, unclouded by bogus conscience, remorse, delusions of morality that have nothing to do with the real essence of human existence if evolution has any validity whatsoever.
Dylan Klebold, one of the infamous Columbine killers, wrote in his journal that he and his accomplice Eric Harris were “god-like” and more highly evolved than every other human being. I remember hearing one of their quotes: “We are no longer human, for we have evolved beyond human morality.”
They wrote in their journals (and pardon the language but it is theirs and not mine): “Why give a fuck what Jesus would do?” And, “I blew off his head with one shot. I am god. He died.”
And why, indeed? I mean, other than the fact that WWJD is a much better acronym than WGAFWJWD.
And I demand the evolutionist give me a detailed scientific answer based on a chemical analysis of our damn brain cells that definitively proves that we should not all go thou and do likewise.
And evolution is a farce, or you prove they HADN’T evolved beyond human morality. Because evolution teaches me why I should murder and rape and steal to get whatever I want; and it does NOT teach me why I should love or cherish or give my what is mine for the good of someone who doesn’t even share my DNA.
I could on that simple evolutionary level be very content being a serial killer, a serial rapist, tracking down, stalking and HUNTING my human prey and satiating my own lusts, my own desires, doing my own thing my own way. If I want something, I ought to steal it. I have a lust for someone, I ought to kidnap and rape. If I don’t like somebody, I ought to hunt down and kill that somebody.
I can show you scholarly articles from evolutionists talking about rape as a simple adaptation to the requirements of natural selection and the survival of the fittest. Because evolution is all about spreading your DNA to the next generation – THAT’S WHAT MAKES YOU “THE FITTEST” BABY – and evolution doesn’t have any stipulations on how to do that. If it works, do it.
Last night I discovered and called in a bunch of stolen copper wire that somebody had stripped and sold. Why not?
At some point, I realized that if evolution were actually true, if there is no God who holds me accountable for my works, then anything is equally permissible. Not only is the torture-rapist-murderer no morally different from the Mother Teresa, but in fact the former is actually SUPERIOR to the latter; because the torture-rapist-murderer GOT IT and grasped the essence and the sheer absurdity of human existence and Mother Teresa was a stupid fool who made the wrong bet stupidly thinking there was some God at the end of the picture when there wasn’t. And now both people get the same dirt nap, only one of them lived their lives realizing all along that they would get that same dirt nap and lived their life consistently by that plan in a completely self-centered manner.
The sociopath is the true moral hero of Darwinism. Go thou and do likewise.
I always laugh when I hear the secular humanist and the atheist claim that religion is intolerance and mass murder. Because they are the worst kind of ignorant fools and because the simple fact of the matter is that State Atheism has been responsible for the brutal murder of one hundred million just of their OWN people and JUST during PEACETIME alone. Hey, you go ahead and add up the Crusades and the Inquisition and the witch burnings – which were all actually all more secular than truly coming from the Church, but that’s an argument for another day – and whatever you want – and you won’t even scratch the surface of what Mao and Stalin and Pol Pot and the Kims in North Korea did in their official state atheism. And you can really and truly rack up a giant death toll when you add in the fact that according to the members of Adolf Hitler’s inner circle, he was a self-revealed atheist as well – and he started World War II and bears the guilt of the 60 million casualties from that war. Then add to that terrible death toll another sixty million murdered innocent human beings just in the United States alone at the hands of secular humanists in their abortion mills. And don’t even TRY to imagine what would happen if the secular humanists truly took power, because they would deliberately wipe out the vast majority of humanity in order to achieve their insane and evil environmentalist goals.
Jesus actually taught Christians to put away their swords, to turn the other cheek, to live in peace. Because His Way was the anathema of the Way of evolution and natural selection and survival of the fittest.
And so, confronted with a very stark choice, something in me with every fiber of my being said NO this crap that I’ve been force-fed is NOT the TRUTH. There IS a way that we should live, a right way and a WRONG way. And each must have CONSEQUENCES. And if that ISN’T so, then don’t you DARE look down and judge the torture-murder-rapist who enjoys his “work” with that screaming woman or that terrorized little child. Because he is only doing what is in him to do. If it feels good, do it, right? Just like the homosexuals and the abortionists and the dope users say to justify their “choices” that fly in the face of everything every culture before them previously ever believed. There is no more wrong with what they do than what the heyena does when they chase an exhausted animal down and start literally eating it alive. And who the hell are YOU who DON’T have that person’s DNA and DIDN’T live his life and have his however-twisted experiences to judge that person???
