In Defense of Faith: A response to Sam Harris' "Letters to a Christian"

“The laws of nature are written by the hand of God in the language of mathematics.” – Galileo Galilei

"I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery, but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing." ~ Allan Sandage, one of the most influential astronomers of the 20th century.

2001: a space odyssey

One-time or recurring donations can be made at Ko-Fi

You can listen to me read this essay here:

A couple of days ago I read Sam Harris’s Letters to a Christian, his response to a Christian who wrote him a letter about faith and Christianity. I have not read the letter that caused Sam Harris to respond, but I can only conclude, based on the response, that both have a wrong idea about faith and Christianity. This happens so often that I found myself sitting down and writing a response to Harris’s response.

I warn the reader, it’s a long one. I’ve been on grandma duty this past week, so it’s been challenging to find the time to write. Now that it’s finished, I’ve realized that it might well be my most important essay to date. Here goes…

What it means to be a Christian.

One of the first points Harris makes is that he agrees “that there really is a problem with religious fundamentalism. I’m glad to know, for instance,” he says, “that you are just as worried about Islamic extremism as I am. On your account, we simply disagree about faith itself and about the special validity of Christianity—or rather, Catholicism, which is the form you recommend.”

Other than the obvious fact that most of us agree on, that there is a problem with religious fundamentalism (and I will get into that later), Harris’s idea of what it means to be a Christian is all wrong. In fact, at the risk of offending many people, including probably the letter writer, although Catholicism is considered a “form of Christianity”, as is Protestantism, Mormonism and a host of other isms, they are not Christianity. They are religions that grew out of Christianity. Christianity has strayed so far from its original meaning, that I now prefer to call myself simply a follower of Jesus. At least it is what I strive to be.

Becoming a Christian should have absolutely nothing to do with falling “under the influence of Jordan Peterson & Friends” as Harris says the letter writer has done, nor any other human being, because we are all fallible, me, you, everyone.

Rather, becoming a Christian should have everything to do with falling under the influence of Jesus Christ, and him alone.

In Luke 9:23, Jesus said: "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me."

This is the essence of Christianity. It’s very simple and very hard, and Jesus makes it very clear. But we have developed all sorts of reasons why this does not apply to us, or it was for back then and not now. Because, if this is what it means to be a Christian, who really does this—who would even want to do it?

I grew up under unusual circumstances, some of which I have written about in my essays. My father was Christian author Dave Hunt. We did not belong to a church, although we attended the Plymouth Brethren until my father was excommunicated when I was around nine years old. I was taught that God does not favor Catholicism above Protestantism, or vice versa, he does not reside in a building and is not impressed with fancy rituals. My father and I had many disagreements but on these points we always agreed. My mother was Mennonite. She could trace our family back to the 1700s and spoke often of the persecution our ancestors suffered for their faith. So, I had a very clear idea of what it meant to follow Jesus, even to the cross.

Jesus’s teachings weren’t popular with the religious leaders, nor the intellectuals, nor the wealthy of his time. He lived among the poor and despised. He taught love and self-sacrifice, not just with words but by his own example. His purpose in coming to earth, God as man, was to die; to sacrifice himself for our sins. And then, to overcome death and to rise again. You can laugh at that if you want. You can think it’s a fairytale concocted for fools. But I am not concerned with that right now. I am simply saying what Christianity actually means.

To be a Christian, one must believe there is more to life than this physical body. The atheist, on the other hand, must discount the spirit because it is something he cannot see or understand. He cannot eat it or wear it or put it in a box.

But whether you are an atheist or a theist, life is still a mystery, and we all live by faith, even if we don’t want to admit it. You cannot even walk out your front door in the morning without having faith that you will get back again at the end of the day, after you’ve navigated all sorts of dangers where you had to trust that other people wouldn’t do things like run red lights. If we didn’t have faith, we’d be frozen in terror, incapable of accomplishing anything.

Atheism is no less faith-based than Catholicism or Islamism or Hinduism.

No matter how many theories science has developed, we still don’t know how we got here and what happens after we die. We tinker with life, but we don’t know what life is. For the first time in history, science thinks it has a real chance at beating death. Elites spend billions on employing scientists to discover what ignites life at conception and what extinguishes it at death—and how to control it. The Replicants of Blade Runner, the Dracula of Bram Stoker and the Frankenstein of Mary Shelley seem like real possibilities and those who play with fire claim they are being very careful, but how would they even know? They have told themselves so many stories to justify their actions that they don’t know where the truth ends, and the lies begin.

Science is the new religion. Where once the Church had to be obeyed unquestioningly, now it is The Science.

That is, only The Science anointed by the State. If you dissent, even if you are highly regarded in your field, you become a heretic. The label “conspiracy theorist” condemns you as much as a Scarlet Letter condemns a whore. Maybe you aren’t actually branded or burned at the stake—at least not yet—but you are as good as dead in the scientific community.

Sir Fred Hoyle, an English astronomer who formulated the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis and one of the authors of the B FH paper (a landmark scientific paper on the origin of the chemical elements) had this to say about the problem with science:

“Science today is locked into paradigms. Every avenue is blocked by beliefs that are wrong, and if you try to get anything published by a journal today, you will run against a paradigm and the editors will turn it down.”

