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How would you respond to this objection to Christianity? It makes no sense that the relatively short life we live on this planet, at most 100 years and perhaps as brief as a few minutes, would be used by God to determine our ultimate destiny, one that will last trillions and trillions of years and beyond. You may already have an idea how you'd respond.

You may be wondering how to respond to that. My goal in the next several episodes is to answer the objections that have been proposed at the friendlyatheist.pateos.com blog post from 2014, August 26, titled 40 Problems with Christianity by Hemant Mehta. he appears to be the friendly atheist. This blog post was shared with me on Twitter. Actually, it was shared with my friend Alan Nelson, who, upon looking at it, actually laughed, not realizing it was a serious attempt to refute Christianity.

And without sounding rude about it, there is, without trying to sound rude, there are some sort of laughable objections on this website. But in order to create help for those who may need help answering these questions, maybe just for your own enjoyment, and possibly to bring some skeptics to our side of things, I'm going to try to attempt to answer these objections. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on them I'm not going to go and do a bunch of research this is going to be my way of trying to share how to just respond to things as they come by relying on what we know the Bible says already so some people will have more knowledge there's probably going to be some things where you would have to look up answers a little more maybe I will have to on some cases too but what I wanted to avoid was turning this 40 question the refutation of these 40 questions into like a full-time job for me my goal will be to answer them and in some cases I probably will not answer them in any way that somebody considers sufficient but I'm going to I want to give you some ideas of how to think through these things I also don't want to give the friendly atheist or Michael Runyon, the former Catholic who wrote these objections, very much airtime either.

So let's see Michael Runyon, the former Catholic and recently retired risk analyst for the U.S. government, let's see his critical assessments of the Christian religion. Relative time, it makes no sense that the relatively short time we live on this planet would determine our ultimate destiny. The time difference, I'm skipping a little bit here, the time difference between the trial period and the punishment is drastically out of sync.

So here's a person that doesn't have any concept of God's holiness and doesn't have any concept of God's infinitude. So God is infinitely holy. It means he's never ending. He's eternal. His holiness has no bounds. And when we sin against a holy God, even in what seems like a finite period of time for us, that sin is so serious because of the worth of who is being sinned against. so the reason why our punishment excuse me i have a little bit of a frog in my throat and every time i every time i pause to cough my voice changes so forgive me if if you're gonna have to bear through that but the reason why our punishment is eternal when we sin against an eternally and infinitely holy god is because it is against whom the sin is committed that measures the crime the classic example would be that somebody could spit in my face I might fight back, I may not you could spit in the face of somebody who's attacking you and you wouldn't even be considered guilty of any kind of crime but spit in the face of the president or the king of the land and you could get a death penalty or a very serious punishment so even though you may sin a very short period of time your sin against a holy God is worthy of infinite punishment.

That's just what the Bible teaches. He might not like that, and it's clear that he doesn't, but it's what it teaches. What's interesting is that he even compares the fact that you may have a hundred years on this earth to the fact that eternity is still out of sync with that. What he would really hate is the doctrine that teaches that we're all actually fallen in Adam and that we're all guilty before God because of Adam's sin.

So in a very real sense, we are condemned before God before we've ever actually sinned in our lives because our federal representative sinned in our place, Adam. The author here in number one, Michael Runyon, he adds a second paragraph that I want to read to He says, some Christians say that God will give people another chance after they die to accept his grace. So remember, he's an ex-Catholic.

He's got a mixed bag of theology throughout here. But he proceeds, but if that is true, then why be so concerned about the unsaved in this life? He says, if you get a second chance after you die, you will obviously know that Christianity is true, making the decision to believe not a matter of faith but of fact he says this makes no sense and it would render the core theology of Christianity meaningless He nails that He's right.

If God gives people another chance after they die to accept his grace, or if you teach that, you are rendering the core theology of Christianity meaningless. And what I want to bring out here is that this guy is he's a god-hating uh atheist i guess or he's he's he's friendly to atheists at least in his anti-christianity anti-god rhetoric and he knows and understands the basic tenets of christianity enough to know that you must in this life follow Christ in order to be forgiven of all your sins and in order to go to eternity. He understands that that decision has to happen here.

He might not get those details, but he gets it. And so if Christians are saying, oh, well, maybe you'll get another chance after you die, or maybe people that don't hear about Jesus will get another chance after they die. If Christians are saying those things, they are actually committing what I'll call a critiasy. It's a permutation of two words, Christian and idiocy.