Because either God created me in His divine image or I am no different from all the other animals that are the same mindless product of the exact same mindless evolution. Human beings are either the one or they are the other. Period.
Now, I want you to realize that this wasn’t just an intellectual game for me: I got out of the Army a trained killer, a highly trained expert stalker of human beings, a soldier thoroughly trained to deploy weapons specifically engineered to exterminate human beings like bugs – and more than a little bit bitter besides – and I was at that point where I could have gone either way. And why NOT go to the dark side unless there was a genuine, profound difference between the two sides???
Unless there is a God who truly stands above ALL of us as our Creator and has the RIGHT to make the rules for ALL of us and hold ALL of us accountable to His rules that emerge from HIS character and nature and purpose for creating us in the first place. And I was accountable to that Creator and no eternal dirt nap: the choice is either everlasting heavenly reward or everlasting hellish suffering. And you get to choose which.
I mean, just so you know, I was trained by my own government how to kill my fellow genus homo and species sapiens with my bare hands, with a knife, with the bayonet, with pistols, with rifles, with machine guns, with hand grenades, with grenade launchers, with mortars, with rocket launchers, with the M47 Dragon, and even with the M220 Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided missle system. Not that I have most of those things now. And I was trained how to parachute out of a perfectly good airplane so I could – on command – kill my fellow human beings like bugs within 18 hours notice anywhere on planet earth. The question whether I would kill other human beings wasn’t an “academic” one; if and when I was activated, I would accomplish my mission that I was trained and indoctrinated to accomplish.
You have likely heard that slogan, “There are no atheists in foxholes.” I’m sure that’s not an absolute statement, but it does underscore a very valid point: soldiers are people who for the most part need to believe in absolutes and objective values and transcendence in order to function. And that’s because, for example, we have to deal with the reality that there is indeed an “absolute” difference between being alive and being a screaming, dismembered, disemboweled pile of bloody, quivering guts. We believe in objective values because we need to believe that we’re living and dying for some kind of ultimately meaningful purpose; we need to know our sacrifice ultimately means something. And we tend to believe in transcendence because we are people who may have to go through that moment of knowledge that in a very short time we are going to be in a battle and we may not live through it and we want to be in heaven. And those three reasons are why there aren’t very many atheists in foxholes.
And so it was on that background that I began my investigation as to whether or not I should believe in God and what God I should believe in if there IS a God. And also consider the consequences if there is NOT a God.
I mean, how ought a US-government trained super-predator live?
Now, the people who lived half-ass lives, who are afraid one the one hand to be what the Obama’s and the Clinton’s who make up all the politically correct rules for society call “intolerant” or whatever, but who at the same time don’t with any passion follow God or His ways, I GOT NO TIME FOR THEM.
Maybe that disgust at those who won’t get off the fence comes from my experience serving on a team where it was “us” and “them” – and “they” were trying to kill “us” and if “us” had any desire to live whatsoever we better kill “them” first. That’s certainly one very good way to get at the essence of how black-and-white reality truly is.
Get on one side or get on the other side, choose this day whom you will serve (Joshua 24:15). The person sitting on the middle of the teeter totter of life is totally useless. And the people who just can’t sit themselves on the ends just muck up the whole operation of the teeter totter of life.
And that’s exactly the way God designed the world: there is heaven on the one side and there is hell on the other. There isn’t any “middle place” where the useless people who never had the balls to make up their damn useless minds go.
Jesus says that there are the sheep (the righteous) and there are the goats (the wicked). He says He will divide them into two and ONLY two groups, and He will say to one, “Enter into the joy of your Master,” while to the other He will say, “Depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness. I never knew you.”
Jesus says in the Book of Revelation, “I know all the things you do, that you are neither hot nor cold. I wish that you were one or the other! But since you are like lukewarm water, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth! You say, ‘I am rich. I have everything I want. I don’t need a thing!’ And you don’t realize that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked.” — Revelation 3:15-17.
And yes. That’s the way it works in God’s universe. And to quote J. Vernon McGee, “you might have a better plan than God, but what you DON’T have is your own universe.”
God wants PASSION in His pursuers. He frankly wants us to follow Him with all our heart and all our soul and all our strength and all our mind (Luke 10:27) or else hey, please don’t bother.