Or, as physicist and mathematician Prof. Frank J. Tipler pointed out, “Whether the ice caps melt, or expand - whatever happens - the anthropogenic global warming theorists claim it confirms their theory. A perfect example of a pseudo-science like astrology.”

The most basic quandary that everyone, not just scientists, wants to answer, is how did we get here. How did something come from nothing.

I am not a scientist, nor do I have any other impressive degrees, but it would seem the only solution is that something was always here, something infinite. But since we are finite beings, we will never comprehend infinity. This is a hard pill to swallow—that there are things we can never understand and that we must, therefore, accept them by faith. And so, scientists make up stories to explain what we don’t understand, no different from what they accuse religious people of doing.

The scientific method is to come up with a theory and then set about proving it.

If you are lucky, your theory will be invested in by powerful people and then you can be pretty sure it will be proved as true. Let’s take the Big Bang theory of how everything came out of nothing. Britannica describes the Big Bang like this:

The big-bang model is a widely held theory of the evolution of the universe.

The big-bang model is based on two assumptions. (I won’t get into those two assumptions but you are welcome to read about them at the above link)

Now that we have these two assumptions… it is possible to calculate the history of the cosmos after a certain epoch called the Planck time.

However, scientists have yet to determine what prevailed before Planck time.

I won’t get into what Planck time means. Suffice it to say, here’s how scientists talk about what happened before the Big Bang, as explained in this article from The Conversation:

By now, we are well into the realm of speculative physics, as we can’t produce enough energy in our experiments to probe the sort of processes that were going on at the time. But a plausible hypothesis is that the physical world was made up of a soup of short-lived elementary particles…”

…and so, it goes on.

How is this to be taken more seriously than, say, the story of the Garden of Eden. The Bible is deemed ridiculous because it addresses life and death and sin and the consequences thereof from a spiritual perspective that includes a Creator. Ah, spiritual, you say? That’s not scientific at all. Any intelligent person knows there is no spirit and there is no God. The Bible is a stupid book for delusional people.

We are given the impression that scientists don’t believe in God. However, about two-thirds of scientists do believe in God, or some sort of rational being that designed our universe.

It is interesting that Sam Harris talks about the many scientific achievements of Sir Isaac Newton without acknowledging that he believed in God. Newton said that the man who “thinks half-heartedly will not believe in God; but he who really thinks has to believe in God."

Harris mocks the Bible, yet Newton said, "I have a fundamental belief in the Bible as the Word of God, written by those who were inspired. I study the Bible daily."

Newton was also humble enough to admit that despite his great intellect, "As a blind man has no idea of colors, so have we no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things."

Harris mocks faith itself, saying that the only kind of faith that makes any sense is “faith in oneself” as some sort of “positive thinking”. This makes little sense if we are merely products of a primordial soup. If we are just blobs that somehow grew big brains, nothing that we think is of any consequence at all. Whether we live or die or are kind or cruel, whether we blow our planet up or pollute it into extinction, it’s all one and the same. There is no right or wrong, no purpose, no meaning.

Harris seems to think that because the Bible says, “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen”, it’s all just “wishful thinking” and is therefore antithetical to reason. However, there is no more wishful thinking than what scientists do. Especially when it comes to the most fundamental question of how we got here, and their convenient theory that “something came from nothing”.

In his essay On the Origin of Everything, philosopher David Albert does a blistering take-down of Lawrence M. Krauss’s assertion that “the laws of quantum mechanics have in them the makings of a thoroughly scientific and adamantly secular explanation of why there is something rather than nothing”.

Albert uses Krauss’s own words to show how absurd this type of thinking is:

Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from? Krauss is more or less upfront, as it turns out, about not having a clue about that. He acknowledges (albeit in a parenthesis, and just a few pages before the end of the book) that every­thing he has been talking about simply takes the basic principles of quantum mechanics for granted. “I have no idea if this notion can be usefully dispensed with,” he writes, “or at least I don’t know of any productive work in this regard.” And what if he did know of some productive work in that regard? What if he were in a position to announce, for instance, that the truth of the quantum-mechanical laws can be traced back to the fact that the world has some other, deeper property X? Wouldn’t we still be in a position to ask why X rather than Y? And is there a last such question? Is there some point at which the possibility of asking any further such questions somehow definitively comes to an end? How would that work? What would that be like?

In the Afterward, famed atheist Richard Dawkins praises Krauss’s book, claiming that “the problem of ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages.”

It only shrivels up if you are so close-minded in your arrogant intellectualism that you refuse to ask the most fundamental questions raised by David Albert. To ask the questions would be to admit that you don’t really know the answers and you are relying on faith in some theory you have devised rather than facts that you know to be true.

It requires far more faith to think that this world came into existence by chance than to believe it was made by design.

Sir Fred Hoyle had this to say about the beginnings of life:

“The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is 1 to a number with 40,000 noughts after it (1040,000) .... It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.”

“Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make it absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favorable properties of physics, on which life depends, are in every respect deliberate.... It is, therefore, almost inevitable that our own measure of intelligence must reflect higher intelligence -even to the limit of God.”