It's nothing but critiasy to say that we could get another chance after we die. And intelligent, well-read people like the people on this website, Even though we disagree with them, even though we think they're blinded to spiritual things, they're still intelligent and can read well. They know that that renders Christianity meaningless. The urgency of Christianity is that the message of Jesus Christ and salvation must be preached as if people will never have another chance, possibly even five seconds from now.

And so the problem of relative time is easily solved by pointing out that our sin deserves eternal wrath because of whom our sin is committed against. But I will give the author credit. He knows Christianity better than some people that profess to be Christians. Number two, lack of gradation. Here's what he writes that that means. Christianity proposes that only one of two fates awaits humans after they die, an extremely attractive invitation into heaven or a miserable, dreadful sentence to hell.

Given the complexities and varieties of human experience, offering only two judgments is absurd. Well, there's a bit more there, but he goes on to explain that people are born in different circumstances and so he's trying to argue that your circumstances are going to ultimately determine whether you know christ or not and so it's absurd to think that those who don't know christ go to hell is his his basic argument again he makes the error of not understanding the scriptures jesus jesus accused the uh i think it was the sanhedrin guys of that he says you err because you do not know the scriptures. Heaven and hell are actually the only two things that make any sense because of the way God is and because of the way we are.

The mistake that this man makes is he has a bad, what we call, anthropology. He's coming from this from the perspective that all men are basically good, that some of them might make mistakes, some might not, but those mistakes they make are going to be very much based on their circumstances and that everybody in this worldview he's kind of proposing here, everybody kind of deserves a chance to know Jesus Christ. So like in this guy's argument would be, well, if Jesus is the way to heaven, then everybody would deserve to hear about it.

So if they don't, they shouldn't go to hell. But since Christianity would teach that they would go to hell, then it must be absurd. And so his assumptions are all wrong. he doesn't understand that man is basically evil man is by his very nature a child of wrath and we all deserve hell because of our sin and the fact that there is a heaven or a hell has to do with the fact that it's really it's a pass fail test he can call it absurd and if he creates his own universe someday ex nihilo like our god did and he creates his own people and they rebel against him and he wants to give them different levels of how they can get to different levels of heaven or hell or whatever it is he thinks, he's entitled to do that.

But when God created the world and God said, let there be light, and he created the plants and the vegetables and the sun and moon and stars, and then ultimately made man and man rebelled against him, it was God who got to decide that there's a heaven and a hell. And it's God who explains that to us clearly. And this guy in the Friendly Atheist blog I'm reading, he reveals to us that he actually understands this.

Because he calls it absurd, he actually is explaining, though, that he knows it's what the Bible says. He's not refuting it's what Christianity teaches. He just labels it absurd. I would also, if you want to get into logical fallacies he really has an unargued philosophical bias here he just calls something absurd with no real explanation why his explanation begs the question he adds at the bottom though some Catholics believe in purgatory where souls can be purified before they are allowed into heaven he says this would seem to alleviate the problem so he thinks purgatory alleviates the problem that he sees but listen to what this guy says an ex He says if it weren for the fact that it is completely made up without any basis in the Bible So here's an ex-Catholic.

He's an atheist now, or at least he's friendly to atheists. And he is abundantly aware that purgatory is a made-up thing. and so again when christians go outside of what the scripture teaches to try to soften the blow on people in regards to judgment and sin they do nothing but damage to the arguments that we may want to make and people who are thoughtful don't want to be lied to people who are headed to hell don't need to be lied to. People need to be told the truth, even if they don't like it, even if it's in a hard to swallow pill, if you were.

And then they get to choose whether or not they're going to believe in Jesus Christ or not. And obviously, I'm a Calvinist, and everybody understands what I mean by that, that even at that point, that requires God's intervention. but that's not the point of this problem this guy brings up, the lack of gradation, easily solved by the fact that it's really just not up to him to decide what's absurd or not. It's what God chose.

The third problem that the Friendly Atheist blog points out with Christianity is that Jesus mentions hell or some derivative thereof many times in the Gospels and hints that most people will end up suffering there. And then he lists some scriptures addressing hell. Matthew 5, 28 and 29, Matthew 13, 41 and 42, Mark 9, 45 and 46. But listen to what he says.

He says, a belief in hell is unavoidable if one is to believe in Jesus. He's absolutely right. And it's wonderful to see people proclaiming the truth, frankly. and it is nice to think that this guy actually knows what he's rejecting and it would be nice if he would also eventually come to the faith. But he adds, if hell doesn't exist, then why would God have allowed it to be so prominently addressed?

So he's really fighting the Rob Bells of the world. This guy probably thinks Rob Bell is quite a critiquette and and rob bell is a black mark on christianity and he's an embarrassment to us and one of the reasons is because to the friendly atheist rob bell is a christian who's compromising and a guy like the friendly atheist probably has more respect for christians he vehemently disagrees with but who at least are honest and won't compromise but now he says hitler sent jews to concentration camps and gas chambers for no reason other than their ethnic identity. He says this was a temporal punishment.

