Evidence supporting the validity of the Christian religion

SolitaryRoad.com

Website owner:  James Miller

[ Home ] [ Up ] [ Info ] [ Mail ]

We live in an age when the West has effectively abandoned Christianity. In most western countries Christianity has been mostly replaced by Secular Humanism (which is really atheism). See Religious liberalism; Humanism. And mostly those people who do still believe in God and view themselves as Christians don’t really practice the teachings of Jesus. Instead they follow false versions of Christianity in which people think they will be saved by following rites, rituals and ceremonies much as the Jewish leaders of Jesus’ time thought the essence of righteousness was following the rites and rituals of Jewish law. See Jesus versus Jewish rite and tradition. Others reject Christianity for other world religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, or Islam. I find all of this very interesting because it seems to me that no other religion on earth comes even close to Christianity in regard to evidence for its validity. No other religion has the kind of powerful, intellectually convincing evidence supporting it that Christianity has. This is because Jesus’ appearance on this earth was accompanied by so many miracles, so many impressive signs from heaven. He did so much that was just mind-boggling in the way of miracles. And there were so many supernatural events that occurred that testified to who he was, testified to his divinity. How many miracles did Muhammad do? How about Buddha? What great signs from Heaven gave testimony to either of them or to any other important person? See

Jesus, Who he was

A divine messenger. Jesus Christ, Son of God, messenger from the creator to his creation.

Why has the West rejected Jesus Christ and Christianity? Partly it is because all the false versions of Christianity have created disillusionment with it. Christianity becomes associated with hypocrisy, falseness, and foolishness. Why does Christianity always get so twisted and corrupted? I think the Devil has something to do with that. But mankind seems to be absolutely determined to get to heaven by some way other than by being virtuous and good. Being upright, honest, virtuous, and good is just too hard. The actual practice of what Jesus taught is perceived as just too difficult. Another reason is theologians and their ivory tower abstractions and dogmatic systems. And the tendency for people to follow other people. The tendency for theologians to follow other theologians; to read the works of other theologians instead of reading the Bible; trust other theologians as an authority instead of the Bible as the authority.

Miracles, signs and wonders

1. The birth of Jesus was preceded by the appearance of the angel Gabriel to the virgin Mary where he told her she would bear the Jewish messiah. (Luke 1: 26-35). At his birth the “star in the East” led the three Magi from the East to the place of his birth (Matt 2:1-11). In addition, an angel appeared to shepherds out in the fields watching over their flocks at night telling them: “For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign to you: You will find him in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.” And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of heavenly host praising God and saying: Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, good will toward men.(Luke 2:11-14).

2. The preaching of Jesus was accompanied by miracles all the time, everywhere he went. Hundreds of miracles. Healing the blind, deaf, lame, sick. Casting out demons. Raising the dead. Changing water into wine. Walking on the sea. Stilling a raging storm by a verbal command. Feeding a crowd of five thousand people with five loaves of bread and two fishes — with 12 baskets of fragments left over (Mark 6:34-44). Jesus was not some person who did a few miracles. He did them everywhere.

Jesus taught repentance from sin, turning to God, living uprightly. He went from town to town preaching, teaching, healing the sick. The Pharisees and Jewish leaders hated him because he claimed to be God (a shocking claim), didn’t follow their Jewish rites and practices, and told them they were hypocrites.

At one time Jesus transferred his supernatural powers to seventy of his followers and instructed them to travel, two by two, from town to town preaching repentance from sin, healing the blind, deaf, and sick, and casting out demons as he was doing. (Luke 10:1-12).

Finally the Jewish leaders took Jesus captive, placed him before the Roman governor Pilate, and demanded that he be crucified. And Pilate, reluctantly, understanding him to be innocent of wrongdoing, gave in to them and instructed that he be crucified.

3. At his crucifixion there were great and marvelous signs from heaven:

Matt 27:45 Now from the sixth hour until the ninth hour there was darkness over all the land. 46 And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” that is, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” 50 And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice, and yielded up His spirit. 51 Then, behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth quaked, and the rocks were split, 52 and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; 53 and coming out of the graves after His resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many. 54 So when the centurion and those with him, who were guarding Jesus, saw the earthquake and the things that had happened, they feared greatly, saying, “Truly this was the Son of God!”

