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Real Answers™
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Copyright: © 2006 Tom Flannery
700 words

LETTER TO AN ATHEIST

By: Tom Flannery

To promote "Letter to a Christian Nation," the new book by avowed atheist Sam Harris, Random House compiled a litany of quotes presented as words of wisdom from the author and posted them on its website — along with some statistics that are clearly meant to alarm us. 

but is it alarming that 83% of Americans believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead?  Well, it is if you believe that the Bible must be accepted purely on faith, without the benefit of corroborating evidence or ever being subjected to rigorous scrutiny of any kind.  Yet the Bible itself commands us to test everything (I Thess. 5:21). 

The truth is that there's a great deal of historical evidence which supports Christ's bodily resurrection from the grave.  For instance, we have the first-hand testimonies of the disciples of Christ, who witnessed the events surrounding His death and burial then had personal encounters with the Risen Christ in the days that followed.  As the apostle Peter explained:  "For we did not follow cunningly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of His majesty" (II Pet. 1:16). 

In all, more than 500 people saw the Risen Christ over a period of several weeks.  As Christian apologist Josh McDowell writes in his book "Evidence That Demands a Verdict," if you brought all of those witnesses into a courtroom and allowed them each just six minutes to give their accounts, you would have an astounding 50 hours of first-hand, eyewitness testimony in support of the Resurrection. 

This group included former skeptics like Jesus' brother James, who was converted after seeing the Risen Christ and became leader of the church in Jerusalem.  According to the historian Josephus, he was stoned to death in A.D. 62.  Before being martyred for his testimony, though, he wrote the Book of James in which he described himself as "a bondservant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ." 

Not only were their lives dramatically transformed after seeing, touching and eating with the Risen Christ — when they went from hiding in fear before the Resurrection to openly and boldly proclaiming the gospel after it — but the majority of these witnesses also sealed their testimonies with their own blood by dying willingly as martyrs rather than renouncing the truth of the Risen Christ. 

Combine this with all of the other historical evidence for the Resurrection — the facts surrounding the empty tomb, the inability of the authorities to produce Christ's corpse after news of His appearances began spreading, the conversion of Saul of Tarsus (enemy of the church) to the apostle Paul after his own encounter with the Risen Christ, etc. — and you begin to see that it takes more faith not to believe in the Resurrection than to follow the data where they lead and affirm this exhaustively-attested historical event. 

Yet Harris relates with palpable dread:  "A person who believes that Elvis is still alive is very unlikely to get promoted to a position of great power and responsibility in our society...But people who believe equally irrational things about God and the Bible are now running our country.  This is genuinely terrifying." 

Nonsense.  There is not a scintilla of evidence to suggest Elvis is alive;   in fact, all the evidence we have confirms that The King has indeed "left the building" (what the Bible calls our earthly tent, or body).  So holding to an "Elvis lives" philosophy is incontestably irrational, whereas faith in Christ's resurrection is rooted in solid historical data.  For this reason, it's deceptive and intellectually dishonest to compare the two beliefs. 

Another alarming statistic, according to Harris, is that 49% of Americans believe the Bible to be God's Word. 

Actually, this isn't very surprising at all when you consider the abundance of evidence for the Resurrection, the multitude of specific Bible prophecies that were provably fulfilled hundreds and even thousands of years after they were recorded, and many other infallible proofs for Scripture. 

So Harris shouldn't be so chagrined by the fact that a stunning 87% of Americans say they never doubt the existence of God. 

There's simply no reason for them to do so.

"Real Answers™" furnished courtesy of The Amy Foundation Internet Syndicate. To contact the author or The Amy Foundation, write or E-mail to: P. O. Box 16091, Lansing, MI 48901-6091; amyfoundtn@aol.com

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