It sometimes lasted only a few days. He adds God, on the other hand, is prepared to send good, well-accomplished, and generous people to a place of everlasting punishment and torture for the crime of not believing in something for which no credible evidence exists. He says the God of the Bible is, in effect, worse than Hitler. All right, so this is what I call the fire hose of logical fallacies.

There's a number of unargued philosophical biases in here. He just makes a bunch of assumptions. He makes a bunch of assertions. And it's actually really hard to know where to start. But let's just start at the beginning. He says, God is prepared to send good, well-accomplished and generous people. to a place of everlasting punishment and torture.

Well, again, how do you define good? How do you define well-accomplished? And how do you define generous? By this friendly atheist standards, I'm sure there's a number of people that fall in those categories, but this is all solved very simply. If you look at things like Psalm 14, I believe Psalm 53, Romans 3, 12, that there's no one who does good. There's no one who is good.

So God doesn't send any good people to a place of everlasting punishment. In fact, the only good person who ever lived was Jesus Christ, and he's ascended into heaven. He says that God will send well-accomplished people. I don't even know what that means. My daughter pointed out, my 15-year-old daughter read the atheist blog with me, and she pointed out that to many people, Hitler would have been considered well-accomplished and good, and they probably would have even thought he was generous and her point being that that the guy that the friendly atheist is trying to compare god to in order to show that that god is even worse than hitler would actually qualify by this guy's own virtues that he's telling us should be extolled as one of the good people so i don't i don't even know what well accomplished is supposed to mean God's supposed to reward people with heaven because they went to work and made money.

I'm not even sure what well-accomplished means. It's so subjective. Generous people. Generosity is such a wonderful thing in our world, and it's nice when people help others. And if your generosity does not come from a heart of love and devotion to God, if it's not through faith in Jesus Christ, it's sin. your generosity is more than likely for your own pride and ego to be stoked and even to the extent where you want to help other people even to the extent where you would help other people at your own cost if it's not done through faith in jesus christ and then it's ultimately worthless because it is god who deserves the glory for your generosity if you have a generous heart and if it not being used for his glory you a rebel and you deserve hell for taking that good gift God gave you of a generous heart and using it for your own glory or the glory of any other man.

And so God will send people who atheists think are good, well-accomplished, and generous to a place of everlasting punishment and torture. And now we get into the next problem. He says, for the crime of not believing in something. Well, your crime is not not believing in something. Your crime is rebelling against God and being a sinner in his eyes. That's the crime.

Because the fact of the matter is, is that you know God exists. Everybody does. We're all born with the fundamental understanding of God's law written on our heart. That's written in Romans 1. And the friendly atheist tells us himself in the same sentence that he has an idea of what is good. He has a definition of good.

Therefore, he knows what is good and what is evil deep down inside. Now, he suppresses that truth because he loves his unrighteousness. But God doesn't send people to everlasting torture for the crime of not believing in something. He sends people to hell for their sin. Our sin is what condemns us. the wages of sin is death. And then he says, for not believing in something for which no credible evidence exists.

It's hilarious to me that he, first of all, he says no credible evidence exists. Well, as long as you throw in the word credible, now you've just made it a completely subjective sentence. So I can just say, yeah credible evidence exists and I could just move on. I won't be that much of a jerk though but what I will do is I'll scroll back up about four inches on this page and he is literally quoting Jesus from the Bible which is a book that was written by eyewitnesses of Jesus.

And so if there's ever been credible evidence of anything it was eyewitnesses jotting down what they saw and heard. It doesn't mean you believe it. It doesn't mean that you aren't skeptical about it, but it's absolutely the definition of credible evidence. And even more interesting is later on, there's a section where he says that, let me find which one it was, but he says that because Jesus is let me find it there's what there's one later where he says that the the fact that people weren't more um oh but he was pointing out later that that jesus is actually a believable character in history because of something that he says later.

And it's funny because that's credible evidence to me. So again, you don't go to hell because you don't believe in the thing without credible evidence anyway. There's plenty of evidence of God. And your problem, and no one's problem, but particularly you, Michael Runyon and the Friendly Atheist, your problem is not that you don't have enough evidence.

The problem is that you're blind to it. you are literally you are evidence that god exists even renee descartes figured that one out the chair you're sitting on is evidence that god exists the technology you're using to listen to this if by god's grace you are is evidence that god exists the heavens declare the glory of god and the sky above proclaims his handiwork and the wrath of god is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. There is evidence everywhere you look and it convicts you. And you will not believe, not because there isn't evidence, but because you refuse to see it.