Why is the Bible relegated to derision and falsehood by the intelligentsia while these scientific stories of everything coming out of nothing, all dressed up in impressive language so that ordinary folks aren’t able to understand it, embraced as truth. The Bible is used as a history book in Jewish and Christian schools. Mohammad stole from Judaism and Christianity to create Islam. I won’t discuss further the accuracy of the Bible, this essay is already long enough, but I encourage readers to watch the video I have included of one my father’s talks to find out more.

Harris makes fun of the 10 Commandments as “strange”.

But they are only strange if you do not accept the premise that through rebellion against God, Adam and Eve were cut off from their Creator, expelled from the Garden of Eden, and as a result, all their offspring were condemned to that same separation. Yes, you could say it is just a story, but if you look at the history of mankind, you see that this story explains our obsession with becoming gods ourselves and all the problems it has caused as a result.

We are all born into sin, and as such, before Jesus’s death, we were condemned under God’s law. There could be no mercy from a perfect God for his fallen creation who had chosen to reject him. Now, you don’t have to believe there was really a Garden of Eden, but I’m just explaining the spiritual aspects of our existence and that we all have a profound yearning for a relationship with our Creator, while at the same time, a desire to rebel against him. This is undeniable. This separation from God explains the violence in the Old Testament. Life is cruel. Death is ever present. Sin is ugly.

Before Jesus death and resurrection, there was no mercy, no forgiveness of sin. There was only judgment. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

God gave the Israelites the written law in the form of the 10 Commandments, but all this did was condemn them more because they could never live up to it. Even as Moses was up the mountain receiving the commandments, the people got tired of waiting and made a golden calf to worship.

This is exactly what the second commandment is talking about. It isn’t talking about art, as Sam Harris wrongly assumes. It is talking about images made out of living things, like plants and animals, and worshiped as gods. There is nothing strange about God commanding his people to have no other gods before him. There is nothing strange about God stating that he is a jealous God. Or that his people should not bow down to images or carvings of fake gods. And I’m sorry to offend anyone, but in Catholicism, for example, they bow to images, they pray to icons, to saints, the Virgin Mary, but this is completely against the Bible.

When Jesus died on the cross, the veil to the Temple was torn asunder. The way was made clear for anyone to come into the inner sanctuary, to be forgiven, to be free from the Law and to commune with God once again. Jesus fulfilled the Law and freed us from it.

As the Apostle Paul says, “But now we have been released from the law because we have died to that in which we were held so that we might serve in newness of the spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter.” (Romans 7:6).

The first verse that every child learns in Sunday school and indeed perhaps the most important verse in the Bible is this:

“For God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son that whosoever believes in him shall be saved.”

This is the essence of faith. I put my trust in my Savior. I put my trust in Jesus. In this act of submission to my creator, I am set free from the chains of sin that bind me.

But instead of accepting this salvation, instead of falling at the feet of Jesus after his death and resurrection, we once again turned away, just as we did in the Garden of Eden. We were determined that we could be our own gods. That we knew better. In fact, that we could create our own beings (now in the shape of AI), that we could find our own way to eternal life. That we could dethrone God and sit there ourselves.

The same old obsessions. The same old lie of Satan that we so easily succumb to. Satan rebelled against God, and he was cast out of heaven. He was given this world as his kingdom for a time. Satan tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden, telling them that they could be as God, that they surely would not die. This is the lie that Satan repeats over and over, and we see it everywhere around us. It is the lie he tempted Jesus with, in the desert before Jesus’ death. The last of three temptations was that if Jesus bowed down and worshiped him, he would give Jesus all the power over the earth. Jesus’ response was, Get thee behind me Satan!

We see this same temptation in the promise of transhumanism/posthumanism, in the promise of a new creation arising from the melding of man and machine.

The tech gods, more than any others, have fallen for this lie and seek to impose it on the masses in the same way the church imposes religion, in the same way science imposes theories. They want to rule as gods who live forever, and they believe they have the right to do so. Don’t worry, they will be able to control the monsters they create in their image.

Religious leaders fall prey to the same temptations, not satisfied with the simplicity of the Gospel. Religious leaders seek to control people through rules, guilt and fear, rather than accepting that the love of Jesus is sufficient. Scientists use big words and complex ideas to intimidate people and make them feel inferior. Just as ordinary people are told they can’t understand the Gospel, they need priests to interpret it for them, scientists build scientific theories that are impossible for any ordinary bloke to understand. In order to understand the secrets of science, you must attend a prestigious and very expensive university and have the approval of others who were invited into this exclusive club before you came along, and 99.9% of the population will never be able to do any of that.

What has science achieved? Every door it opens, leads to ten more doors. The theories of today are tossed in the dustbin tomorrow and replaced by new theories, thought up by some new upstart.

What is our greatest achievement; the result of our determination to go our own way without our creator to guide us? It is that we can obliterate ourselves along with every living thing on the planet.

And what is our answer to this problem that we have created thanks to “progress”? According to famed astrophysicist, Stephen Hawking, if humanity is to survive long-term, it must find a way to get off planet Earth -- and fast. Mostly because of what we are doing to destroy it and ourselves.