I ask you. What other great man, teacher, thinker, or religious sage has ever been attested to by these kinds of remarkable signs from Heaven? The modern West has made a gigantic mistake in turning its back on Jesus Christ and Christianity. Jesus Christ was God. He was who he said he was. The penalty for rejecting him is not pleasant: it is a terrible hell of everlasting torment. What worse mistake can a person make in this life than a mistake that leads to that? It does seem to me that all of these atheists of our modern age are just remarkably courageous. Or is the right word “foolish”? (The Bible says, “The fool has said in his heart there is no God.” Ps 53:1)

Foundations of Islam. The Islamic religion is based on the teachings of Muhammad who claimed that the angel Gabriel appeared to him and gave him (orally) the contents of the Koran. The Koran teaches that Jesus was not divine, that he was only another prophet. It denies the basic teachings of the Christian New Testament, the basic claims of Jesus. See

On the Koran and Islamic Belief and Outlook

Stance of the Koran on Jesus and Christianity

The Koran

Foundations of Hinduism, Buddhism, and other religions of Hindu origin. Hinduism is not a single set of beliefs but a large conglomeration of a great many sects with certain common beliefs but many differences (in somewhat the same way as Christianity is a conglomeration of many sects). Thus one cannot speak with precision on Hinduism in general but must speak about a particular sect, its gurus and their teachings, its beliefs and practices. The scriptures, beliefs, and practices of Hinduism go back thousands of years to the mist of unrecorded history with the teachings of religious sages, saints, and gurus being first passed down orally and then in written form. The religion is a diverse system with beliefs that span monotheism, polytheism, pantheism, atheism, and others. Thus Hindus are not in agreement, even on the belief in the existence of a God. And different sects view God in different ways. Core common beliefs include a belief in reincarnation. One important practice in at least some sects of Hinduism is that of meditation in which one attempts to find spiritual truth and achieve oneness with God via a trance-like state. How reliable is the spiritual Truth arrived at by Hindus? How reliable is the spiritual Truth arrived at through trance-like states? If Hindus can’t agree even on the existence of a God, how trustworthy are their sources and beliefs? And how liable are they to self-deception?

Buddhism. Buddhism encompasses a variety of traditions, beliefs and spiritual practices largely based on original teachings attributed to the Buddha and resulting interpreted philosophies. Buddhism originated in ancient India as a Sramana tradition sometime between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE, spreading through much of Asia. Two major extant branches of Buddhism are generally recognized by scholars: Theravada (Pali: "The School of the Elders") and Mahayana (Sanskrit: "The Great Vehicle").

Most Buddhist traditions share the goal of overcoming suffering and the cycle of death and rebirth, either by the attainment of Nirvana or through the path of Buddhahood. Buddhist schools vary in their interpretation of the path to liberation, the relative importance and canonicity assigned to the various Buddhist texts, and their specific teachings and practices. Widely observed practices include taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, observance of moral precepts, monasticism, meditation, and the cultivation of the Paramitas (virtues).

Theravada Buddhism has a widespread following in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia such as Myanmar and Thailand. Mahayana, which includes the traditions of Pure Land, Zen, Nichiren Buddhism, Shingon and Tiantai (Tendai), is found throughout East Asia.

Excerpted: Wikipedia

We can ask the same questions of Buddhism as we asked of Hinduism. How reliable is the spiritual Truth arrived at by Buddhists? And how liable are they to self-deception? I personally find Buddhism to be highly abstruse and intellectually unconvincing. I suspect it of being closely linked to the occult.