And he says the God of the Bible is in effect worse than Hitler and And it's, honestly, it's laughable how many problems there were in that paragraph. Let's move on to number four. Hopefully this isn't taking too long for people. I guess you can listen to multiple sessions if you want. It says, related to the previous point, Christianity can be understood to endorse a spectacularly cruel and senseless outcome, completely subjective, of how certain people are judged.

And then he goes in to talk about Hitler being Catholic, who could have gotten saved before he committed suicide. Ted Bundy, a rapist, I think, and murderer, or else he was just a murderer, I don't remember. He says he confessed his sins before his execution, and so thus he would go to heaven. And then he cites Bill Gates as this amazing, virtuous atheist who's donated all this money, who's going to go to hell because he's not a Christian.

He calls it irrational and senseless. But he says this irrational and senseless result is entirely consistent with the dogma of conventional Christianity. So this guy seems to understand here that really, really, really wicked sinners, if they believe in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of their sins, actually will be ushered into heaven, despite all the bad things they did.

And he seems to understand that people like Bill Gates, who maybe don't live out such evil in this life, do what by the friendly atheist standards are any number of good things for people, are not good enough to go to heaven. He understands Christianity better than a lot of Catholics from the way I'm reading this. But the problem is, it's not irrational, it's not unthinkable.

The problem is that he does not understand the value and worth of the Son of God, Jesus Christ. notwithstanding whether or not Hitler legitimately made a profession of faith and then committed suicide, and not judging Ted Bundy by any standard that I cannot, I can tell you this. The thief on the cross, who was a wicked man, we think of the thief on the cross, and I think sometimes we think of a guy that stole something. He was walking along like Aladdin, and he stole a loaf of bread, and he was running through and then they caught him and said, we'll put him on the cross.

And this guy was suffering capital punishment. I have to believe that he was worse than like a bread stealer in the marketplace. This was a man who had committed crimes that were worthy of death. This was of such a grave nature that they wanted to make a public spectacle spectacle of killing this guy. And this thief on the cross, who was certainly a vile man, he reviled the Lord Jesus at the beginning of the crucifixion.

When he believed, Jesus said, today you will be with me in paradise. That is grace. God's grace extended to sinners because the sacrifice that Jesus Christ made is greater than the sins that man can commit. So first of all, I don't particularly have any reason to believe Hitler actually got saved. But if Hitler is responsible for six million Jewish deaths, Jesus's blood is more than enough to pay for those sins if Hitler had believed.

Ted Bundy, a wicked, wicked man, raised as a Christian, if I remember correctly, taught the right things in his life. I remember him in an interview saying, don't blame my parents for how I turned out. They taught me correctly. They took me to Sunday school, and it was Ted Bundy who was wicked. If Ted Bundy truly turned to Jesus Christ for forgiveness, is, all those who come to me, I will never cast out, Jesus said.

So what the friendly atheist fails to understand is that whether you go to heaven or hell has nothing to do with how bad you happen to be. It has to do with whether Jesus Christ atoned for your sins on the cross, whether he was the substitute for the punishment you deserved. And if he was, then his punishment that he took on is more than enough to cover what you deserved.

Keep in mind, we all are deserving of hell because of the original sin of Adam, not because of, well, also because of what we do, but what we do in this life is more of a outworking of the sin that already in us the corruption that we are already under because of Adam sin And so whether your only sin that you committed is the sin of Adam or whether you lived a life of murderous animosity towards others, you deserve hell. But both of those are perfectly covered by the Son of God. But a man like Bill Gates or anyone who, in effect, obeys God's laws outwardly, donates money to global health and education for others.

That man lives for himself and deserves to go to hell for his sin. And there's no amount of money that could be given or sacrifices that could be made that will make up for his sin. David knew this. that David could have killed every bull and ram and goat in all of Israel, and he knew that none of that would save him and make him justified in the eyes of God.

So if you've ever encountered one of these websites where atheists or skeptics, I don't even know what to call it, post their thoughts, I'm going to go through this friendly atheist one, and I'm going to help you understand how to bolster your own faith in God and help you to see how some of these things are just, I don't know, they really shouldn't be that faith-shaking. I have no fear of reading these, frankly, and somebody listening being suddenly moved toward atheism. I think these are things that a short Google search would fix.

