#610 How To Compare Religions; Unmasking the Uniqueness of Christianity

Before I bring Matthew on , I want to just touch on a sponsor of ours for today's show . I want to introduce AIM Utility Advisors , owned and operated by the Lally family , who are local Catholic friends , supporters of our work at the John Paul II Renewal Center .

I've known him for many , many years , so I ask you this if you have a business that is prepared for the increased energy prices starting in June 2025, ? Aim Utility Advisors is family owned . They're an energy brokerage and consultancy company that's been helping small and medium businesses reduce energy costs for over 30 years .

Aim will put together a straightforward savings plan tailored to your business needs . When I was in business for myself , I always used an energy brokerage company . Aim operates without a quota , so you can request a no-pressure cost analysis through their website . It's free . Go to aimenergygroupcom . That's aimenergygroupcom .

See the show notes for my friend TJ Lawley's direct phone number . I'll have a link in there for their website and be sure to tell them that Jack said hello . Just spoke to him not too long ago , matthew . It's so good to be with you , brother . Thank you for having me on .

When we're speaking to young people , old people , everybody . It's a confusing time . And you wrote this article how to Compare Religions . It's really showing that Christianity is different . And you did so by visiting one of my favorite friends of all time , who is GK Chesterton . For people that aren't familiar with GK Chesterton , he's kind of a one-of-a-kind guy too .

I mean an incredible way that he expresses himself , the thoughts that he has . He only had a high school education at GK Chesterton , but a mind was just all over the place Amazing . So , matthew , how did you end up writing the article ?

And , of course , tell us a little bit more about your background , because they'll know why you're also enamored with GK Chesterton .

Let me go back and read . And so I just prepared to teach a class . I dived in and started reading . I think I read Orthodoxy about a dozen times in the three months leading up to the spring semester so I could teach it well and a ton of other books about him and I just absolutely fell in love .

That fundamentally changed my outlook on life and fundamentally changed my theology , my philosophy . Just totally fell in love with Chesterton , his way of thinking . I think it's extremely practical , extremely useful , extremely timely . He was writing 100 years ago , an absolute prophet .

He foresaw the Nazis coming to power and almost everything they were going to do , hitler's hatred for the Jews . He foresaw it all . And then , of course , he died before World War II ever started , in like 36 or 37 . He died something like that , but he foresaw everything . He was a great prophet , a total master of the Catholic tradition .

Like you said , he only had a high school diploma but he read everything . He was just a vicious reader read everything . It seems to have kind of had a deep understanding of everything he read too , if you read some of his books in the time he was writing .

The mode wasn't to constantly mention your sources and mention oh , by the way , I'm responding to this person . Oh , by the way , I learned from this person . Mode wasn't to give citations , but you can see he's involved , like referencing everybody ever Aristotle , plato , thomas Descartes , kant , nietzsche .

He mentions Nietzsche by name sometimes , but he's thinking and engaging with everybody . So when you read something like orthodoxy , you're engaging with the entire intellectual tradition of the West in 200 pages .

He has the kind of point of the bigger book , his main , his magnum opus , his great work , everlasting man , which is also like the only book he really thoroughly edited Orthodoxy . He didn't really edit , he just wrote it and sent it off and published it .

But the one book he really worked on for a longer period of time and thought through a really , really deep layer and edited is Everlasting man .

That's like his main work , so to speak , and the point of Everlasting man is to show , well , christianity is one true faith , the Catholicism was one true faith , and so in the process of that , he gives a method for how we can compare religions , compare belief systems , and I think that's just incredibly useful for us today , when there are so many ideologies and

things being put out to us as live options , options , and there's so much discussion of what's the truth , faith , where , where's the truth be found , isn't an orthodoxy , isn't catholicism , proselytism , islam .

I had a friend who was grew up a prostitute , went to iraq as a soldier , converted to muslim , to islam , then came back to america as an islam muslim , then eventually became orthodox like a greek orthodox christian and then eventually went back to pros as a Muslim , then eventually became Orthodox like a Greek Orthodox Christian and then eventually went back to

Protestantism . So just all over the place people are just so many options out there .

But I don't want to get you off tangent too far you know , because usually it goes the other way once you're immersed in that . But hey , to each his own . But you make some really interesting points here and you said his main argument comes in two steps . First , he compares mankind to all other animals and finds that mankind is radically different .

