- Christianity For Beginners.
This is lesson number two in the series,
and the title of this lesson is The Christian Religion,
The Christian Religion.
As I said, this is the second lesson
in a series of seven classes,
especially designed for those
who are just learning about Christianity
or have recently become disciples of Jesus Christ,
and we also use this class as a refresher course
for those more experienced Christians.
So in this lesson, we're going to look
at the Christian religion from a wide view
as we compare it to other major religions in the world.
In doing this, it'll help us in a variety of ways.
For example, it'll give us some historical context.
We're going to be able to see where Christianity,
as a religion, fits into the general history of mankind
and also the history of other religions,
because Christianity doesn't just exist in a vacuum.
I mean, there are other religions that were being formed
at the same time that Christianity was being formed,
so we're going to kind of put it historically where it fits in.
Also, give us an understanding by examining Christianity
alongside other religions and their main ideas.
We'll be better able to understand the claims,
and the teachings, and the benefits
of the Christian religion,
and I emphasize the benefits of the Christian religion.
You really see the advantage of Christianity
when you compare it to other religions,
and then, as I mentioned, appreciation.
We often fail to appreciate the value of what we have
until we compare it to some other similar thing.
The value of the Christian religion becomes more evident
when it is compared to the teachings and the claims
of other world religions.
At the end of this study, I hope that the class
will not only more fully understand Christianity,
but also will appreciate its incalculable value
in your life, my life, the life of anyone who follows Jesus.
Alright, when we are studying or speaking
of the religions of the world,
a lot of people think that there
are literally hundreds of different religions,
even thousands of groups and beliefs in the world,
when, in fact, there are really only about a dozen.
There are only about a dozen organized religions,
if you include also what's called primitive religions.
The dictionary defines religion as man's expression
of his acknowledgement of the divine,
man's expression of his acknowledgement of the divine.
The Bible writers used the word religion
in describing the ceremonies that the Jews did
in expressing their faith, Acts 26:5.
When we talk about the religions of the world,
we're referring to the different ways that mankind
has developed to express his consciousness that there
is something other than himself,
usually something higher than himself, here in this world.
Now, we here in this room in this class,
we believe that Christianity is not a manmade religion,
but rather a religion given to us by God.
But for the purpose of this class,
I'm going to put our faith, our religion,
alongside other religions in order to see
where it fits in historically and theologically.
Okay?
So don't be upset if I just call Christianity,
refer to it and describe it in the same way
I'm describing Hinduism, or Buddhism, or whatever, alright?
It's the way that you study organized religion.
Okay?
Now there are many philosophies and movements
that come and go throughout history,
which have impact on society,
but are not necessarily religions.
Several decades ago,
New Age Movement swept the United States.
New Age Movement, a combination of ideas
from existing religions and philosophies.
Communism is a political system, an ideological movement,
but it's not a religion.
Naturalism, which is the outgrowth of Atheism,
Naturalism tries to explain the world without God.
It's not a religion, it's a philosophy.
And of course, Relativism,
which is the today's philosophy, popular philosophy.
Relativism says that life and reality
are what you say or believe it to be.
It's all relative.
So these and others have had influence on the world,
but are not considered organized religions,
and we're not going to study these philosophies.
We're studying religions, okay?
Now in order for something to be a religion,
it has to have certain features.
For example, it has to have a history or an origin story.
All religions can trace their origins
to a place or to a person.
It has to also have a concept of deity.
I mean, the main feature of religion
is that it acknowledges the existence
of a higher being, or a higher power, or a god,
but all religions have that feature.
Organized religions also have a concept of mankind.
In other words, a key question that most religions
try to answer is the following.
Where did man come from?
And each religion has an explanation of some kind
to answer that question.
Where did man come from?
Organized religion have a concept of salvation.
No matter what religion, each of them has its own answer
to the problem of the human condition,
and some of them offer a better existence.
We call it salvation within Christianity,
but all religions offer some sort of better way to be,
their concept of salvation.
Organized religions have a concept of worship.
Most religions provide their own ceremonies
that express their faith
and that the people do individually or collectively,
but all religions have this feature.
Organized religions have scriptures.
Religions keep records of their founders,
the teaching of their founders,
their history, their worship.
They have some sort of holy book.
And organized religions also have a basic geography.
In other words, most religions have certain countries
where they began, and where they flourished,
and where they exercised their influence.
Not every single organized religion
exhibits each one of these features,
and you're going to see that as we go through them,
but most organized religions
have a majority of these features in common.
