Many people I know think that Christianity is for the weak, the simple, the superstitious, or the poor. Marx called it the “opium of the people,” implying that the only way to numb the pain of a miserable existence is to conjure up a fantasy where all the problems of today no longer exist. Freud called it a neurosis based on our inherent weakness and inability to understand the world, he said that faith is a mental illness whereby we try to control and maintain influence on the outside world. And Nietzsche said that Christianity is an attempt to find meaning, and that “God is dead” and that we must create our own meaning because there is no real purpose for our existence.

Many today say that Christianity requires a blind faith that is the antithesis of rational, reasonable, intellectual thought. You have to check your brain at the gate. To believe in things that are not visible, that are not empirically verifiable, you must abandon reason and embrace mere illusion. They say there is no way to conclusively prove your view of religion is true, therefore to believe in it you must be delusional. You may think that believing in Christianity requires you to believe in the unprovable, unverifiable, unfeasible, and unknowable. Which requires you to make a truth statement about something you can’t know to be true and is therefore too risky for you. You might think that you are too intellectual to trust something invisible.

But what if I told you that this is exactly what you are doing?

You see, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche accused Christianity of being false because it was invented for comfort, control, and meaning, but their anti-religious stipulations were exactly that, a way to find comfort, control, and meaning. You may accuse Christianity of being an unprovable statement of faith, but your own statement to the contrary is just that, another unprovable statement of faith. When we Christians say that we believe in a Creator who is the cause of all things, you respond by saying that’s not true specifically because we can’t prove it, but can you empirically prove otherwise? His point of view on religion is also based on faith. We both make statements of faith, we are both theologians and philosophers, we both believe something about God, and ultimately we both have to rely on our faith to make statements about the unseen.. I trust my faith by saying that God is real, you trust your doubt by saying that he is not. We both bank our lives on a statement of faith about religion. My question is, how much do you trust your statement of faith? After exploring alternatives, I have risked my life with my statement of faith, do you feel safe doing the same?

Now I know that this does not prove Christianity, you could say that there may be an invisible spaghetti monster and because we cannot disprove its existence, we must blindly believe in it. That’s not what I’m saying, I’m not asking you to believe in God simply because ‘you need to make a statement of faith anyway’ and so pick one at random. Instead, I urge you to critically evaluate your own faith as I have. Explore Christianity. Read the New Testament, peruse serious books by theologians and philosophers, listen to what reasonable Christians have to say, listen to the best arguments for Christianity. Explore.

The point is, if you don’t believe that Jesus is God, but you haven’t seriously considered that possibility, you are risking a lot by making a statement of faith that he doesn’t exist. Because your statement is not empirically proven and has not even been examined; your life trajectory is simply based on your feelings. That is the most illogical and blind kind of faith possible. AND Until you have seriously evaluated Christianity, you are like a man on a bridge taking a leap of faith, affirming that there is or is not something under your feet, but never bothering to look down.

If you’re a committed and researched atheist, I think there are answers to your questions, although you may not like them because they’re not what you want, but I still respect you for taking the time to explore and come to conclusions. about your faith If you decide to reject Christianity after a serious evaluation of what the best Christian minds have to offer (not the caricatures posited by fringe groups), then I respect that and don’t want to force anything on you. However, if you reject or scoff at Christianity because you have a feeling of doubt, or it just seems too crazy, or some Christians you know are weird, but you haven’t searched for answers, haven’t looked at it seriously, you’re making exactly the kind of statement of blind faith without intellectual support, which you accuse Christians of doing.

There may be two questions on your mind right now, “How does this show that Christianity is true and other religions are false??” and “How can Christianity be true if there are so many different groups of Christians?“I agree that there are other religious groups that make statements of faith, and you don’t just have two options: theism and atheism; there are many options. But whatever conclusions you come to, atheism, Christianity, or others, you still you are choosing one unprovable statement of faith out of many This should not be a reason to think blindly or on the basis of your feelings. Before you make a statement of faith denying the Christian faith that 1/3 of the world believes to be true, you owe it to your intelligence a rational exploration of what Christianity really is..

I know some Christians get into pointless fights and say stupid things, but if you deny Christianity because of them, you are basing your ultimate statement of faith on the failure of some people, not on an exploration of the nature of truth. It would be like denying that Apple makes good computers because some of its employees are really bad at explaining how they work.

I know you may have questions, I know it may sound crazy, but since you are making a statement of faith anyway, why not explore Christianity before you reject it? Read authors like CS Lewis, Timothy Keller, John Stott, James Packer, check it out for yourself, don’t trust your doubts, don’t trust the caricatures. Explore. If Christianity is false, but you believe, life is useless and you have lost almost nothing. But if the things Jesus said are true, and you ignore them, you have lost everything.

Go out and explore.