People raise many objections to the Christian faith. I have tried to build answers to most of the most common questions into the Interactive Gospel pages. However, these questions don't seem to entirely fit in those pages, so they are being addressed here.
| 1. | The system is not fair |
| 2. | I would like to believe, but I have no faith |
| 3. | Science is the only way |
"Is someone who doesn't believe in God and lives their life never hurting other people better or worse than a Christian who commits a serious crime against another but asks for forgiveness?
"I've had this debate with a christian and apparently the atheist is still damned to hell. And the christian gets heaven.
"It's one of my main problems with god."
I'm not surprised you have problems with this. I have problems with it, and so do all the active, thinking Christians I know. I mentioned it to a friend who has been working as a missionary for nearly 20 years, and his response was: "I don't believe in a God like that, either."
The problem comes when you see Heaven as a reward.
Most people think of Heaven as a reward for being good. If you are nice to others down here, you get to enjoy the nice stuff when you die. Christians often talk as if Heaven is a reward for having this thing called 'faith'. It's not a helpful approach.
Heaven is not a reward: it is a place. More specifically, it is the place where God is. The basic principle is that you get what you want: if you want to be with God, you get to be with God. If not, you also get what you want: to be in a place without God.
The Bible (actually, the New Testament - the second part of the Bible) talks a lot about rewards in the next world for the way you live in this one. If you do what God wants - if you love people, treat them with dignity and respect, listen to them and respond to them in appropriate ways - then you will be rewarded. It's not entirely clear if the reward is anything more than the benefits you get from growing as a human being by acting in this sort of way, but who cares?
On the other hand, if you don't care for other people, you don't get the reward. If you live a bad life, and right at the end you decide you want to be with God after all, then yes: you get to Heaven, as you wish. But you end up there empty-handed - you had a life, and you wasted it.
It's not about whether you 'believe in God'. Belief isn't something you have or don't have: it is always something you have a bit of, about something in particular. You don't believe in that sort of God. Good - neither do I.
I'm saying it is about wanting to be with God. The Bible talks about this in various ways. It talks about being part of God's family, being accepted, being set free, being made a whole person, and so on. They are all pictures, images, trying to put into words something that cannot be put into words. They are all about a relationship with God, and you cannot fully capture what any relationship means to you, or what it involves.
The basic question is: do you want to be with Him, do you want to be on His side? If you are not certain that He exists (and, to be quite honest, that is where most 'believers' are much of the time, if they are honest!) - then, IF He exists, would you want to be with Him?
And this raises what, for many of us, is the 'real' question: if God exists, what is He/She/It like? For Christians, the basic points are: (1) God is Love, and God is Holy (He really wants the very best for you, and He really hates injustice, intolerance, and all that sort of thing); and (2) if you want to see what God is like, go look at Jesus.
So - to answer your question. The person who loves and helps other people all his life is a better person than one who is selfish and hurts other people all the time. But both of them get what they want: to be with God, or to be without Him.
On a personal note: I am very sceptical of the whole 'deathbed conversion' thing. I think it is very unlikely that someone who has lived a life constantly fighting God, rejecting His principles and hurting other people - it is very unlikely that such a person will suddenly decide that they want to be with this Holy God for all eternity. And I don't believe that saying the words 'I believe' on your deathbed will make an iota of difference to either your destination or your reward.
There are a lot of strange ideas about faith and belief, especially when you look at religious or spiritual issues.
People sometimes say to me things like, "I wish I had your faith!" or "I have tried to believe, but I can't stop doubting." Whatever they mean by these words, it is not what I mean when I talk about faith in Jesus.
Firstly, doubts are okay. Any time you are aware of exercising faith, you will probably be aware of your doubts, too. It is the doubts that make it faith and not knowledge, although the line beween the two is a very blurred one.
Secondly, everybody has faith. When you get on the bus or train in the morning, you have faith that the driver will take you where you expect to go; when you get married, you have faith that together with your partner you will be able to build a life you want; you have faith when you go to work that your boss will pay you at the end of the month; you have faith when you sow seeds that they will blossom in the Spring. Every part of your life requires faith.
Thirdly, everybody has a religious faith. However you live, you are demonstrating some kind of religious faith. Not going to church and not praying is just as much an exercise of faith as going and praying. Perhaps more so! We have an idea what proof of the existence of God might look like, but there is nothing you could possibly point to as proof of the non-existence of God. This has nothing to do with the nature of God: it works exactly the same way if you talk about the existence or non-existence of my brother or sister.
Finally, what actually matters is the deeper question: what is it you may have faith in? The question is not, do you believe in God, but what kind of God do you believe might exist?
There is a wonderful passage in Catch 22 where Yossarian is debating the non-existence of God with (I think) the Major's wife. She gets very upset. He says, but you don't believe in God, either! She replies that the God she doesn't believe in is good and just and loving, while the God he doesn't believe in is horrible and cruel. Of course, the question for the reader is: which position makes more sense? Yossarian's. Whether or not there is a God corresponding to what they each don't believe in - that is quite a different matter.
There is no one thing called 'God' that you either have total faith in or not. There are many different and conflicting ideas about God, and we each have differing levels of belief in each of them - and those levels of belief change with our feelings and as we grow in knowledge and experience.
The God I believe in today is significantly different from the God I believed in when I was fourteen years old. This is not to suggest that God has changed, but to admit that I have.
To those who say they don't believe in God, I ask you to consider the nature of the God you don't believe in. You may well discover that most Christians don't believe in such a God, either!
"Science is the only tool which offers any hope of answering questions, large and puzzling or otherwwise..." (New Scientist, 28 October 2006, page 26)
Science is great for asking some questions. If you want to know how to build a tower without it falling down, or where a cannonball will land, then science is the way to go.
On the other hand, if you have questions about the meaning of life, what values you should live by, or whether your parter loves you, science has very little to offer you. Science cannot give you the answers you look for, and the answers you find cannot be proven. You can ask questions, examine the evidence all you like, but sooner or later you just have to act in faith.
Some people do a strange trick. They define a set of questions as the 'real' questions, or the 'only questions worth asking' or something similar. And then they show that only science can answer those questions. Great.
But in the real world, people want to know what to do with their life, whether to make lots of money or spend their time trying to help the less fortunate. Should I take this job? Should we get married? Should I have an abortion? It seems to me that these are the real questions, the big questions in most peoples lives, and science has absolutely nothing to say about any of them.
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