Category: Religion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiMygzdy78o&ab_channel=J.John I gave a whole series of lectures at Oxford University and after my final lecture a student comes up to me and he says “I've listened to all your lectures and I've enjoyed them but personally I believe Christianity is a crutch”. I looked at him and I thought “I hope you break your legs.” Then I said to him “If you broke both of your legs, would you appreciate the use of a wheelchair to get around?” He says “Yes, I would.” I said “If you broke one leg, would you appreciate the use of crutches to get around?” He said “Yes, I would.” I said “I'm a broken person and so are you. I've never met a person who isn't broken and I'm so pleased I can…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NxPEDfoigY “The Lord is my Shepherd” David said.  I don't want us just to think about a God way off in the sky somewhere but he wants to have a personal intimate relationship with us. The difference between religion and relationship is: Religion always looks for God somewhere and tries to get to God through works and effort and some certain kind of behavior. “Are you a Christian?” “Well, I go to church.” “That's not what I ask you. That doesn't make you a Christian.” I can sit in my garage for a year and that'll never make me a car. Just because you sit in church, that doesn't make you a Christian. A Christian is not even necessarily someone that does good works. Yes, we as Christians should do…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si7phiFnRnU&t=289s It is a well-known fact that Jews have a lot of dietary laws. Christians, on the other hand, seem to be able to eat nearly anything, despite the fact that the roots of Christianity come directly from Judaism. In this video, we will be seeing why that is and whether Christians actually have dietary laws.  Firstly, let’s ask the question; why can Christians eat pork and other meats deemed unclean by Jews? Well naturally it is due to the key difference between the two religions which is that the Jews are still waiting for the Messiah, while Christians believe the Messiah has already revealed himself. For the Christian, the change in law stems from the life and ministry of Jesus as well as Peter and the apostles. One specific…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1lTM3NLmuc The question students ask me all  the time is: What makes Christianity  different? Because the assumption we kind  of have is Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism,  Islam and Christianity, when you get down  to the core, they're all really the. I want to give you reasons why  Christianity is unique amongst the  religions of the world. One reason is that Christianity is testable. In other words, it's not just a  story about some person on a distant  land, in a different place. It's about a  human being who is God, who lives in a  certain place, in a certain time and did  publicly-testable miracles to back up  his claims to be God. In fact, his ultimate miracle was rising  from the dead and Paul writes in 1st  Corinthians 15: If Jesus…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKhSHExRSa4 There are 7 billion of us on the planet. And most of us believe there’s some kind of higher power. A God, a life force, an organizing principle, something beyond the ordinary that gives our lives meaning and purpose. We just disagree about what “it” is. That’s why we have over 4,000 religions. So how could Christians say that theirs just happens to be the one true religion? After all, Christianity is not the only religion that says “treat others the way you want them to treat you.” Most religions teach this same idea. So maybe, despite small differences, all religions teach the same thing. So they’re all true. Let’s test this idea by comparing two worldviews. Buddhists and Christians agree that we should be kind to one another.…

How does relativism contradict itself? https://youtu.be/52goRAXCYH8 Relativism is the belief that there is no universal truth. That all truth is specific to its culture and its time. And at a basic level, this contradicts itself because it is a universal statement. If I stand up in a room and say, "Nobody in this room can make any laws," you shouldn't listen to me. But if we buy into relativism, what other problems do we have? Well, first, we can make no universal moral statements like "Men and women are equally valuable." Second, we can make no absolute historical statements like "The Holocaust happened." And third, while relativism seems to be a humble approach on religious questions, it actually turns up being quite arrogant. Because if I say Christianity can be…

https://youtu.be/fQpNvSjoTE4 Related articles So what if Christianity is a crutch? Transcript of the above video Andy, is Christianity a psychological crutch?  You know I hear that question, that objection, Alan, from atheists quite frequently and I guess it runs like this: you know religion is merely a comfort blanket, a psychological crutch for people are just too weak to deal with the difficulties of life and and thus Christians believe in God, not because it's true but because it's comforting, it's soothing to believe there's a beneficent being up there in the sky, that there's life after death and so on. It's a very kind of sneering way of dismissing religious belief without even looking at it. The problem of course for atheism is you can take the sychological crutch…

https://youtu.be/et7l3_22u9s You're in a conversation and someone says the crusades prove that Christianity is actually a violent religion. What would you say? Even though the crusades happened over 800 years ago, they're often used as an objection to Christianity. However the people who use the crusades as an argument against Christianity often don't know what actually happened and therefore they don't know how to think about them. So the next time the crusades come up in conversation, here are three things to remember. Number one. The crusades were not an unprovoked invasion. Many people assumed the crusades were perpetuated by a bunch of barbaric Christians bent on either converting or slaughtering peaceful Muslims. But that's not what happened. When Muslims initially conquered Palestine, they were fairly tolerant of Christians and…

https://youtu.be/SCrVTOhaeAM If Christianity is true, why are there so many denominations? When I first became a Christian, I remember driving down the streets of the Los Angeles county and seeing, because I wasn't sure where you can go to church, right? But there were a lot of options. I mean there was all kinds of denominations of church, Christian church in Southern California and I thought that if Christianity is true, wouldn't there just be like one place to go to get it? I mean why are they all these different denominations? I can see why people might think that that variety of differencing and different opinions might actually demonstrate that Christianity isn't true. But even as an atheist I recognize that you know to hold a view and if…

https://youtu.be/1_QydM9EAog I think there's a popular misconception about religion today that says that religion has nothing really to do with objective knowledge - you know the kind of knowledge that we usually gain through science, careful study or investigation. Instead people tend to think of religion is dealing only with things like our feelings and our conscience or our intuitions. If this is true, if religion is exclusively about what goes on inside of us emotionally or spiritually, then blind faith really is the only option because there's nothing objective to evaluate.  Now Christianity as it emerges from the New Testament writings offers a very different picture of religious knowledge, one that in no way relies upon blind faith. One of the most striking examples of the Christian approach is…