Why It's Worth Taking a Deeper Look at Christianity
Yes, even if you don't believe
In a classic episode of Seinfeld, George Costanza decides to convert to Latvian Orthodox Christianity. He does this so that he can stay in a relationship with a woman whose family would only accept a member of their own faith. As he is meeting with the elders at the church, they ask him about his acquaintance with the religious texts. “I’m familiar with the basic plot,” George responds. Comedic genius aside, this line seems to reflect many people’s dismissive attitude towards Christianity and religious wisdom in general. And this attitude, I believe, is very unwise.
Before I explain why, let me make clear that I’m not Christian. However, I have become more and more Deist in my thinking recently. I find the fine-tuning of the universe, the mystery of subjective consciousness, and the moral law to all be fascinating and persuasive arguments for the existence of some sort of divinity. But more than anything, my own spiritual experiences of overwhelming love and overwhelming awe at the beauty of art—specifically music—give me moments where I am most confident there is something. Some higher force, one that often feels like it is full of love.
But all of this sentiment does not mean I’ve suddenly jumped to the conclusion that a particular religion is true or the right one. The cliché response a Christian or Muslim or (insert religion) might say is that I now must take a “leap of faith.” But is that phrase not just a euphemism for willful delusion? It’s like, I don’t think that Jesus was born of a virgin, or that a man named Moses made an entire sea open up and close on cue, for the same reason I don’t believe that Luke Skywalker fought Darth Vader a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. These are fantastical fictions.
As Sam Harris recently pointed out in a recent conversation with Doug Wilson, you can imagine if someone told a Christian about a man doing similar miracles now, in 2025—and that he had attracted a following, presumably the Christian would say that he and his followers are crazy. Or blasphemous. Or heretical. Yet stuff like that is somehow believable when it comes to the Bible, describing things that were purported to have happened thousands of years ago, in a pre-scientific, pre-Enlightenment world, amongst people who were largely illiterate, and almost certainly more superstitious and gullible.
Additionally, just because the profound mysteries of being are mysteries does not mean the Bible has all the answers. And I must admit, uncertainty is more comforting to me. Despite my admiration for parts of it, if the Bible did indeed have the correct answers, I would be disappointed. In an emotional sense.
Just as the worldview of the hardcore materialist atheist is unsatisfying to me, so is the worldview of the dogmatically committed religious zealot. If Jesus—in other words, an Aramaic-speaking guy from the Middle East a few thousand years ago—really was everything the Gospels say he was, I would be so damn confused, and sort of weirded out. I’d ask God endless questions: “Really? That is it? Why? And why couldn’t you have made it clearer? And why couldn’t you have had the Bible be a better book, and not include, say, all the stuff about slavery? And now everyone else who didn’t believe in this book is damned for eternity? Seriously? Is that not absolutely psychopathic and twisted?” Think about it.
But now, since that was probably the harshest introduction you’ll ever see in a piece about the merits of Christianity, let’s get into it.
First off, if you wanted to say I’m a cultural Christian, you could. I went to a Catholic high school, after all. And there are norms and values I take for granted as self-evident, that appear not to have been self-evident to humans before the dawn of the Gospels, as Tom Holland points out in his book Dominion.
Speaking of the Gospels, the simple fact that they are still around and widely read tells you pretty much everything you need to know. They are Lindy, having survived a rigorous selection process, and stood the test of time. Books that are this old still being read and talked about today is a strong indicator they contain timeless wisdom. Think of other classics like Meditations, The Bhagavad Gita, and The Tao Te Ching.
Needless to say, there are still parts of the Bible I disagree with or find completely ridiculous. But clearly there is value. And much more than that, it is the people and the faith communities that catch my attention and make it worth thinking about. Obvious exceptions like violent cults and inquisitions aside, every genuinely Christian person I’ve ever known seems to possess a rare level of kindness. It’s a type of graciousness that can sometimes be shocking. There is so much love in them that you can’t help but be inspired.
