More Than A Carpenter: Jesus Christ and What Makes Him Unique

I’ve really enjoyed this book I’ve been reading “More Than a Carpenter”, by Josh and Sean McDowell. Josh writes that he wanted answers to the meaning of life. “Who am I?”, “Why am I here?”, “Where am I going?” are all questions that he asked himself. When he was young, he got into religious stuff and things. But soon, he felt as if it was all wrong. So, as he says, “I chucked religion”. He decided that education might hold the answers he was seeking. He realized that education had helped him no more than all his religious years when he was younger. But one day, he met a group of Christians who made him realize that there was a difference between Jesus Christ (christianity), and religion. Religion, as he puts it is “humans trying to work their way to God through good works”. He realized they were all wrong and that the answer to life is actually 42.

His friends challenged him to examine Jesus, to take the case apart, piece by piece, and see for himself if Christianity is legit. To narrate the next few chapters lightly to save time, what made Jesus different from all the religious leaders at the time was, simply, none of the other leaders claimed to be God. Jesus CLAIMED to be God, and that is why people hated him. To see a man, appearing equal or lower to/than them, claiming to be (equal to) the almighty God, angered a lot of people. Also, he claimed to have the power to forgive peoples sins, a power which at the time, only the church had “through God”. He claimed to be able to forgive your sins, which by extension, makes him claiming to be equal to/above the church.

Skipping over a bit, he goes on to talk about God, and science. Atheists and other people often dismiss the possibility of a God because you can’t prove it scientifically. The fallacy in this is, people think because you can’t prove something, there’s no chance of it possibly being true. Scientific proof is just that, which is that, if someone denies you, you can simply repeat the action again to prove it. Legal-historical proof, as he calls it, is when something is proven by being so blatantly obvious it would be dumb to argue.

So that’s my summary of the book so far, I like it a lot, it really makes you think! (I quite like books like that :P)