Time to give the lie to a culture in denial?

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | May 29, 2018

I’ve been saying it for years. The claim that all religions are the same, and all equally unverifiable, is the height of folly. Rather, we must distinguish between religions based on human claims and those based on the claims of God Himself—those which command assent through an historically verifiable Revelation attended by signs and wonders which can only be performed by God.

When we take a look at all the religions that have ever existed we find immediately not only that most display no evidence of Divine revelation but that only two of them even claim to be revealed by God in any sort of verifiable way.

It is long past time to stop being stupid about religion. Reason itself succinctly demonstrates that Judaism and Christianity are fundamentally different from all rival claimants when it comes to spiritual credibility. That is why the first reading for Trinity Sunday struck me with such force this week. Here we heard Moses make exactly this case to a community that badly needed to grasp the difference between Divinely revealed truth and human invention (or demonic deception):

For ask now of the days that are past, which were before you, since the day that God created man upon the earth, and ask from one end of heaven to the other, whether such a great thing as this has ever happened or was ever heard of. Did any people ever hear the voice of a god speaking out of the midst of the fire, as you have heard, and still live? Or has any god ever attempted to go and take a nation for himself from the midst of another nation, by trials, by signs, by wonders, and by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and by great terrors, according to all that the LORD your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes? [Dt 4:32-34]

And then Moses stated the obvious conclusion:

[K]now therefore this day, and lay it to your heart, that the LORD is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other. Therefore you shall keep his statutes and his commandments, which I command you this day, that it may go well with you, and with your children after you, and that you may prolong your days in the land which the LORD your God gives you for ever. [Dt 4:39-40]

This lesson is both fulfilled and magnificently amplified in the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, which was witnessed by thousands who were willing to stake their lives on what they saw. Therefore, we must stop thinking about religion like people who refuse to see what is real because they are preoccupied with their own pride and sensuality, their own grubby goals and paltry powers, their own myths and their own excuses.

We must stop thinking like people who are so confused by endless human arguments that they cannot see past their own noses. For God has already cut through all that the chattering classes have to offer. He has manifested Himself, and He has done so without any possible mistake—for all those who are willing to see.

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Next in series: Dangerous! Both religious exclusion and religious common cause