He is in agreement with Elon Musk and others that: “If the human species, or indeed any part of the biosphere, is to continue to survive, it must eventually leave the Earth and colonize space. For the simple fact of the matter is, the planet Earth is doomed... The Earth should be regarded as the womb of life-but one cannot remain in the womb forever.”

So, billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos dream of colonizing Mars or space stations throughout the galaxy. They want to get off this planet before the Apocalypse. It isn’t just the Bible that talks about the Apocalypse. It’s pretty obvious we are heading that way as a species. Mind you, not an Apocalypse unleashed upon us by God, but by our own doing, although we would love to blame God for it. When it is convenient, we resurrect God as a scapegoat for our own vices.

Like the child whose parents never taught him to clean up his own room and simply moves on to another room in the house to cause more destruction, we somehow think we have every right to leave behind the mess we have made on earth and move to another planet, continuing to spread our own special brand of violence and decay while celebrating it all as further progress.

The very fact that our greatest obsession since the beginning of recorded time is to become gods, to somehow overcome death and live forever, is proof in itself that there is a God that created us, and we are trying to take his place. And yet, in our hearts we yearn for our Creator. We feel empty inside without him, and we do all we can to fill that void with distractions.

William Shatner is perhaps the most famous astronaut to fly to space. Star Trek became real for him when he shot off into the outer limits on Jeff Bezos’s spaceship. Shatner describes a terrifying realization when he looked back at earth from space.

"It was the death that I saw in space and the lifeforce that I saw coming from the planet — the blue, the beige and the white," he said. "And I realized one was death and the other was life."

"I wept for the Earth because I realized it's dying. I dedicated my book, Boldly Go, to my great-grandchild, who's three now — coming three — and in the dedication, say it's them, those youngsters, who are going to reap what we have sown in terms of the destruction of the Earth."

All around us is death and here we are, on this one beautiful planet that shines with life. There must be a reason why.

Sir Isaac Newton said:

“Atheism is so senseless. When I look at the solar system, I see the earth at the right distance from the sun to receive the proper amounts of heat and light. This did not happen by chance.”

Even Charles Darwin, the father of the theory of evolution, said, “The impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God.”

“The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator. Science brings men nearer to God,” said Louis Pasteur.

Faith in God is not determined by any manmade religion. To show why, we can look briefly at the three largest religions, Catholicism, Islam, and Hinduism.

And because I cannot say it better myself, I will quote my dad from this talk that he gave in South Africa, I am not sure exactly when, but it had to be at least twenty years ago. It is also the talk that I mentioned above that discusses the validity of the Bible. I encourage everyone to watch it.

DAVE HUNT:

Let's take the Catholic Church. First of all, you've got about 1.5 billion Roman Catholics, and I don't want to offend any Catholics if we have any here tonight. The pope claims to be the Vicar of Christ, or [supreme headship of the Church, taking Christ’s place on earth]. Well then, let's compare him with Christ.

You know, Jesus Christ had one robe, a homespun robe. He slept in it on the ground in the garden the night before he was crucified because he didn't have a house. He hung naked on the cross and the soldiers gambled for his robe.

The pope in contrast wears the finest silk robes and he's got hundreds of them embroidered with gold. He lives in a palace of 1100 rooms. He's waited on by servants. He has another summer palace of 1100 rooms.

Somehow it just doesn't compute. How can he represent Christ?

Furthermore, as he travels around the world, he is so popular, the world leaders love him. Every country he goes to, he's greeted by the president or the prime minister or the queen or whoever it is; huge crowds come out.

Jesus was hated. He was persecuted in fact. Jesus said to his disciples, “If you were of the world, the world would love its own, but because you're not of the world but I've chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.”

One of the problems we have today is we're trying to make Christianity popular. Christians are so concerned to get the world to accept the gospel that they manufacture a gospel acceptable to the world and it's not going to work. It's not going to save anybody.

I won't go into the details, but I could name you popes who were the sons of “celibate” popes, popes that had mistresses. One pope that had a mother and a daughter for his mistresses. I mean, they were some of the worst creatures that ever walked this earth. They killed people, they fought one another, they were voted in by mobs, some of them were put in power by emperors, more than one pope died in a bed at the hands of a husband who found him in bed with his wife, I can hardly call that apostolic succession. It doesn't make sense. I don't know how you can trace this back to Peter. Peter was crucified, refusing to deny his faith.

Catholicism has many ways to control its followers. The church promises that if you wear a scapular, you won’t go to hell.

“Whosoever dies in this garment shall not suffer eternal fire.” - promise of Our Lady to St. Simon Stock on July 16, 1251

What kind of a God lets you out of eternal fire because you wear a scapular? That's like a fetish, that's like hocus pocus, that's like magic. I mean, it doesn't make sense.

There’s so much that doesn’t make sense about religions. All the requirements to pray a certain way, at a certain time of day, to wear certain clothes, to ask forgiveness of a representative, not Jesus, all these things that are meant to bind a person to rules and regulations rather than the freedom of communing directly with our Father.

I understand the comfort that tradition gives and it’s not a bad thing to teach children because they learn discipline and focus. But it shouldn’t be treated as anything more than that. It certainly isn’t some assurance of salvation.

