As for Zeus, he’s done just as much for me as Christ has. I mean, c’mon; all the gods I don’t believe in are on equal footing. And as for God sending Jesus to die… that whole thing makes zero sense to me. I mean, God *is* Jesus. Whatever that is supposed to mean. And he died, but so what? We all die. Most of us die for more than 3 days, so I’m unimpressed by the sacrifice. And heck, I read everything Jesus said — which is about 10 pages worth of material, he wasn’t exactly prolific — and it doesn’t exactly jump out at me as revelatory. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to listen to Paul. Haha, I think I made a pun of sorts. A heretical pun.

I recognize that Christian faith — and most faith, regardless of religion — is something I don’t understand, that I can’t empathize with. You can’t reason about faith, I accept that. But it goes both ways — I accept (and am entirely comfortable) with the fact that I can’t use reason to convince you not to be a Christian. I don’t have any desire to convince you of that. But similarly you won’t be able to use reason to convince me (or anyone) to be Christian. You can use the language of reason, but that’s just a facade. In using that language you might convince someone of something; but you didn’t do it with reason. You connected with some desire, some as-yet restrained belief in them, some image, something that was there before.

The souvlaki was great, though. :)

Free souvlaki to all who follow me.

Surely you jest… the US has become more overtly evangelical Christian centric over the past 20 years than at any time since the post-WWII ‘modern era’.

It hasn’t helped any.

1. http://tinyurl.com/7qrao
2. http://tinyurl.com/dm4da

I, too, never expected to be a Christian myself. I was a great fan of humanism and positivism. I had tried budism. And while all of this seemed to bring some peace and a sense of completeness, it was all too shallow.

Then I tried Christianity. And now there’s no turning back. My faith has grown day after day. I had experiences with God. Once you are really into Christianity there’s just too many evidence that God exists and that Jesus was really the Savior to not believe.

Think about it. Where is Zeus? What did he do for you? What can he do for you today?

God sent his son Jesus to live on earth and die for us. No other ‘god’ out there would do the same.

Well, since you ask…

I’ve come to realize — not a profound realization, just one I hadn’t thought of for some time — that of all the things I *could* become, a Christian is not one of them. I could gain faith or lose faith, I could believe in any number of things — I haven’t closed myself to such things. But I couldn’t become a Christian any more easily than I could start believing in Zeus.

Christianity is a tradition. I know *of* that tradition — probably more than most of my secular friends, and maybe more than several of my Christian friends. But I’m not of that tradition; my family is a couple generations into secular humanism now. I can take on new philosophies, but taking on a new tradition is a rather odd experience. Why one instead of another? Certainly when there is a spiritual vacuum many people reach into their peer group and their past, and they find Christianity. But neither my past nor my peer group has Christianity, and my spiritual life has not been a vacuum. And so where would my faith in Christ come from? These things don’t emerge from the ether.

So, there you go. To some of us Christ is just a random person, and The Bible is just a random book, and there’s nothing that can be changed about that. I think, on some level, there’s no going back — if *I* had turned away, I could turn back, but separated by generations the shift becomes permanent.