So that's number one we want to explore just at least briefly here . And the second , chesterton compares Christ to all other men and he finds that Christ is radically unique among all religious founders . So you know , this is a confusing time . in the church we get some crazy ideas all the way at the Vatican , you know , all the way through .

So this is a great time to be talking about it . So why don't ?

If you want to sum it up for people , a couple of things we have that the animals don't have , and sometimes the reason I say this , matthew , and I want to take a couple of minutes is because a lot of the times the young people don't really think about this right .

They've been told hey , we're all just a bunch of biology and you know blah , blah , blah , and it doesn't take you much to sit in a forest preserve and find out that , hey , we're a little different than the rest of the creatures , right ?

There's no such thing as a spiritual soul . God , you know , we all just made that up . So chesterton begins like tackling that on . It's like no . And so the mode in which he engages this question is he says let's assume man is just an animal . Well , for sake of assumption , for argument , let's just assume man is just an animal like all the others .

Well , then you start looking around and comparing us actually to other animals . You realize there's not much to compare . Instead you can almost only contrast . Like we have this thing called like speech and animals really don't do it like there's all .

Every year you see some article in some science journal oh , the language of dolphins , it's just they make a couple sounds and like not , it's just not very impressive at all . Like animals just don't have speech and language like we do . One proof of that chesterton doesn't say say if we can like , add to it is that we have to learn language .

Humans learn language if . If you don't learn language , if you don't learn to speak by the age of like eight or nine or 10 , you actually never learned to speak , so like if you're like Tarzan , born in a jungle , raised by animals , you don't learn how to speak .

It's actually impossible for you to then learn how to speak If you don't learn yeah , if you don't learn , by the time you're like eight like eight , nine or ten , you never learn .

Uh , so if those kids aren't rescued from their parents and brought to ordinary society by the time they're eight , nine or ten , they just never learn to speak . But animal , and also like our languages , are different . We have hundreds of different languages in the world . Right and like , as history has progressed , our language has progressed .

Like shakespeare's english is different from our english , which is different from early english . So even the same language like changes actually into different languages . Really , animals aren't like that . Even among like one species of animals , the basic sounds they make are all the same .

So you can take a monkey , raise it in isolation with other monkeys , and it's the language , so to speak , that he speaks is exactly the same as the monkeys . The sound , the sounds , the sounds for fear , for pleasure , for pain , are exactly the same as the air monkeys .

So what this proves is animals sounds is pure instance , but for us it's not instinct , we have to learn it and there's different languages , so it's more than instant . So that's like one thing you look at , but also just like obviously you reason capacity to reason . Animals don't have this every like . You might see a monkey use a stick as a tool .

I'm not impressed Like you might occasionally see , like one in the middle of one in a thousand monkeys .

Yeah , so powerful . And then let's hit on one last thing here at least , which is this thing called free will .

I experience , late that , regrets of my choices and judgments and condemnation of myself for past failures I have . I experienced free will . Animals don't seem to have such a thing like that and part of my free will then uh , that chester points to is the choice to worship religion , the , the judgment that I should worship something .

The idea of religion is radically unpractical , actually , like it doesn't really help us in this life . Chiefly , the point of religion is not to live a good life . Now , the point of religion is to honor the deity , to honor the supernatural . You kill your cow to honor God . That doesn't necessarily help you .

Some forms of bad religion , like the classic air of natural religion , is always going to be I kill cow and this convinces God to bring the rain , and even , like Plato and Aristotle are likeato and aerosol . Like this is stupid . We shouldn't be trying to control god with our cows , with our sacrifices and our prayers . God is god . We are not . We serve him .

We don't control him , that's , that's a common error in all religion yeah , and I don't know if a religious instinct of man is radically unique among the animals we're the only ones ones . All men , chesterton points out , feel this religious instinct . We want to worship , we want to bow down and kneel before God .

Animals don't have anything resembling that at all .

This is a big problem , I think , obviously with the technology today . Right , because it spends all the time with this noise and distracting us . The natural man , let's call it , you know , without all the distractions has a natural inclination , when he's sitting in silence , to say there's got to be something more . You feel this movement , right ?