And so it was with that big picture – one way or the other, the light side or the dark side – that I began to investigate whether there is a God and which God I should follow if there is.
I actually gave the Darwinists their first shot. I mean, if they could prove their case, then why bother looking at useless religions that talked about fairy-tale gods???
And so I read the hot-off-the-press at-that-time atheist work, “The Blind Watchmaker,” from cover to cover.
Right off the bat, I came across this memorable quote from Dawkins:
Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. — The Blind Watchmaker (1996) p.1
And Dawkins also said in The Blind Watchmaker:
“Animals give the appearance of having been designed by a theoretically sophisticated and practically ingenious physicist or engineer…” — (p. 36)
Okay, so I’m hearing the man CONCEDE the major point that HIS SIDE has the BURDEN OF PROOF because he concedes that prima facie – on its face to be accepted as correct until proven otherwise – admission that it DOES in FACT appear self-evident that things were DESIGNED by a creator with a purpose. Just as St. Paul confirmed to believers in Romans chapter one.
And I have two arms with opposable thumbs so that I can open the stupid fridge with my right hand and take out the gallon of milk with my left hand. Design and purpose, kids.
So Dawkins told us from the outset that the burden of proof was on his side to PROVE beyond any shadow of a doubt whatsoever that there is no Creator God and can be no Creator God. But as I read, do you know what I increasingly began to observe? That this man was an appalling moral idiot, and that what truly set him apart was the gargantuan arrogance of a genuine fool.
I found it interesting to learn that Richard Dawkins was not opposed to the idea of an “intelligent designer.” Unless that intelligent designer turned out to be God. Because ultimately the man is a anti-religious bigot and an intellectual hypocrite rather than any kind of scientist.
If the prima facie case rests with design and therefore Creation, then the sensible person believes that unless and until the alternative is PROVEN otherwise. And he proceeded to FAIL spectacularly by any standard outside of his own incredibly narrow-minded presupposed viewpoint that he holds a priori based on his narrow-minded speculations rather than any legitimate science.
Then I read a book that I got from the library called “Darwin’s Enigma” from a man named Luther Sunderland. And what intrigued me about that book was that it was written by a guy who had literally been hired by the state of New York for the purpose of ascertaining whether creationism was an acceptable teaching for public schools. And he talked to the leading evolutionists in the world as he compiled his research from that secular purpose. Some of the curators from the leading museums of natural history on planet earth were literally quoted as saying that evolution was NOT a legitimate scientific theory and should NOT be taught as a fact in the public schools.
So I believe as I ought to believe when I intellectually believe there is a God who intelligently designed us with a plan for His creation. And I believe what I ought to believe when I morally believe that there is a God who holds us accountable for how we live and how we act.
And then from that I began to study the world religions. I examined each one until it disqualified itself. But at the same time I had already determined that ONE of them must be the real McCoy.
I considered Buddhism and Hinduism. I considered Islam. The first two disqualified themselves on the intellectual level because who the heck instituted “reincarnation”??? Who built that thing? Who designed that system? And who made the rest of us that go through these endless cycles of reincarnation? And who was the Big Banger who made it all happen? They also failed on numerous moral grounds. You look at India and see the caste system and you know what I’m talking about; you see the millions of gods and the fact that evil and good are basically viewed as being two sides of the same coin and you see what I’m talking about.
It isn’t rocket science, kiddies. God is either personal or impersonal: if He is personal, then Buddhism and Hinduism are false; if He is impersonal, then Christianity and Judaism and Islam are false.
And this is critical because it answers a fundamental question about the human race: either WE are personal or impersonal. If we are personal, where do we get our personhood from? How is it that we come to have free will? Genesis 1:27 provides a very clear answer: “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”
Buddhism strictly denies the existence of human beings as “selves.” This doctrine is literally one of the three marks of existence of Buddhism: Anattā (no-self, without soul, no essence) is the nature of living beings. The other two are Anicca (impermanence, nothing lasts) and Dukkha (suffering, unsatisfactoriness is innate in birth, aging, death, rebirth, redeath – the Saṃsāra cycle of existence). And scientific naturalism likewise denies the existence of the self, of the soul, of a “you” that is a permanent you, for what it’s worth. According to these views, there IS no “you” inside you; there IS no free will; you are a strictly determined and strictly conditioned being with no soul.
