The Best Way to Bolster Your Christian Faith is to Read Skeptical Books!

I have a friend named Bill who was a member of a church where I preached and who recently read my books. Afterward he wrote me this: "The deeper I get into the 'meat' of your material, the more solidly grounded I get in my faith in God and His Son, Jesus Christ." Now I've heard that before. So maybe I should just accept what they're saying. Hey, why not? Surely they wouldn't be liars for Jesus, right? So take what they say as recommendations for my books. If you want to become more grounded in your faith then you need to read more of these types of books! If my books do this for some Christians then others should take the Debunking Christianity Challenge.

Or, they're fooling themselves. Fooling themselves? Could it be? Yep. This is exactly what social studies predict.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Okay, the title to this post should be "One of the best ways to..."

It's just that I like to keep my post titles to one line if possible.

shane said...

On the contrary to Bill, the more times I delve into the bible and research apologetics, the more I feel affirmed that christianity is not true!....and the stronger my agnosticism gets.

Mike D said...

Interesting, because reading C.S. Lewis' "The Case For Christianity" was one of the first things to really push me away from my faith. That and the Bible. Seriously, read the book of Hebrews, which explains the system of covenant. Then ask "yeah, but... why?" and see if anyone can give you a straight answer.

Chuck said...

Why did Bill's faith get strengthened? Did he give a reason? Sounds like a standard christian assertion where personal testimony is over-valued as evidence. "I read those atheistic books and guess what, I felt the Jesus love pore through me even stronger than before. Ya see, I got me the holy ghost."

Anonymous said...

Yeah Chuck, Bill wrote this in a letter and that's all he said about it. No rebuttal, no attempt to deal with the arguments, just an assertion.

If that's all it takes to believe then [Fill in the punch line].

Gandolf said...

"The deeper I get into the 'meat' of your material, the more solidly grounded I get in my faith in God and His Son, Jesus Christ."

Sound like those books will be selling like hot-cakes soon then John.For promotion of solidly gounded faith for people, they will soon be selling them books in church.

Hallelujah .... its truly a miracle

The lord moves in such mysterious ways John, its great news that your friend Bill is now recomending all christians do read these books for gaining their solidly grounded faiths.

K said...

There's a book called Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) by psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson that explains exactly why this happens. When presented with conflicting information to an formed belief it causes people to dig their heels in. I remember hearing about a recent psychology paper that showed similar, people were much more likely to reject science if science demonstrated that a belief they held was wrong.

It's not just faith you're up against, it's human psychology.