If you ask someone, why do you believe and the answer is, well I belong to the largest church or I belong to the oldest church, or the pastor has such a wonderful way about him and I really like the singing, the music, that's not a very good base for launching into eternity. You better have a more solid reason than that for what you believe.

We could go on to Hinduism. And again, I'm just being very brief, and I don't want to offend any Hindus, but you know, Hinduism teaches karma and reincarnation, and I could just tell you three quick things about reincarnation.

It's amoral. Well, why do I say it's amoral? Because if I'm a husband who beats his wife in this life, karma, the law of cause and effect, says I must be reincarnated as a woman in my next life who is beaten by her husband. The perpetrator of every crime according to the law of karma must become the victim of the same crime. But the husband who beats me as a wife in the next life, he's got to come back in another life as a woman beaten by her husband. The perpetrator of every crime must become the victim of the same crime. This is the law of cause and effect but then the person who did that, he must become the victim and on and on it goes. Karma and reincarnation do not solve the problem of evil, they perpetuate it. It is amoral as there is no solution for evil in karma and reincarnation.

I say it's senseless. Can you remember your prior lives? Well, if you think you've lived them, and you can't remember them, I mean maybe you're making the same mistakes all over again. What's the point of coming back if you didn't learn anything the last time. Why is this going on and on and on. Is the world getting better? I don't think the world is getting better. Apparently, nobody's learning their lessons. It doesn't make sense. It is senseless.

Then, it's hopeless. You know, the fact that you're sitting where you are sitting and that I happen to be up here talking is a result of the karma we build up in a prior life because the karma of your prior life creates the karma of your next life, but that life was the result of karma in a prior life and a prior life and a prior life…

You can't escape and this is why Gandhi said reincarnation is a burden too great to bear and … with each life, we build up more karma that requires we live another life and another life and another life and another life and that's why they call it the wheel of reincarnation. It's hopeless. You're never going to reach the end. You'll never get there.

What about Islam. It doesn't make sense either. You know, Islam pretends to be peaceful today and I know you've got a lot of Muslims, and again I don't want to offend anyone, but it is a fact of history, and you cannot escape it that Islam was spread by the sword, and they almost took Europe, and they are still trying to do it today. Everywhere they went, they took the head off of the infidel. Either the infidel converts to Islam, or he is killed. ISIS sent us videos and they are still doing it today. That's coercion. That's not love, that's not truth, you don't bring people to truth at the point of a sword, you terrify them.

If you go to Saudi Arabia today, you cannot be a citizen of Saudi Arabia unless you are a Muslim. You know, I sometimes tell people in the United States, how'd you like it if in the United States you couldn't be a citizen unless you were a Southern Baptist. I mean, this is horrific. And furthermore, in Saudi Arabia today it is officially the law of the country that for a Muslim to convert to any other religion it is the death penalty. What kind of a religion is this. The Quran, I'm quoting it verbatim, says “make no friendship with a Christian or a Jew. Pursue the infidels wherever you find them and kill them.” That's the Quran, that's their holy book. That's not a religion that I want to be involved in. Other Muslim countries are the same in varying degrees.

But the Bible itself says all the rest of them are false, so if you can prove the Bible is true you’ve saved a lot of time.

Jesus said, “I am the way the truth the life, no man comes to the Father but by me.”

Jesus claimed to be God. Now just logically, you couldn't read the sayings of Jesus, you couldn't read the testimony of scripture about Jesus without concluding that Jesus was a good man. But wait a minute, a good man doesn't go around claiming to be God unless he is. And Jesus very clearly claimed to be God. Jesus said, “Before Abraham was, I am.” He didn't say I was, he said, I am. He used the very name for God that God used in the Old Testament.

For example, in Exodus 3 when God appears to Moses in the flaming bush and tells him to go to Egypt to deliver his people, Moses says, who will I say sent me, what is your name? And God says my name is Yahweh. It is the same name in every language and Yahweh means “I am that I am”, the self-existent one whose existence depends upon none other but himself and the existence of all things and creatures depends upon him.

And Jesus used those words in the New Testament, “Before Abraham was, I am”. In John 8 he said, “Except you believe I am you will die in your sins and where I go you cannot come.”

Now you're going to have to come to some conclusions about Jesus. He made some powerful statements, and he claimed to be God so you can't say he's a good man if he claims to be God and he isn't.

There are only three possibilities. Either Jesus is sincere, but he's deluded or he's a deliberate liar and deceiver, or he is who he claimed to be.

The Scripture says, “He who knew no sin became sin for us that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.”

So, how did Jesus save humanity from sin and death? He paid the penalty that his own infinite justice required and if you think you're saved by any other means you're not.

We’ve got people thinking they will pay for eternal life through their church membership, their good deeds, their charity, whatever it is. In the very act of trying to pay for their salvation they are rejecting the gift that God wants to give them. If you're going to receive eternal life and forgiveness from God, you're going to receive it as a gift, you're going to receive it as an unworthy sinner who deserves hell. You've violated God's laws. You've forfeited the right to be in his presence in his universe. You're going to receive it as someone who cannot pay for it. You cannot earn it. You cannot merit it. You don't deserve it. And you will have to receive it as a gift, or you don't have it.

