Tuesday, October 14th, 2003 - How Is Christianity Different From Other Religions?

After receiving and understanding more information about how Christianity differs from other religions, I felt compelled to email this explanation to the atheist that I have been emailing. I leave that email with you:

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My last email composed largely of a little of the evidence supporting the reliability of the Bible. Through continued research, I would like to share with you what makes Christianity different from other religions. I promise that this one won't be as long as the last one!

The first thing different is the Bible's historical evidence and accuracy compared with other religious books. All major religions except Christianity are a result of "one man's one revelation at one time;" I have already explained to you that the Bible consists of works from 40 men over 1,500 years. Several revelations are recorded throughout the Bible, long before Jesus was born and even after he died by crucifixion.

The second thing is the martyrdom of those who were the first followers of Jesus (also known as Apostles or The Twelve). Some may argue that all the eyewitness accounts of Jesus' resurrection were "made up" or "created" by these Apostles since a large portion of the evidence for the Resurrection comes from their testimony. Judas is the one who handed Jesus over to the Jewish leaders, but out of the other 11, at least 10 of them were martyred for their teachings about Jesus. It is said that people will die for what they believe to be true (even if it is not true), but they will never die for what they know to be a lie. It is not logical to say that all those men died for something they "made up" and knew to be a lie.

The third thing different is the fact that Jesus fulfilled 61 prophecies all written at least 400 years earlier. A scientific study was conducted to estimate the probability of that happening. The probability of one person (any time from the beginning of time to the present) fulfilling just 8 of those prophecies is 1 in 10^17 (1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000). The probability of fulfilling even 48 of them is 1 in 10^153 - I'm not even going to type out 153 zeros.

Those three differences are the most convincing among the many. I will shortly state a few more but will not elaborate on these, unless you so desire me to.

These are distinctive to Christianity:
The Bible claims to be inspired by God (compared to other books).
Only Jesus claimed to be God (compared to other religious figures).
Religion is man's attempt to reach God; Jesus is God's attempt to reach man (Jesus is not a religion, but a person).
Salvation is assured through a relationship, love, and devotion to Jesus; there is no "maybe" or "probably" - it is guaranteed.
The belief that God is part of everything all around us - the sense of closeness.
The promise that God sends His Holy Spirit to dwell in us, giving us power to live as He asks, since we cannot do it on our own.
Belief is based on documented truth rather than emotions.
Not a "white man's religion" (as accused by some Native Americans); Jesus wasn't even white, as many people think. He was a dark-skinned Easterner and Christianity is rooted in the Eastern world.

One last thought - where do other religions come from then? The Bible accounts for this - as people turned away from God (as early as the first chapters of Genesis), they made up and followed other beliefs (based on their own free will to do so). In Old Testament times, other religions formed were based on Baal or Asherah poles, as a couple examples. Today, the tradition of those who choose not to follow God continues with other religions and practices (such as Buddhism and Islam, to name a couple prevalent ones), and even the simple lack of religion or practice (which is what I'm led to believe atheism is).

Thank you for taking the time to read my opinions, but I must close with the reminder that the majority of my faith lies in my relationship with God - experiencing Him every day, more often than I can describe. This is what makes God real to me and why I choose to put faith in Him. I don't practice a religion called Christianity; rather, I experience a personal relationship with Jesus.
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I have condensed a lot of the information for the sake of brevity, as I mentioned in the last email I posted. I am considering making my home site into a compilation of several of my beliefs concerning Christianity, and having my "blog" be just a part of that. This main site would hold topics such as this one - how is Christianity different? There is so much more evidence and information I want to post, and then I could even type up other writings by people other than myself (i.e., I have a friend who has done extensive studies in her own time into the scientific evidence in dealing with Creation vs. Evolution and such topics, and I would love to post some of those writings on the site).

I'm still thinking about it, and I may just end up putting more of this information into future blog entries. We'll see, I'm not sure. And no, I haven't forgotten the Lizzie Mcguire analogy - it's on its way :).

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