Now the nature of our study will be
to compare the different religions of the world
according to these categories.
So imagine, at the top, we've got the different religions,
the 11 or 12 different religions,
and we're going to examine, for each religion,
we're going to examine very briefly the history
of its origin, their concept of deity,
their concept of mankind, their concept of salvation,
of worship, of scriptures, where they are geographically.
So it's like a graph.
All the religions are on the, excuse me,
the religions here on the top,
and then on the side are all the categories.
And the beauty of this type of study is that you can look
at all the major religions and see, side by side,
what they believe about salvation.
You can compare them, what their scriptures are like,
what their concept of man is like.
So this is, what we're doing here in this class,
one lesson we're devoting to it,
is a brief study of comparative religion,
really condensed down to one session, okay?
Now before we discuss the major world religions,
I think it would be helpful to talk, just for a moment,
about what are called primitive religions,
primitive religions.
These do not fit into the pattern
of major organized world religions.
However, they are ideas, religious ideas,
practiced by many people in the ancient world
and even in today's society,
but in very different and disorganized ways
in different places.
For example,
certain features of primitive religions include,
these are the features of organized religion
that I've just shown you,
history of origin, deity, all that stuff.
So primitive religions also have certain features.
First feature is a strong belief in magic.
Now we could take a whole session to talk about magic,
but the basic concept of magic is a person
is doing something in the physical world
which is affecting something that is taking place
in the spiritual world, and usually for their benefit.
That's the whole idea of magic.
Somebody in the physical world is manipulating something
taking place in the spiritual world for their advantage
or against someone else,
but that's what magic is.
We're not talking about magic in show business.
That's show business.
We're talking about true, the occult, okay,
this kind of magic.
So primitive religions have a strong body of magic.
In primitive religion,
usually there's no individual god, or gods, or powers.
They're spirits, they're forces, okay?
And then a third thing about primitive religions
is that it's practiced in various forms,
and different religions use different ideas.
For example, some primitive religions use animism.
In other words, they believe that certain objects
are inhabited by spirits.
So somebody says my lucky charm.
Well if they're talking about their lucky charm,
that's animism.
They think that there's some spiritual power
that indwells a physical object.
Some primitive religions have a form of dynamism.
Dynamism is impersonal forces that are at work in nature.
For example, the sacred burial grounds
of certain Native Americans or the sacred hunting places.
In other words, they think that there's spiritual activity
taking place in certain areas, alright, dynamism,
and then fetishism, is the reverse.
Fetishism is an object into which power is introduced.
Voodoo, for example, the Voodoo doll,
you make incantations, you say certain prayers,
and it gives a certain power to this Voodoo doll,
and this Voodoo doll now controls your enemy
or is inside your enemy's spirit,
and if you put pins in the Voodoo doll,
it'll affect your enemy.
So an object into which power is introduced.
So those are the different types
of practices of primitive religion.
Also totemism, totemism,
mostly associated with animal
and human characters that are merged,
men taking on the characteristic of various animals.
Again, most notably in North American Indians
practice Totemism.
So these types of primitive religions,
they have kept few written records.
They have little organized theological thought or worship,
mostly focused on nature
and man's relationship with his environment.
Alright?
Now, we can trace primitive religions historically,
beginning with early tribal groups, 4000 BC,
to Egyptian nature and mystery cults,
3000 years before Christ.
Believing that the Nile River and the sun
represented gods, were gods.
The Babylonians introduced magic and astrology to the mix.
They would read internal organs.
They would kill an animal, and reach in,
and take out its liver,
and they would somehow read like you read tea leaves.
They would read the liver of an animal
for signs of what could be happening in the future.
They studied the stars, again,
to know what may take place in the future.
We can thank the Babylonians for that.
The Greek culture began with primitive nature religion,
and it evolved through a mythological stage,
where they had many many gods, to a philosophical stage,
where reason and logic took over,
and they ended up as a mix with Roman style mythology.
In other words, the Romans took the Greek gods,
and they gave them Roman names.
So Zeus, the Greek god Zeus, became the Roman god Jupiter.
Okay?
So the Romans, they mixed Greek mythology
with their own primitive nature religions.
Eventually, the Roman religion was eclipsed by Christianity
in the third and fourth century.
However, you still see traces
of ancient Roman primitive religion
in the Catholic form of Christianity
with its saints, and images, candles, mystical practices.
All of this are vestiges of Roman primitive religion.
None of it is in the Bible.
