Why Am I A Christian?

Why am I a Christian?

"So why are you a Christian? What right do you have to believe that Christianity is the only truth? Isn't that a little ignorant?"

I have had this question asked to me many times and at first, I didn't know how to answer it. I knew I had a relationship with Christ, but when confronted by someone seeking intellectual philosophical reasoning for your faith, answering them with, "CoAsE jEsUs LoVEsS Me!!" doesn't satisfy. So, I went to older people in my life, mature Christians, and asked, "How do we know what we believe?"

Sadly, many older Christian have fallen for a lie that has been implanted into Christianity, the lie being, "Don't question God, just have faith!" Yeah...no, that's a lie. Faith isn't blindly believing something without any proof, faith is holding onto what you know to be true when your feelings tell you it isn't. For instants, if you ever been scared of the dentist, you might have felt, when sitting in that scarry dentist chair with vibrating drills in your mouth, that the dentist was going to hurt you. But you logically know that the dentist is there to help you. So, you have to use your logical brain to remind yourself that though you feel scared the dentist might hurt you, you know the dentist is helping you.

That's faith, holding on to what you know as truth even when you're feeling say otherwise. But when I asked, "How do we know what we believe?" it wasn't me knowing truth but doubting due to my personal feelings, it was me asking how do I know what truth is.

So, how do we know what truth is?

In our culture, truth is personal and relative. You will hear this a lot, "Well, that's your truth.". We have been trained to think moral truth is subjective, that everyone has different personal truths. But how could there be several truths, something that is inherently objective cannot be subjective among people. I mean, if something as big as the objective truth of humanities' purpose and identity be subjective, relative to each person, I shutter to think what kind of society will we make. And that's the question to religion, people go to religion (Or other secular groups) to find identity and purpose.

We all have a deep internal need to know we are doing good, we want to know if we are a good person, if we are living for the right things, if someone truly loves us. It's like its built into us to seek validation and approval from some outside force. We can only muster up a certain amount of self-confident, and when we run low or do something we feel guilty for we look to others for answers.

Where we find that, depending on our personality/experiences gravitating us towards certain groups, we then find our purpose and identity.

It seems to me that people cannot live a healthy happy life until they find something to give them a purpose and identity.

Where this moral justification is found vary through many different groups, and as we conform to the beliefs of the groups and connect to the people who have shared experiences with us, we create a worldview based on that group.

Many different world views will you encounter,

"Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."-Dr. Seuss

"Unlike a drop of water which loses its identity when it joins the ocean, man does not lose his being in the society in which he lives. Man's life is independent. He is born not for the development of the society alone, but for the development of his self."-B. R. Ambedkar

This is the biggest beliefs of our secular culture currently (2020), in the independence and self-expression era. This world view is created in part to push back to earlier world views of ancient Shame and Honor cultures. Shame and Honor cultures were/are a culture were your identity and purpose come from your duties and responsibilities.