END OF QUOTING DAVE HUNT.

Now, let’s get back to the beginning where we talked about the concern of religious fundamentalism.

You cannot understand true Christianity without looking at the difference between the jihadist martyrs of Islam and the loving martyrs of Christianity. You could say both represent the most extreme form of the two faiths. Most people will never commit themselves so deeply to their faith as to become a martyr.

Yet, one is a martyr for Satan and the other is a martyr for Jesus. One is an expression of the greatest evil, the other is an expression of the greatest good.

In welcoming death, the Muslim jihadist’s intent is to slaughter as many infidels as possible in the process.

In contrast, Christian martyrs refuse to deny their faith and die with love and forgiveness in their hearts towards their murders. Jesus forgave those who killed him. To the criminal who hung on the cross next to him who asked for forgiveness, he freely gave it and said, this day will you see me in paradise.

I was fortunate as a child of nine to meet such a Christian martyr, Richard Wurmbrand.

For those of you who know my writing, you will recognize the name as I have written about him before.

Wurmbrand was first persecuted by the Nazis for being Jewish and then persecuted by the communists for being a Christian. He spent fourteen years in prison, ceaselessly tortured and brainwashed. For seventeen hours a day, repetitious phrases tormented him: Communism is good. Christianity is stupid! Give up. Give up!

His body came to bear the scars of many beatings and burnings. His bones were broken, including four vertebrae. When asked about his time in prison, he said, "I prefer not to speak about those [tortures] through which I have passed. When I do, I cannot sleep at night. It is too painful."

His wife, Sabina, was brutalized for three years in prison. The Wurmbrand's nine- year-old son Mihai was orphaned during this time. In 1956, Wurmbrand was released from prison and immediately recommenced secret church work. He was again imprisoned, not released until 1964.

In 1965, Western churches ransomed Wurmbrand from Romania for $10,000. Richard and Sabina immediately spoke out for those still suffering in Communist hands. Wurmbrand was asked to testify before the US Senate. He removed his shirt and revealed eighteen holes cut in his body. This had a huge impact in convincing the international community of the horrors of communism.

It was during this time that the Wurmbrands came to visit my father in our home in Los Angeles. Many people came to our home from all over the world to speak with my father. It was a stimulating household for a child, and I enjoyed meeting all the interesting characters.

We went on to travel the world and had many adventures, including smuggling Bibles into Romania. It was illegal to do what we were doing, and I have never forgotten the terror I felt at each border crossing, where my father prayed that God would blind the eyes of the guards to the Bibles we carried. The pastor we were supposed to give the Bibles to had been ransomed out for $7,000 just days before we arrived, but we didn’t know that. We ended up giving the Bibles to people we encountered and finally to a pastor of an underground church.

Just as I will never forget my own fears at those border crossings and my own weak faith, I will never forget the tears of joy those followers of Jesus had when they saw the Bibles. The Bibles were so precious as God’s Word that they were willing to go to prison for having them. As were my own parents. If they had been caught smuggling the Bibles, they, too, would have been imprisoned.

Not that long ago, I spoke with Mihai, and we shared memories. It brought it all back, how as a child of nine, I had looked into the eyes of his father, Richard Wurmbrand, this living martyr, and saw all the pain and sorrow, and yet no bitterness or hate, only the love of Christ.

You can laugh if you want. You can call such martyrs lunatics, or fools, but then, you haven’t stood before them as I have. So, I understood clearly from a young age what it meant to be a true Christian—to follow Jesus unto the cross. This is the faith that we have. The hope in things to come. Where would the world be if people of such hope and faith ceased to exist. Their spiritual worth is immeasurable. Their faith puts the arrogance of atheists to shame. It puts the greed of religious pundits to shame.

I would encourage Sam Harris and other atheists to read the works of Richard Wurmbrand, of Corrie Ten Boom, of Father George Calciu. I would encourage my readers to do the same. We all can benefit from their teachings.

Not long ago, I discovered the writings of Fr. George Calciu. I read his life experiences with tears in my eyes. I quote from “Interviews, Homilies, and Talks:

I was fortunate in that God opened my spiritual eyes to understand the importance of material things and the importance of spiritual things. What is most important for me is that I understood this fight between good and evil, between God and the enemy of God—the devil. Nothing in this world happens in a mirror. All of these visible phenomena are only a reflection of what happens on the spiritual level, you know.

In Pitesti they had a prayer chain. “I would pray half the night until midnight. At midnight I would knock on the wall of the cell next door, and they would continue the prayers. For one year, we made these continuous prayers. We were connected, we were strong, we were optimistic.

But then, came the effort to destroy hope. The great experiment of Pitesti.

I was very good friends with this young man, and they knew that. So, after beating me and torturing him, they forced him to torture me and me to torture him—to destroy any connection between us, to isolate us. This is the tactic of the devil—to isolate everyone. God intended man to be in a spiritual community of prayer. Therefore, they isolated everybody; they made everyone to be alone. We can be one in Jesus Christ, but this was oneness in the devil. No one believed in anyone; no one trusted anyone. Thus, everyone was isolated, and the resistance was annulled.