None of it stems from Bible teaching.
Now, I mention primitive religions,
because they are still practiced in many countries today.
As I say, Voodoo practiced in Haiti,
and Native Americans continue to practice,
many of them, their primitive religions here in America,
and a lot of ideas from primitive religions
are recirculating today in other forms,
as I mentioned, several decades ago, the New Age Movement.
Today, the emphasis on the preeminence of the environment,
to the point where the environment is almost sacred.
That's not a new idea.
That's a very old idea.
We've added science to that idea,
but the veneration of nature
is a very old primitive religious idea.
The Falungong groups in China,
who are trying to harness spiritual power
through physical means,
another modern take on primitive religious ideas.
But primitive religions are not part of the group
of the major world religions that are practiced
by the majority of the populations on Earth
in the last several thousand years.
We're going to now focus on major world organized religions,
but I wanted to talk a little bit
about primitive religions just in case somebody
asks you a question about these things,
you'll know at least what category that they fit into.
Alright, major religions.
As I mentioned previously, not counting primitive religions,
there are only about 11 organized religions in the world,
and these are usually listed
in geographical terms based on where they began.
So if you go to college,
and you take a course in comparative religion, for example,
and you wonder how are we going to study these,
they're usually categorized geographically.
Okay?
So if we're going to begin a comparative study
of religion in our class tonight,
we begin with what are called the Far Eastern religions,
the first of which is Taoism.
You pronounce the T like a D, Taoism.
That comes from China, from China.
Was founded by Lao Tze, and he lived 604 to 517 BC.
The major ideas in Taoism, man is the hightest level.
There's nothing higher than man.
To experience God, one had to look within man and nature
and find balance in life.
The ying and the yang.
Balancing the ying and the yang.
Taoists reject all human institutions as counter productive.
Government, for example, and big corporations,
and all stuff like that, they, Taoists reject all of that,
because it upsets the balance.
Okay?
Next one is Confucianism, Confucianism, another religion,
not exactly a religion as we understand it,
more of a philosophy,
but a philosophy applied to society like a religion, okay?
Comes from China, founded by Kung-Fu-Tze.
He lived 551 to 478 BC.
The major ideas in Confucianism,
there's no Heaven or Hell for people.
The focus was on the proper relationship between people
in a society by cultivating basic personal virtues.
And so the practice of this quote religion
was the cultivation of these virtues,
things like wisdom, and good morals,
and respect for elders, and so on and so forth.
All of these based on the teachings of Confucius.
So it is a non-spiritual religion.
Next one, Shinto, Shinto coming from Japan.
There's no founder in Shinto.
It evolved from a basic nature religion
and added concepts from Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism.
You're going to find that a lot of religions
are simply a mix of,
they take ideas from different religions,
and they package them in a different way.
Well, Shinto is one of these.
The main idea in Shinto,
it is a mystic nature religion that evolved
into a veneration of the island of Japan itself
as the center of creation with its leaders
as the descendants of the gods.
And this explains the military fanaticism in World War II,
suicide bombers and so on and so forth.
They thought it was impossible for them to lose,
impossible.
The emperor was a god.
You couldn't defeat a god.
And the island itself was a thing made by God
and dropped onto the Earth.
The purpose of the Shinto religion back in the 20s and 30s
was to promote Japanese supremacy,
and of course that stopped after World War II.
One of the conditions of surrender,
one of the conditions of surrender is that they had
to remove that idea from their religious teaching,
and they had to change their flag.
Their flag was a sun with rays going out.
The whole idea is the sun was Japan,
and the rays were its influence throughout the entire world,
all coming back.
After World War II, they had to change their.
If you know what the Japanese flag looks like today,
it's just the sun, there are no rays anymore.
Today, the shrines and temples for Shinto
are mostly devoted to ancestor worship.
They go there to honor their ancestors.
Another one, again,
we're talking about Far Eastern religion,
Buddhism began in India, and China,
and now of course is all over the world.
The founder, Siddhartha Gautama,
he lived 563 to 480 BC.
So there are a lot of religious founders
that lived in the same era.
He was called the enlightened one, the Buddha.
The main idea of Buddhism, first of all,
there is no one personal supreme being.
Life is a mixture of spirits, gods, beings that are all
in a continuous process of becoming part of the whole.
The state of nirvana is reached when a person ceases
to desire a conscious independent life
and is fully absorbed into the whole.
One Buddhist saying is that you are like a drop of water
that is absorbed into the ocean.