Islam is mono-theistic, which is good. But from there it gets very, very bad very, very quickly. And the fact that today 99.99 percent of terrorist attackers are being committed by the most ardent followers of what Muhammad actually taught is kind of icing on that cake. If you understand the dilemma of violence inherent within Islam – which is NOT shared by Christianity – it is frankly terrifying. Islam specifically denies that God has a Son, so if Jesus is who the Bible declares He is, Islam is false. And if Jesus is NOT who the Bible declares Him to be, then Christianity is false.
Each of the great religions of the world teach mutually exclusive truth claims: they can’t all be true or right. You are a fool according to the rules of logic and reason to believe “all paths lead to the same God.” Because no, they don’t.
And Jesus Himself ruled that politically-correct cultural relativist view that all religions were equally valid when He said, “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.”
There are literally thousands and thousands of teachers and professors with PhDs who are literally presenting their students with intellectual gibberish when they teach the pluralistic universalism that is so common today.
Now, I want you to understand; I’m not micro-nitpicking at this point on ANY of my above investigations. I’m just trying to ascertain whether or not the BIG PICTURE is true. If the big picture is false, then all the tiny little details are false, too. Or, to put it another way: if the big picture is fake, who gives a damn about whether the inconsequential details are true or not?
So when I get to Christianity, it all ends up boiling down to one simple question: did Jesus rise bodily from the dead, as His disciples claimed? What’s the evidence for that central claim of Christianity? And if that big picture claim is false, then I frankly don’t give a flying damn about the Bible. But if it’s true…?
I dedicated myself to a study of the evidence about the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead. And if you examine that claim with a halfway open mind, the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead is simply astounding and irrefutable. The bottom line comes down to this: there is simply no reasonable question that Jesus’ disciples believed with ever fiber of their being that they had seen Jesus alive after His crucifixion and death and burial. There isn’t a single New Testament scholar – Christian or secularist alike – who claims the disciples didn’t genuine believe they had seen Jesus alive. Their completely transformed lives and boldness in the face of certain persecution and even death confirms that fact. And in fact it is a historical fact that every single one of the apostles save St. John died as martyrs having traveled the known world to tell people about the Jesus they had personally seen alive after His death in confirmation of all of His claims of His deity and His purpose for coming into the world: to die for our sins and to rise again and take His sheep with Him to the Father in Heaven.
Find me one person who you know to have died for something that they knew for a fact to be false. Yes, we have a lot of Muslim “martyrs” who blow themselves up to kill “infidels” and we probably both agree these people are tragically wrong: but THEY believe what they’re doing is right and THEY believe in Allah. But you need to understand as you read the Gospel accounts: the disciples were in a unique position in human history: they were in the position to absolutely know for certain whether or not Jesus actually rose from the dead.
And every single one of them signed in their own blood their testimony that yes, they had witnessed it with their own eyes and they were willing to therefore lay down their own lives to carry their OWN crosses (literally the instruments of their death penalties) and die for their Lord who had already died for them and given their lives and their deaths meaning.
If Jesus died and rose again from the dead, Christianity is true and everything Jesus said is true and the Christianity that He founded is true and the Bible is true and that’s that. And He did and He did and He WAS true and Christianity IS true and the Bible that He affirmed is true and that’s that.
And to a man like me, that is all I need to tell me what I should live for and how I ought to live.
That’s the big picture. But there is so much confirmation in the little tidbits, too.
Just – and I mean JUST – watched a program called “The Fall of Jericho” on the military history channel I love to watch. And I watched a drama that has been played out over and over again about the accuracy and legitimacy of the Holy Bible. I couldn’t find the transcript of the program, but here’s a link that describes in even more detail what was presented.
So Jericho. Did it happen according to what the Bible claims in the Book of Joshua? Well, you wouldn’t believe how many times “scientists” said hell no. And they said it with no legitimate archaeological basis. An archaeologist named Garstang made it his life’s work to go through the layers of cities that Jericho had been built and rebuilt on in the 1930s. And he found something fascinating in one of those layers: the walls had collapsed in EXACTLY the pattern that the Bible described in the conquest of Jericho. Well, we know that Joshua and the Israelites entered the land in the late Bronze age. In fact we know by other data the actual time of 1406 BC. So Garstang was interested in WHEN the walls had collapsed. And he started collecting and dating pottery. And according to his analysis, the date of the site was 1406BC – EXACTLY WHEN THE BIBLE SAID. So the Bible was established FACT and to the level of amazing scientific verifiability.