I would just interject here that we are now experiencing such an isolation. We are isolated from one another in the metaverse, inundated with mountains of useless information. We are to the point where we cannot trust our own eyes and ears, let alone someone else’s. How many “friends” do you have in the ether? When you interact on social media are you sure those you interact with are even real? Are you sure the news you see with your own eyes is real? We can no longer be sure. We have lost touch with reality, imprisoned in a fake universe.

But those who are imprisoned for their faith are very connected to reality and easily know the truth. It is by faith and through reliance on strength of the spirit that they survive the realities of torture.

Father Calciu describes being sent to Jilava Prison where he was put in a cell with four men, one of which was very sick, a man named Constatine Oprisan, whose lungs were completely emaciated with tuberculosis. Calciu decided to take care of this man. He was not able to move by himself so Calciu would put him on the bucket to urinate, he washed his body, he fed him.

Here is what Calciu had to say about Oprisan:

He was like a saint. It was the first time that I was in contact with such a man. He was in this condition because he had been tortured in Pitesti for three years. They had beaten him on his chest, on his back, and had destroyed his lungs. But he prayed the whole day. He never said anything bad against his torturers, and he spoke to us about Jesus Christ. All the while we did not realize how important Constantine Oprisan was for us. He was the justification of our life in this cell. Over the course of a year, he became weaker and weaker. We felt that he had finished his time here and would die.

[When it came time for Oprisan to die], I looked at him. His face was completely emaciated. His eyes were open, but I saw there seemed to be a curtain of mist. His eyes turned inside himself. I was so scared, so afraid. I felt that he would die, and I would be alone in this cell. I put my hand on his and said, “Constantine, don’t die; don’t die! Come back; come back!” Immediately he came back. His eyes became clear. He looked at me. I was right in front of his eyes, you know, bent over him. I don’t know what happened to his soul, but I saw an intense terror in his face. His eyes were full of terror and he started to cry. I had the feeling that he had been ready to enter the spiritual world, and I had asked him to come back to the cell. This was a great terror, and so he started to cry. Tears were flowing out of his eyes. His face became the face of a child, a newborn child. He was crying like a newborn child coming out of the womb of his mother. Constantine Oprisan cried because I forced him to come back. In a couple of minutes, he died.

After he died, every one of us felt that something in us had died. We understood that sick as he was and in our care like a child, he had been the pillar of life in the cell. Then we were alone without Constantine Oprisan.

We took a towel and washed his body to prepare it properly to be buried in the earth. Then we knocked at the door of the cell and told the guards that Constantine Oprisan had died. We had never before left that cell, which had neither light nor windows. The water was seeping into the walls; the straw mattresses were putrid under our bodies. So for the first time, the guards commanded me and my friend to take the body of Constantine Oprisan and go outside.

Outside it was so beautiful. Flowers and trees and blue sky. As long as we were in the cell, we forgot about the beautiful world. When we went out, we saw that the world had not changed. This vegetation, these flowers—hurt us. It was like an insult to us because we were suffering, dying … but the universe did not care about us! The sun was going down and there was a golden light. Everybody was shining like gold. We put Constantine Oprisan on the ground. He was completely naked because we had to give his prison clothes back. His body was completely emaciated. We could not believe that he was a human being. He was only bones, only bones. And I think that the bile at the moment of death must have entered the bloodstream, because he was completely yellow. My friend took a flower and put it on his chest—a blue flower. The guard started to cry out to us and forced us to go back into the cell. Before we went into the cell, we turned around and looked at Constantine Oprisan—his yellow body and this blue flower. This is the image that I have kept in my memory—the body of Constantine Oprisan completely emaciated and the blue flower on his chest. He was nothing but bones and skin—no muscle. Nothing else … his body lying on the ground with a blue flower.

Afterwards, it was very difficult. Constantine Oprisan, before he died, said, “I will die, but after death, I will pray to God for you. All my prayers will be for you because I do not want you to die in this cell.” And I am sure he prayed for us, because all three of us succeeded in leaving this prison to go to Aiud Prison.

Father Culciu describes life in Aiud and thinks about the plethora of information fed to us today and how we really know nothing, yet Culciu and his friends in prison were rich in knowledge:

I was in isolation for two years, but it was not solitary confinement. We had no right to read anything, to get newspapers, or to go outside. We would just stay in the cell, day and night. There were four people in each cell. We had a very spiritual life there, because in this special section were special people. Some priests were there. There were also some writers and minsters. We began to teach each other and to learn new things—foreign languages and so on. We were very busy! There was one professor, Manu, who was a physicist. Before he was arrested, he had worked with Madame Currie in France. He told us about the atom and its properties, for at the time we entered prison these discoveries about the atom and its properties were only beginning. We knew about the explosion of the atom bomb in Japan, but very few knew what occurred to make this happen. He described it to us, and we understood the structure of matter. There was also a writer who had written many books before he got arrested. There were also priests, and everyone had his moment to say something about himself. Then we would have prayers. The priest who had been in prison since 1941, Father Grabena, celebrated the Liturgy with our bread.

