I've nearly finished writing 321 - the evangelistic book. At the end I'm briefly addressing 10 common objections to Christianity. Can you help me with some quotes of people who have put these objections famously or powerfully?
Ok, but is it true?
Can we trust the Bible?
I'm not religious, why bother with God?
How can anyone join the church with all its hate and hypocrisy?
How does a Good God fit with evil and suffering?
Isn’t religion one of the world’s great problems?
Why not other faiths?
How does a loving God fit with judgement?
Why are Christians so weird about sex and sexuality?
Aren’t believers anti-science?
“It’s always interesting to watch what happens when people who insist that God would never judge them come face to face with undeniable evil. Confronted with some truly horrific evil, then they want a God of justice — and they want him now. They want God to overlook their own sin, but not the terrorist’s. ‘Forgive me,’ they say, ‘but don’t you dare forgive him!’ You see, nobody wants a God who declines to deal with evil. they just want a God who declines to deal with their evil.”
Greg Gilbert, What Is the Gospel? (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2010), 44.
There is a difference between doubt and unbelief. Doubt is a matter of the mind. We cannot understand what God is doing and why He is doing it. Unbelief, however is different. Unbelief is a matter of the will. Unbelief is a willful choice not to believe.
- Pr. Greg Laurie
Here's one from an Orthodox Jew who even believed the resurrection, but thought Jesus was only a prophet:
"If the resurrection of Jesus from the dead on that Easter Sunday were a public event which had been made known...not only to the 530 Jewish witnesses but to the entire population, all Jews would have become followers of Jesus." -Pinchas Lapide
And from the other-side (though you didn't ask for it), here's one in regards to the question of why weird on sex:
"Establishments often populated by those who realize that loneliness is more than the burden of time and who are beguiled by another fiction: that loneliness can be conquered by erotic infatuation. Here are folk, whether men or women, whether looking for the same or the other sex, for whom seduction becomes a way of life, who insist on the importance of what meets the eye – physique, clothes, the appearance of youth. Here are the lonely whose search for a partner is so dangerous, so stimulating and so exhausting that the search itself provides an apparent escape from loneliness. But when a partner is found for an hour or a night or a transient affair, the search immediately resumes, becomes compulsive. And while erotic companionship seems more appealing – and more human – than resignation to boredom, while touching another may be more intimate and more honest than watching another, no one may really find his own identity in another, least of all in the body of another. Perhaps this is the most absurd fiction of them all: the notion that is present, primitively, in erotic partnerships but also very often in other relationships – between parents and children, in friendship, in marriage – that one’s own identity must be sought and can be found in another person" -William Stringfellow
If you wanted some pithy objections, you could probably flip through Bertrand Russell's book on why he's not a believer.
Cal
On sex/freedom/meaning/truth:
"I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption... The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantegous to themselves... For myself... the philosophy of meaningless was essentially an instrument of liberation... sexual... [and] political."
"Our conviction that the world is meaningless is due in part to the fact (discussed in a later paragraph) that the philosophy of meaningless lends itself very effectively to furthering the ends of political and erotic passion; in part to a genuine intellectual error -- the error of identifying the world of science, a world from which all meaning has deliberately been excluded, with ultimate reality." (p. 267)
Both from Aldous Huxley.
For suffering I'm sure there are many, this might give you some ideas http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawsuits_against_God
For the philosophical formulation (as opposed to the existential above) Epicurus or Hume have good pithy quotes.
Very, very helpful guys. Thanks so much!
A few more:
see here and search "religion", "Christianity" and "Jesus" and there quite a few good ones.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Maher
From the Simpsons:
1) Lisa: The Mound Builders worshipped turtles as well as badgers, snakes & other animals.
Bart: Thank god we've come to our senses and worship a carpenter who lived two thousand years ago.
2) Marge: We're visiting Grandpa
Homer: No fair, we just went to church!
Bart: Yeah! So we've already heard stories from thousands of years ago about stuff that didn't happen.
3)Bart: Whoa, cool! God is so in your face!
Homer: Yeah he's my favourite fictional character!
4) Reverend Lovejoy: Everything is a sin. You ever sat down & read this thing? Technically, we're not allowed to go to the bathroom.
5) Homer: I'm not a bad guy! I work hard & I love my kids. So why should I spend half my Sunday hearing about how I'm going to hell?
6) Homer: Suppose we’ve chosen the wrong god. Every time we go to church we’re just making him madder and madder.
If you wanted more buying this might be a good option http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Gospel-According-Simpsons-Spiritual/dp/0664224199/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1397724657&sr=8-1&keywords=gospel+according+simpsons
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Religulous
How about using some images? Damien Hirst rails against the things that we put our trust in when faced with our own mortality - religion being one of them. This is a really great blog post from Gareth that unpicks some themes that might link to the objections you're dealing with?
http://garethleaney.wordpress.com/2011/02/18/jesus-and-damien-hirst-laughing-at-life-and-death/