But hold on. A different archaeologist showed up named Kathleen Kenyon and “found” that no, the walls of Jericho had been destroyed 150 years earlier. And she used the same pottery as her primary source of dating.
Thirty years pass. For thirty years all the “scholars” and all the “scientists” sneered at the Bible. It had been factually refuted.
But a guy named Dr. Bryant Woods shows up in the 1980s. And he’s doing his PhD on pottery and decides to reopen the case that had been “rock-solid” against the Bible. He decided he was going to evaluate ALL the evidence of the pottery fragments. He tracked them all down. And to his intellectual horror he discovered that this pseudo-scientific fraud Kathleen Kenyon had not even BOTHERED to look at most of the actual evidence before arriving at her sneering bogus conclusion. Seriously, Woods went to the museums and found that Kenyon hadn’t even examined the evidence.
And Dr. Bryant Woods CONCLUSIVELY PROVED THAT THE BIBLE WAS COMPLETELY HISTORICALLY ACCURATE IN EVERY SINGLE DETAIL THAT IT HAD AFFIRMED.
And this sneering arrogant intellectually dishonest fools’ game has been played over and over and over again with the Bible.
But the fact remains that NO archaeological find has EVER controverted a SINGLE fact presented in the Bible. It stands as completely true in all that it affirms.
The Bible remains true as the anvil of history. You can pound on it as you will, but you will die and the Word of the Living God will go on and on and on.
The Bible is beyond any doubt the best seller in the entire history of planet earth: more copies are sold every year, more are sold every single month, every single week, every single DAY, than any other book in the world. Twenty million copies of the Bible are sold each year just in the United States alone. And that doesn’t even count the millions of copies that are given away by people who have their OWN stories of their OWN encounters with a Jesus who is STILL alive. As an example, the Gideons alone distributes about 60 million copies of the Bible a year.
The Harry Potter series has collectively sold 500 million copies worldwide, which is truly astounding. Unless you compare it to the more than six BILLION copies of the Bible.
The Bible is available in over 2,100 languages. Because humanity has a passion and a hunger for the true Word of the Living God.
Richard Dawkins’ book, for the official record, is not; in fact it’s none of the above at all.
So I read the Bible with that understanding that it is THE most sacred Book in the history of the world. It ought to be given that respect because what I just stated is simply true by any objective measure. But the scoffers continue to abound and they have no respect for anything that is sacred.
But it comes down to this: people who fixate on the most minor details and then say, “See? It’s wrong, it’s ALL wrong!!!” are not wise.
Most of the time, when I hear somebody assert to me that the Bible isn’t accurate or isn’t reliable, and I ask them to give me an example, they literally cannot think of even ONE such example. Somebody at some time said something, and that was all they needed and they never bothered on their own to verify or refute a claim they just took at face value.
I simply marvel at that: your entire ETERNITY hangs on this, and you just yawn and walk away like it’s no big deal when it is the biggest deal of your existence.
My challenge to everyone is to study the questions of eternity as though your soul depends on it: because it DOES.
DON’T be a “Kathleen Kenyon” who doesn’t bother with the facts and arrives at bogus conclusions that are based on lies; be a “Bryant Wood” who carefully examines all the evidence and arrives at the truth. Be like St. Luke the author of the Gospels and Acts, who stated, “I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning” (Luke 1:3). Be like the Bereans, who “were more noble-minded than those in Thessalonica, for they received the word with great eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so” (Acts 17:11).
Consider Jesus. Consider Who He was and whether He Is.
One way or another, you have to answer the ultimate questions. Is there a God? Who is He? What does He expect of us? Or is there NO god? And if not why should I bother living in accordance with a bunch of made-up politically correct gibberish and if I want something that someone else has, why shouldn’t I steal it and if somebody’s bothering me why shouldn’t I kill him or her? And who the hell does any other human being think he or she is to tell me what I should do or how I should live when it’s MY life and it will be MY eternal dirt nap and butt the hell out of my business because I’m not a herd animal, I’m a predator animal. And your own precious evolution says we predators are every bit as evolutionarily valid as your herd animals.
Or chose Christ and choose life and experience life more abundantly instead. Because Jesus contrasted the Way of Evolution with His Way when He said:
“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” — John 10:10
Stop being double-minded, unstable in all your ways. Stop wavering between two opinions. Make up your mind. Get off the fence. Choose this day whom you will serve.