Karm.org or gotquestions.org. I think people would really quickly get the answers to some of these things. So what's important to understand is that we are in a battle, not with flesh and blood, but with powers and principalities and authorities and rulers and spiritual forces of evil and cosmic powers over this present darkness. And so it's easy to laugh at some of the things that atheists might say. it's it's sometimes very easy to argue against them and we can feel very accomplished we can we can use scripture and we can memorize the latin terminology for logical fallacies and we can do that perfectly even what is what does first corinthians say i can speak in the tongues of men and of angels right but if i have not love i'm a clanging gong or a clanging symbol and a noisy gong and so one of the things i want to do personally and i want to remind you to do is that even if even if we even if we mock a little bit maybe mock an atheistic idea or maybe chuckle about how easy it is to refute something that we read on this website.

I want to remember that our goal here is love that issues from a pure heart. The real goal is that there would be people who would read a website like this and be convinced by it who would stumble across my podcast or maybe an argument you making on your website Or maybe it's just a person you work with who has these same thoughts. These are not uncommon thoughts for non-believers. the question is how do we get a hold of people and give them the truth and not just try to refute arguments and destroy every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God I think that there's a place for being argumentative and polemical and debating and I think we can mock ideas.

I don't like mocking people very much personally, but I think sometimes that can be an effective way to teach truth to people. But I think that in our hearts, our desire should be that the people who we talk to about these things actually come to the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. When you read what I just read to you, and we've spent about 33 minutes now, and you realize that the only reason I understand any of these things that this guy is not accepting is by the grace of God.

That this guy even in some cases has correctly pointed out proper Christian doctrine in contradistinction to Christians who are teaching compromised messages. and for me to have any pride in my heart because i understand the same thing he does but for some reason i'm i'm holding on to it and grasping it is sin on my part and it would be sin on yours as well dear listener and so let's let's remember that that is part of this while we um you know i've got 36 more questions i don't know how many episodes this is going to take but let's just remember that and and that that we're our goal is to boost the faith of weaker christians and to hopefully draw people who may be susceptible to this type of teaching to our side so i i i don't want to call what this guy wrote stupid uh it's it's it's not stupid this guy is a retired analyst of some kind a risk analyst he's probably super intelligent he's probably got a degree in a bachelor's of science or master's in some kind of science. He probably can do things that a lot of us can't do. And so we want to remember that the blindness that unbelievers have to what we think is just plain good logic, it doesn't have anything to do with intelligence levels or IQs.

It has to do with spiritual blindness. And is the result of that sometimes what we'll call stupidity or foolishness? Yes. Sometimes it devolves into foolishness, but that takes time and we need to try to hope the best for people. So with that being said, we will continue with question five on the next episode. If you want to check out this blog I just paste the link in the show notes so that you have the link in there if you want it And what I want you to think about is if you like this show I not really a big I don know how to put this I'm not comfortable saying what I'm about to say, and I think I just need to be comfortable with it.

And that is that if you like this show, it actually means a lot to me if I hear from you. So Michael at thingsabove.us or some Facebook messenger works too. I don't want to become prideful, but it is encouraging if people say, hey, that helped me. By the grace of God, he is using me to do this podcast. And so that would help me personally. And it also, to some extent, it affirms for me that it's worth my time.

If only one person listened and they enjoyed it, I'd have to say, okay, I'm glad I'm doing it for that one person. But there is a point where I'm taking time to do this, and it's time away from family a lot of times. And I'd like to know that I am reaching people. And then thirdly, if you do the thing where you open up your podcast app and you give me a rating or write a review, I do think that it helps my podcast the Be A Berean podcast to rank higher if you type in Be A Berean into podcast apps it is not a very original name I should have come up with a better name there's so many Berean podcasts and I love being a Berean I love the concept I'll do an episode on why I named it that sometime but if you would give me a review um i'm not going to ask you for a five-star review you know just do what do what you think makes sense but if you take that time it it would probably help other people to find me maybe by accident and again it would encourage me as well so I don't want to have to do that a lot but at the same time it's kind of part of podcasting I think is to throw that out there I know that I don't mind when people that I listen to have asked me to do that and I've always thought yeah you know I probably should just take the time so other people know that I like it so I also if there's anything you ever want to hear about let me know I have experience in some different areas.

I think I can teach most of the Bible and parts I can't teach, I can probably study. So if there's any questions you have or anything in particular you want me to talk about, I'd love to. I'd like to do an episode. I could do episodes about the 1689 Confession of Faith. That's something I've been studying with some friends. I'd like to do an episode with my testimony, kind of talk about how I got Beabrean name.

So there's a lot of different ideas there. I could do one where I just talk about the podcast that I listen to and share with you some of the things that I like to listen to. So anyway, I'm going to sign off for now. Thank you for being with me. Again, I'm appreciative of anybody that listens and is a part of my life and my journey with Christ.