What Atheists Get Right About Christianity

Posted on Mar 26, 2020 Topic : Inspirational/Devotional, Men's Christian Living, Prophecy, Women's Christian Living
Posted by : Clay Jones

One thing that surprises me is how often skeptics write that if Christianity were true, then it would fulfill our longing to escape death. Philosopher Stephen Cave says reconciling the fact that we know we will die with our desire to live forever is something “Christianity achieved spectacularly well, with enormous consequences for the development of Western civilization.”

Sam Harris tells an atheist convention, “There’s no other story you can tell somebody who has just lost her daughter to cancer, say, to make her feel good. You know it is consoling to believe that the daughter was just taken up with Jesus and everyone is going to be reunited in a few short years. There’s no replacement for that.” Of course, Harris rejects Christianity, but he agrees that if Christianity were true, then it does fulfill our deepest need.

Parisian philosopher Luc Ferry comes to the same conclusion about the wonder of Christianity’s promise: “What we would like above all is to be reunited with our loved ones, and, if possible, with their voices, their faces—not in the form of undifferentiated cosmic fragments, such as pebbles or vegetables. In this arena Christianity might be said to have used its big guns. It promises us no less than everything that we would wish for: personal immortality and the salvation of our loved ones.”

Later Ferry writes that “the Christian response to mortality, for believers at least, is without question the most ‘effective’ of all responses: it would seem to be the only version of salvation that enables us not only to transcend the fear of death, but also to beat death itself.” In fact, Ferry states that Christianity’s doctrine of salvation “turns out to be ‘stronger than death.’ ”

Christians don’t need to be heroes or search for or invent a sense of meaning for their lives. As Jesus says in John 4:14, “Whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” It’s simple and direct: the Christian lives a life honoring to God in the face of sickness, suffering, persecution, and death, and because of the work of Jesus, they are rewarded with eternal life!