It ceases to be itself, and it becomes part of the whole.
They use meditation, yoga, self-denial, study
in order to reach that state of nirvana,
that state of no longer desiring to be self or independent.
The next group of religions.
So these are the Far Eastern religions,
Taoism, Confucianism, Shinto, and Buddhism.
The next ones are the Eastern religions,
The first of which is Hinduism, which began in India.
It is the oldest organized religion still practicing today.
It began roughly 2000 BC.
There is no founder, it evolved.
Another religion that evolved from nature religion.
This is why I talked about primitive religion,
because a lot of the organized religions
evolved from primitive religions,
and Hinduism is an example of that.
Evolved from nature religion,
and it evolved into a social system
that produced four stratas or castes in Indian society,
with the priestly or the religious leaders at the top,
and then going down,
the Brahman class at the top
and then the poor at the bottom.
And you couldn't come out of one caste into another.
Hinduism, similar to Buddhism
in that the goal of life is complete oblivion.
They call it Moksha,
and merging with Brahma, who is the ultimate life power,
who is an impersonal spirit force.
Good deeds, self-denial, the practice of yoga,
avoiding bad karma,
all of this helps the soul to finally reach Moksha,
and it may take several life times in several forms
before you reach Moksha.
You may come back as another person.
You may come back as an animal.
As many times as it takes.
The reason that the cow is so revered in Hinduism is because
of the belief that the cow is the final state, before you,
whoever's come back as cow
is in the final state before reaching Moksha,
and so to destroy the animal would be to destroy
that person's chance to finally reach his or her destiny.
I know you're shaking your heads,
but this is what these religions are.
Now in all fairness, you're listening,
and you probably know something about this
and people watching online, so on and so forth.
We are going at lightning speed through these, and it's not,
I'm not meaning to disrespect any of these religions.
We're just trying to, a little thumbnail sketch of each one
to give you an idea where they fit in, okay?
Another Eastern religion, Jainism.
Jainism began in India.
The founder, Nataputta Vardhamana.
Nah, did I get it?
Vardhamana, that's it, Vardhamana, 599 to 527 BC.
The main ideas in Jainism,
well Jainism is similar to both Hinduism and Buddhism
in that the goal is Moksha or nirvana.
The difference, however, is two fold.
One, the only way to reach it
was self-discipline and self-denial, not knowledge.
In Hinduism or Buddhism, knowledge could get you there.
Knowledge could get you there.
But in Jainism, only self-denial could get you to Moksha.
And also another difference, once you reached it however,
the individual becomes part of the whole,
but is not completely oblivious.
The individual still has consciousness.
So, you see the difference?
I told you, some of these religious founders took ideas,
good ideas from the religions around them
and added their own idea.
The founder, it is said, starved himself to death
after claiming to have reached Moksha in his lifetime.
Sikhism, another Eastern religion.
Sikhism began in Pakistan.
The founder Nanak.
This one is a more modern one, 1469.
He lived 1469 to 1558 AD.
Main ideas in Sikhism,
well Nanak lived in an area
that bordered Hindus and Muslims,
and so his religion is a combination
of Hindu and Muslim ideas.
He kept the idea of Moksha
in Hinduism and the reincarnation,
but he borrowed the monotheism from Islam.
Okay?
And so in Sikhism, one reaches Moksha
through the love of God and doing good.
Moksha is a conscious experience.
Borrowed that from Jainism, and Judaism, and Christianity,
but anyways, borrowing ideas.
He rejected the Hindu caste system.
He believed and taught in an equal society.
He believed in the brotherhood of all men.
Sikhism was ruled by a succession of gurus,
the last of which, Guinde Singh, required all devotees
to add the term Singh, which means lion, to their names
and carry the five K's, the five K's,
the kesh, which is the long hair or the turban,
the kangha, the comb, the kachh, the shorts,
the kara, the steel, the bracelet,
and the kirpan, which is the dagger or the sword.
And carrying these five items were a sign
that they belonged to this particular religion.
A very colorful religion also, a very interesting history.
They became excellent military warriors.
They were hired by the English as bodyguards, and so.
So those are the Eastern religions,
Hinduism, Jainism, and Sikhism.
Now we go to Near Eastern religions,
the first of which is Zoroastrianism.
So as we begin the Eastern religions,
we're going to be looking
at groups we know a little bit more about,
not so much the first one, Zoroastrianism,
founder, Zoroaster.
The main ideas behind Zoroastrianism,
these were based on the visions of Zoroaster.
He was a monotheist.