It makes you wonder if there is anything else that gets people to behave like that. As far as I can tell right now, there isn’t. Run clubs and yoga classes and sports teams don’t. Stoicism and self-help books and internet “communities” don’t. And it’s not even close. All those activities and ideas largely have positive effects, but they often don’t have the truly profound ones that religious faith does.
And this phenomenon makes me think of a pretty persuasive sociological argument for Christianity that goes something like this: without religion—without a collective belief in a higher power—societies tend to descend into chaos, with destructive ideologies rushing to fill the void. Intellectuals often point to Communism, Nazism, and even today’s Wokeism as examples. Humans are hardwired to worship, and it’s better to worship God than the false idols of these “new religions.” It is the classic Nietzsche idea: If God is dead, something else will fill that void.
While there is some good sense in this perspective, in my view it still does not mean that the Bible is the ultimate source of truth. It seems to be more of a human psychology problem than anything. Just because many people can’t bear life without religion, doesn’t neccesarily mean that Adam did indeed live for 930 years! Moreover, closer inspection reveals something condescending about this sociological argument that if we don’t believe in Christianity then we’re doomed to become blue-haired Communists. As Richard Dawkins says in his article The myth of the God-shaped hole:
How patronizing, how insulting to imply that, if deprived of a religion, humanity must ignominiously turn to something equally irrational. If I am to profess a faith here, it is a faith in human intelligence strong enough to doubt the existence of a God-shaped hole.
Now, I’m not an atheist like Dawkins. I’m currently reading The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley, and the central claim of this book has put words to my metaphysical intuitions. It says that there is a Divine Ground that the mystics of every great religion have experienced, and indeed anyone can experience through a number of ways—be it ethical behavior, community service, psychedelics, art, fasting, meditation, prayer, unconditional love. It is not saying that every religion is saying the same thing. It is obvious that they are not, as a brief reading of all of the major religions’ primary texts will reveal.
What the book is saying, however, is that there are religious experiences that transcend specific faiths. It is much like the parable of the blind men and the elephant. People of any religion might feel a different part of the elephant’s body and draw their own conclusions about what it is. But fundamentally, it is the same thing. It is God, whatever that means or is. It is the Divine.
So I’m on board with all that. But that doesn’t stop the specific dogmas of specific religions from turning me off. As someone allergic to groupthink and superstition, pretty much every time I go to a Sunday Mass I feel repulsed. I’m sorry if that sounds harsh, but it’s just the truth. I’ll be super impressed by the love in the eyes of Christians, then join them for a sermon at church and feel totally disillusioned.
For example, I recently attended one in which the pastor was talking about the Book of Revelation. With great confidence, he talked about how at the end of time, all the world’s land masses will come back together, forming Pangaea again, and the Church of David will be in the middle, with a Golden Throne that Christ shall be sitting on. Being so sure about something with such a radically low probability is—to put it nicely—utterly insane to me. His reason for saying this—apart from the Bible of course—was that if we look at the tectonic plates we can see how this will happen. To risk stating the obvious, I wasn’t persuaded by this “evidence.” All the while, people were nodding along while he spoke. It felt like aggressive gaslighting.
I also wish religious people would look into secular or Enlightenment ideas and philosophies more. It’s hard to take some of them seriously intellectually when they are not even engaging with the side they disagree with. “He who knows only his side of the case knows little of that,” John Stuart Mill famously said. I try my best to engage any and all perspectives. I read the Gospels, Genesis, Exodus, and Revelation, in addition to The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, and The Reason for God by Tim Keller. But where are the Christians reading Waking up by Sam Harris, The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch, On The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, Essays and Aphorisms by Arthur Schopenhauer, and The Myth of Sisyphus Albert Camus? I’m sure they exist, and for those types I have enormous respect. But they seem few and far between.
Despite all of this, I’ve decided that I will continue to read the Gospels, and hear Christians out with an open mind. It’s what Jesus would do.
Just want to say how impressed I am with your commitment to the long game of exploring and interrogating your own thinking and perspectives weighed up against consistent study and inquiry into human matters.