I remember the night of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. The guards made a search of the cell—a fire drill. And they came in the cells with a machine and sprayed. We had started the Liturgy of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ right at midnight. They then announced the alarm, and everybody was forced to lie on their bellies. For three hours we stayed on our bellies. They entered the cell and sprayed everywhere, leaving the cell full of whatever it was they sprayed—a white chemical. For three hours they forced us to lie on our bellies—three hours. Fr. Grabenea recited the Liturgy, and we sang “Christ is Risen from the Dead….” It was so beautiful to celebrate the Holy Liturgy under pressure, lying on the ground.

I mentioned earlier how Christianity isn’t about rituals. Even so, there is something beautiful about reciting a prayer or celebrating Jesus’ resurrection with a song. Such repetitions teach us focus and consistency, they instill within us courage in times when we are afraid. To repeat a prayer brings comfort and takes our minds off dire situations. I have experienced this in my own life.

Sam Harris derides moderates, warns against fundamentalists, but he says nothing about Christians like these men. I can guarantee that if Sam Harris had stood in front of Richard Wurmbrand the way I did, all such derision would leave him. His arguments would seem silly and embarrassing.

All one needs to do is look into the eyes of a martyr like Wurmbrand to know he is neither a lunatic nor a fanatic. He is not a fundamentalist. He is not a hypocrite, not a liar, not an opportunist. He is simply true to his faith. He is a follower of Jesus.

He is the farthest from a fool that any human being could be. All arguments against God fall by the wayside when compared to the faith displayed by these Christian martyrs. Faith that is lived, not theorized.

If we were to stand Fr. George Calciu next to, let’s say, Yahya Sinwar, the Butcher of Khan Yunis, who killed his own people with his bare hands when he found they were betraying Islam, it becomes apparent who serves God and who serves the Devil. It becomes apparent that there is a spiritual battle between good and evil, between God and Satan, one which we might not understand, but one in which we, too, play a part. You can be sure that Sinwar, who relies of fear and hate, could never break Calciu’s spirit or destroy his love.

If Sam Harris were to stand in front of Yahya Sinwar and look into his eyes, he would find himself silenced again. He could not deny the evil emanating from those eyes. He would have to acknowledge that confronting the face of evil disproves all the atheists’ theories of how there is no good or evil, no God or Satan, just a Big Bang and a lot of coincidences since then.

It really is that simple. But the truth of it is too hard for most people to bear, the road too difficult. We don’t want to submit to God. We would rather believe the lies of Satan and have some pleasure for a season. We would rather the devil whispers in our ears, surely you will not die. You can be gods.

Why would anyone choose to be tortured for their faith? Why wouldn’t they just deny their faith. Such love and self-sacrifice are beyond our understanding. Love for our enemies, for our jailors. How is it possible?

"If the heart is cleansed by the love of Jesus Christ," wrote Wurmbrand, "and if the heart loves him, you can resist all tortures. What would a loving bride not do for a loving bridegroom? What would a loving mother not do for her child? If you love Christ as Mary did, who had Christ as a baby in her arms, if you love Jesus as a bride loves her bridegroom, then you can resist such tortures. God will judge us not according to how much we endured, but how much we could love. I am a witness for the Christians in communist prisons that they could love. They could love God and men."

Have you ever heard an Islamist talk like this? Do you see their faces bathed with love for their enemies as they yell Allah Akbar?

To deny that people live by faith is the ultimate dishonesty and irrationality. Everyone lives by faith. The only question is, which faith do you live by.

My mom used to tell us the stories of our Mennonite ancestors. One was a woman named Janneken Muntsdorg who was imprisoned for her faith. She bore a daughter while in prison who was then immediately taken from her. Knowing she would never see her daughter again; Janneken wrote a letter for her to read one day. Part of it goes like this:

““…for if we were to continue in the world, we would have had no trouble. For when we were one with the world and practiced idolatry, and loved all manner of unrighteousness, we could live at peace with the world; but when we desired to fear God and to shun such improper ways…then they did not leave us in peace; then our blood was sought; then we had to be a prey to everyone, and become a spectacle to all the world. They seek here to murder and burn us; we are placed at posts and stakes, and our flesh is given as food to the worms.”

Not a pleasant letter for a child to read about her mother. And yet, how proud she could be to have had such a mother. I know when I heard these stories, I was proud to be descended from such courageous people.

To be a Christian isn’t to be a pastor with a mansion bought from cheating his parishioners. It isn’t to be a pope wearing robes of gold.

It is to be willing to follow Jesus, even to the cross.

"If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you." John 15:19

This is why I now call myself a follower of Jesus. I have lived through some torturous times, nothing like those I have written about here. But I pray that I will be strong enough, if such a day comes, that I will live up to the standard of my own ancestors and I will not deny my faith.

I will end with the words of a scientist who had no problem with faith, Sir Isaac Newton:

A Heavenly Master governs all the world as Sovereign of the universe. We are astonished at Him by reason of His perfection, we honor Him and fall down before Him because of His unlimited power. From blind physical necessity, which is always and everywhere the same, no variety adhering to time and place could evolve, and all variety of created objects which represent order and life in the universe could happen only by the willful reasoning of its original Creator, Whom I call the Lord God.