One of my favourite activities is lining up in solidarity with atheists. It was an atheist who put this graphic on the Internet and I found myself so strongly in agreement that I downloaded it to use on Frank’s Cottage.
As far as I’m concerned, every honest and thinking person MUST challenge their beliefs. Like a jeweller checking a diamond’s purity, they MUST hold them up to the hard light of critical examination.
That’s what I did for a long time. I investigated the claims of Jesus of Nazareth (who many people believe is the Son of God) and weighed them against what I knew about others faiths, including atheism.
I read books, thought hard about the reality of this world, and debated concepts with brave, knowledgeable Christians. Finally, at age 42, I decided to follow Jesus.
Through this process, I escaped the prison of blindly accepting the dogma of our culture, which insists that we:
- Buy the newest iPhone
- Save for cruise ship vacations
- Obsess over which celebrities are feuding on Twitter
- Never, EVER consider the big questions of existence
So, to quote the graphic that started this blog, are you your own most effective prison warden? Or are you brave enough to wonder if a promotion, a new car and a bigger flat-screen TV will really boost your happiness?
If you’re at that place in life — and if you’ve read this far, I’m gonna assume you are — then consider these claims:
- There IS a creator, a perfect creator, and this creator knows everything about you.
- This creator wants to connect with you on the deepest level possible, but the wrong things you’ve done and right things you’ve failed to do have erected a Berlin Wall between you and Him.
- That wall is so tall and thick that nothing YOU ever do will ever break it down.
- So God, your creator, did the hard work for you — sending His perfect Son to this earth to show us how to live right and, finally, to die as a sacrifice. That sacrifice will destroy that wall for everyone who believes in the Son and follows Him. And I mean EVERYONE.
Why, you might ask, is this horrible sacrifice needed to break down the wall? Because the wrong things we do and the right things we fail to do are serious business for a perfect creator. Far, far more serious than our culture will ever admit.
How do I know this? One of Jesus’s earliest and most influential followers wrote, “When people sin, they earn what sin pays—death. But God gives his people a gift—eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord”.
If you come to the place of understanding this, then you will also understand just how glorious the gift of Jesus is. Are you willing to accept that gift? Yes or no, post your thoughts below and let’s have a conversation.
Frank's Cottage 
There’s nothing I could say is poorly thought out here in your piece, Frank. And like you, I completely agree with the concept in the atheistic meme. But I’d like to add a piece myself.
While we need to examine and question the values of our culture(s), we need to do it on the basis of seeking truth, not denying it as does atheism in its rejection of any consideration of God. Many others in Western cultures also question our history and react against it, but on what basis? People may know what this meme states, but are still lost in the wilderness of experimentation.
Some try to find answers in Buddhism, which has no Western basis, or in some other “ancient wisdom.” The last two or three generations have been looking into it as an alternative to Western values, especially an alternative to Christianity, but have come up with nothing of lasting value or lasting power. The Muslim world seeks to supplant Western values on the basis of its faults, but still engages in war and rage against itself. Even the cultures from which such “wisdom” originated still seek, not satisfied with what answers they thought they might have had.
If I try to raise Christian faith as an option now, most reject it on the basis of the horrors the Church as committed in past centuries, or in our age, and the failure of Western culture as a whole. ‘Anything but that’ is often the response, or the thought behind the response.
But did the West ever really embrace Christ? Only the occasional individual has, I think, truly done that (and not just in the West). Many so-called Christian cultures embraced a system of self-governance instead and did so in the name of Christianity. And that is often the source which people reject as being Christ, as if the hypocrisy is somehow a model of what Christ wanted (and wants) us to be like. I don’t have to spend long in any church to find contradiction, disharmony and hypocrisy there. I find it within myself, too. Does that all stem from Christ? Really?
Christ’s life and teachings are recorded four times at the start of the New Testament. Why not start there? Is there any indication that the West as a culture ever followed Christ’s radical teachings, or considered him to be the central answer to all questions by identifying him as he claimed to be: the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end of all existence and reality?
So we don’t need to supplement God (and Christ said he was one with God) with anything or anyone else. If I have any good in my life, any pleasure in a new iPhone or a cruise, or the love of a family, or the fellowship in a church, I can thank and rely on him for all that we consider to be good. I don’t need to be rid of such things, but I mustn’t seek my value as a human in them. Even my family, my church, or my culture, as highly valued as they need to be, are not the original source of what is meaningful.
This is so universe-shattering, so unthinkable and original as to be, if I may dare say so, in line with Christ’s perfect contribution. He chose to be dropped into this world among us blood-soaked wretches for a brief 33 years so that we no longer need to be the horribly fallen humans we are. In being so changed, and as we submit more ownership of our lives to him, we increasingly reflect only Christ and who humanity was meant to be, not Western history or Church hypocrisy or anything else.
Christ is the starting point and the ending point, the source of all creation, the end to whom we give our account, the Way, the Truth and the Life, deserving of all glory and honour. And I can think of no better God to worship and commit to.