Shamanism. There are many religious systems in the world that can be described as shamanistic. For example the religious beliefs of various native American peoples and of many primitive tribes of Africa. As for the meaning of shamanism we will use the following:

"A first definition of this complex phenomenon, and perhaps the least hazardous, will be: shamanism = 'technique of religious ecstasy'." Shamanism encompasses the premise that shamans are intermediaries or messengers between the human world and the spirit worlds. Shamans are said to treat ailments and illness by mending the soul. Alleviating traumas affecting the soul or spirit are believed to restore the physical body of the individual to balance and wholeness. Shamans also claim to enter supernatural realms or dimensions to obtain solutions to problems afflicting the community. Shamans claim to visit other worlds or dimensions to bring guidance to misguided souls and to ameliorate illnesses of the human soul caused by foreign elements. Shamans operate primarily within the spiritual world, which, they believe, in turn affects the human world. The restoration of balance is said to result in the elimination of the ailment.

Mircea Eliade, Shamanism, Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Bollingen Series LXXVI, Princeton University Press 1972, pp. 3–7.

The Bible certainly does teach the reality of a spiritual dimension and of a realm ruled by Satan and his demons. It also emphatically instructs us to stay strictly away from the occult. I take that warning very seriously. I do suspect a crossover of shamanism into Hinduism and Buddhism.

Shamanism is closely connected to the idea of getting religious knowledge from trance-like states. For example, primitive Amazon Indians use a concoction made from a couple of jungle plants to make ayahuasca. Ayahuasca when drank, produces a trance-like state in which the drinker is carried into a spirit world. See

Ayahuasca and Amazonian Shamanism

A boyhood experience. When I was a boy of age perhaps 8 or 9 there was an old steel 50 gallon drum sitting on end in our shed where we stored farm tools. The drum had once been used to store gasoline. There was an open fill hole three or four inches in diameter on the top. If you put your nose near the hole and smelled inside the drum you could smell gasoline fumes. I made an astonishing discovery. If I smelled inside that drum for a few seconds I would suddenly see a nest of snakes! They were alive, writhing, and they were as real as could be! I couldn’t believe it! It was obvious they couldn’t really be there but I could certainly see them! How could one account for that! Well, several times I stopped and tried that little experiment again and every time I saw the snakes. Well, one time I told my father about my discovery. He said, “Never do that again!” I never did it again.

Today, all over the world, people are experimenting with all kinds of drugs. They sniff glue, sniff all kinds of things. They smoke marijuana, use cocaine, heroine, other drugs. I have personally never touched any drug and never would (I have never even touched alcohol). Consequently, I don’t have any experience with what these drugs can do to you. My only experience is that experience with that drum. We all know about hallucinations. People see, hear, smell, or feel things that aren’t there. How can that be? The brain is an amazing thing. It is a great, dark, unexplored, mysterious organ capable of amazing things. I would suspect that trance-like states are closely related to hallucinations. What does that tell us about the reliability of information obtained from trance-like states?

The modern West has not abandoned Christianity due to lack of evidence or to Reason or Logic. Evidence, Reason, and logic all support the validity of Christianity. Part of the problem is that there are so many false versions of Christianity, so much apostate Christianity, that the real Christianity becomes lost in all of the clutter. And as for the real Christianity, it gets rejected because people don’t like its message. The West finds its message upsetting and unacceptable. The real Christianity teaches that fornicators, adulterers, and people who engage in perverted sex will go to hell (unless they repent and reform). For some reason, the West just doesn’t like that message. Christianity places great emphasis on moral purity, goodness and virtue. The West doesn’t like that message. It loves the way of pleasure, lust, and hedonism, the way of Satan, and it doesn’t like reproof. Jesus came claiming that he was God, an earthly incarnation of God himself. He taught that there was a Hell and a Final Judgment. In addition, he said he had been appointed by God to be the judge at that Final Judgment. What better authority on who will go to heaven and who won’t than that final judge himself? So, like some brazen, unrepentant sinner, the West just finds fault with the Bible, plugs it ears to what it doesn’t want to hear, reinterprets it, twists it, discourages people from reading it by saying it is too difficult to understand. It divorces Christianity from practice — reduces it to a matter of simply following some enjoyable rituals, rites and ceremonies.

Aug 2019

Addendum: I now present the most convincing evidence of all for the authenticity of the Christian religion. Read Miracle of Miracles by Mina Nevisa 17 June 2021