He taught that doing good and avoiding evil
brought one to God in Heaven.
They used fire in their worship system.
They believed that God sent a special envoy
every thousand years called Sadshyant.
Some think that the wise men
who visited Jesus were Zoroastrians.
There are only a few thousand of them left today.
They live mostly in Mumbai,
which is the former Bombay area of India.
Another Eastern, Near Eastern religion, Islam.
Founder Mohammed lived 570 to 632 AD.
The main ideas based on the visions of Mohammed,
and writing of these in the Koran as the final word of God.
Man goes to paradise through complete submission to God.
That's the main idea of Islam.
As a matter of fact, the word Islam means surrender.
Submission to God is exercised through the practice
of five pillars, the five pillars of Islam.
Number one, confession.
Repeating the phrase there is no god but Allah,
and Mohammed is his prophet over and over.
Number two, alms, giving 2% to Zakat.
Three, prayer five times a day facing Mecca.
Fasting during the holy month of Ramadan.
And pilgrimage, once in a lifetime,
every Muslim is obliged to go to Mecca as a pilgrimage.
If he cannot physically go there,
he can pay for someone else to go in his or her stead.
Originally, this religion was spread through military means.
Different groups within Islam
often are in conflict with each other.
Well I mean, the news, we've had nothing but that
in the last decade, haven't we?
But they're are many groups within Islam,
the Sunnis, the Shiites, the Soffiis,
they're like the Pentecostals, the Soffiis,
the Bahai, the Black Muslim, the Islam Nation.
Much of the fighting today is between Sunnis and Shiites
over the true inheritor of Mohammed's authority.
That's what the fight is ever,
if you ever wonder why are the Sunnis and the Shiites,
why are they fighting among themselves?
Well, they have a different opinion
as to who inherited the authority of Mohammed.
Okay?
The next Near Eastern religion, Judaism.
The founder, Abraham,
lived approximately 2000 years before Christ.
The main ideas of Judaism,
it is the earliest of the truly monotheistic religions.
In Judaism, God has chosen the Jewish race
to be his special representative
and will bless the world through them.
Keeping God's laws contained in Jewish scriptures
given to Moses and the prophets
keeps you as God's people and blessed here on Earth.
The Jew, different Jewish groups
don't have a consistent view
of the reality of the afterlife.
They have different points of view
as far as that's concerned.
Main temple used for worship was in Jerusalem.
It was destroyed in 70 AD by the Roman army.
Synagogues are now used
for assembly, prayer, singing, and readings.
Modern Judaism has three main groups,
one, the Reform Judaism.
They're the liberal branch.
They try to reconcile the beliefs in the Jewish scriptures.
They try to reconcile these
to modern science and modern society.
They're the ones who promote the modern state of Israel.
That's where the money comes from, from the Reform Jews.
Then you have Conservative Judaism.
They still hold to the concept
of a messiah or a personal savior to come.
And then you have Orthodox Judaism.
These hold to the historical practice and beliefs
of ancient Judaism, except for animal sacrifices.
They're extremely conservative
in the way they dress and religious law.
They also claim biblical geographic border of Israel,
and that's where the fighting
takes place among the Jews today.
The Orthodox Jews believe that Israel
is the Israel that's in the Bible,
not the Israel where the Palestinians
have carved out a piece here and a piece there,
and the Jordan is moved.
They want the whole thing as it is in the Bible.
And so when you hear about the settlers,
the settlers have made a settlement,
and they refuse to move, and the Israeli army is goin'
in there and getting 'em out of there,
well they're settling disputed land,
claiming that that land is part of the,
is part of the historical homeland of the Jews.
So very interesting.
And then, of course, Christianity.
The founder of Christianity, Jesus Christ,
lived 4 BC to approximately 29 AD.
Main ideas of Christianity, Jesus Christ
is the promised Messiah or savior of the Jewish religion.
He is the embodiment of God in human form,
and thus his teachings and commands have divine authority.
He performed public miracles.
He was executed by the Roman government,
but rose from the dead after three days,
appeared to his disciples for 40 days,
and then ascended to Heaven.
Christianity believes that the death of Christ
pays mankind's moral debt before God,
and people are saved from judgment by faith in Jesus
and will live a conscious eternal life with God.
Alright, so in brief form, those are the summaries
that describe the world's 11 major religions.
Now most of this session has dealt with the description
of the major religions that exist today.
I'd like to finish this lesson,
and I ask that you be patient with me a little bit here,
by listing three reasons why Christianity
is the superior religion among all of the religions,
including the primitive religions
described at the start of our class.
Three reasons, very briefly,
why I believe Christianity is superior.
Number one, Christianity has a superior revelation of God.
Most religions have a very limited view of God
as either an impersonal force
or a kind of a superhuman being.
Christianity reveals that God is pure spirit
with consciousness, will, power, knowledge,
moral force, and communicative power.
Christianity explains what kind of being God is
as well as what he wants from us and for us
in the clearest of terms.
There's no mystery.
We get more information about God
from the Christian religion than we do
from any other of the world religions.
And that's not a statement from someone
who favorizes Christianity, that's just objectively true.
I mean, if you were just to list all the things you know
about God from Christianity, the list is very long.
Number two, supremacy of the Christian religion.
We have a superior leader.
All of the religions have men or women as leaders,
prophets, gurus, priests, et cetera.
Christianity has God himself as the leader
in the form of a human being, Jesus Christ.
In the Christian religion,
the leader is always alive and present to direct
and encourage his followers in every generation.
I mean, Mohammed is dead.
The Buddha is dead.
And all those religions acknowledge
that their leaders are dead.
Christianity is the only religion
who said no our leader is still alive.
He lives.
Number three, Christianity offers a superior solution
to the problems of humanity.
Other religions offer to solve humanity's problem
by imposing religious rules or practices
or a final solution after death occurs.
Christianity, on the other hand,
identifies the underlying problem
that causes the human suffering that we see,
and that is separation from God because of disobedience
to God's laws, which is sin, which leads to guilt and shame,
rebellion, death, judgment, and condemnation.
And so in Christianity, the problem is identified.
In Christianity, a solution is offered.
God himself takes the responsibility
for paying off mankind's moral debt
through the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ.
In Christianity,
God does for humans what humans cannot do for themselves,
and that is eliminate guilt
by eliminating the moral debt caused by sin.
No other religion even deals with the issue.
I mean, Buddhism denies that sin exists.
Hinduism, the main teaching is simply
to accept your position and life after life after life
to try to work yourself into perfection.
Christianity actually changes things.
In Christianity, people don't find salvation
based on their ability to practice their religion
or observe moral codes as in the case
of every other organized religion.
I'll tell you something.
Every organized religion other than Christianity
is based on law, on the principle of law.
You have to do something.
In Christianity, God himself through Jesus Christ
saves people based on their faith in him.
The practice of their religion and the keeping
of moral codes are ongoing expressions
of that faith initially demonstrated
through repentance and baptism,
but this is not the dynamic that ultimately saves them.
In other religion, man pulls himself up to God
through the five pillars, or the five K's, or a pilgrimage,
pulls himself up to God.
In Christianity, God reaches down and takes man,
and he brings man up to himself.
That's the difference between Christianity
and the other 10 world religions.
And then, Christianity offers a better hope.
Far Eastern and Eastern religions' best offer
is that the individuals cease to be at death or even sooner.
Islam and Judaism offer a paradise
that is much like here on Earth, only better.
In many respects,
this is what primitive religions also offer,
safety here and an ideal situation after death.
Why do they call it the happy hunting ground?
'Cause paradise is like they'll be plenty of hunting,
plenty of fishing.
Christianity, however, offers its followers the hope that,
while they are alive here on Earth,
they can expect freedom from guilt, peace of mind,
loving relationships with other believers,
greater insight into the mind of God,
and a spiritual renewal, and on and on the gifts from God.
In addition to these things,
Christians can look forward to an afterlife
where they are conscious spirits with a personal identity,
where they are free from physical limits,
including sin and death, and where they are joined to God
in an intimate personal relationship for eternity.
I mean, there are many more reasons we can argue
why Christianity is superior,
the greatest number of followers,
the most historical written records,
eye witness accounts of Jesus' life,
a positive impact of Christianity in the world.
I mean, we could just keep goin' on and on.
But I've only given a few in this lesson
to highlight the superior nature
of Christianity and its claims,
and I hope that this will be enough to build your faith
and to give you security in the Christian religion.
Alright, so in our remaining five lessons of the series,
we going to examine more closely the Christian faith
and the lifestyle of those who practice it.
So our next lesson will deal with the Bible.
Why do Christians believe that the Bible comes from God?
Alright, that's our lesson for this time.
Thank you for staying with me a little bit longer
than usual, but we covered 12 religions.
That's a lot for 35 minutes.
Alright, we'll see you next time.