I mean the ancients you mentioned . They would call this often eros , which is , we think of , just erotic or sensual , and it has some components to that . But it's really what is true , what is good , what is beautiful , right ?

But they , the bird , definitely has a better view of the sunset than we do , because it's like flying up there in the sky watching the sunset , but it doesn't seem to stop and then also paint pictures of the sunset . But all humans ever the . What chesterton does here is points . What's the early ?

What are the earliest records of the oldest humans we have as it ? It's paintings , it's art on a wall in the cave , art somewhere . These are the oldest records of human civilization we have . The oldest cave art , I think is something like 50,000 years old . And so he points out art is the signature of man that nobody else , no other animal , does .

Birds build nests , beavers build dams , but they all make them exactly the same style , with no variation . Different species of bird make different types of nests , but within the species they're all the same , and this again proves it's instinct , not choice , and so not art .

So we know , we know mankind is different than the animals and you know that we're unique and it's it's unique right that somehow we're created different and it's not changing . You know , we , I , when I was a kid , matthew , it was that missing link . Right , it was evolution .

It was a missing link and the more we find out about it , the more that link is getting bigger and bigger and and and bigger , right yeah it's been refuted really at this point , so let's in every way .

The only thing , the reason we can survive , is because of our reason , which is , again , unique and different from all the others .

Well , we put that out there and I think it's important for young people all of us again just to sit out , go out and sit in the forest , just your neighborhood forest , because you don't have to go on vacation someplace and just sit in silence and you'll experience , I think , everything that we're talking about here . It's so very real .

And then , once we do that , he starts to compare . Now , okay , we have this movement right of the heart , we're looking for something more . And then , matthew , he gets into your second part of this thing and Chesterton's second part , when he compares Christ to all other men . Let's get into that , because it's really fascinating .

And the way that you caught up on breaking that down too , with him into those four categories , it was really beautiful .

So , instead of naming every religion and all their doctrines or whatever things he said , there's four types , there's four species of religion or genuses of religion , so to speak . First we have monotheism .

This classification , this division , he says , is a psychological division , which means it's a division how this type of religion affects the person , what it reveals about their outlook on life , what it reveals what type of person , what their temperament is . It's not exactly the four temperaments , but that type of thing .

So first we have monotheism , where God , the idea is God is holy , as in other , god is transcendent , he's really far out there , he's really really different from us , god's not like us , he's really far away , he's really really powerful and really , really awesome .

Now , in the state of original sin , in a fallen world , it's hard to know much about the one true God , because we're fallen , because we have darkness of intellect and weakness of will , and so it's hard for us to know anything about God , except that he exists . And so what do we do ?

Well , the pious thing to do , instead of saying wrong things about the one holy , true God who is so far beyond us , is we don't really say anything at all . And so Justin points out that monotheism was probably the earliest belief , because , well , the earliest humans actually , like adam and eve , were like new god and their kids were told about god .

Uh , so monotheism was like the first belief , he points out . In a fallen world , the pious thing to do is kind of to forget god , because if you try and say anything about him you're going to say something wrong . And so monotheism kind of deteriorates . In a fallen world , like where original sin abounds , monotheism kind of deteriorates into polytheism .

He calls this just basically paganism . Paganism , he says , is the second type of religion , and in paganism we know we don't know about God , we're aware of our ignorance about God , but we know there must be a creator of all this thing . Everything we see around us , there's creators . We observe providence .

We know there's a natural law Right is right and wrong is wrong . Certain things are right , certain things are wrong . If you read the agents carefully , you always find some kind of reference to the moral order from the heavens , the moral order from gods like cicero is especially big on . This is very , very clear about this .

We're also seeing some of the greek plays , and plato sometimes too . And so but we know , we don't know anything , we , we're aware of our ignorance . So what do we do ? Well , in order to satisfy our religious instincts , we kind of make stuff up , we tell stories . We have myths . We tell stories about what God might be like .

So Chesterton says paganism is mythic and it's not a description of what is , but a description of what could be or what might be . We almost fantasize about what could be , how great God could be , and we tell stories about that . And over time the stories kind of deteriorate themselves and get less noble and less true .

And now I have to live with an order too in my own heart and in a culture . You have to live with it .

And this , matthew , I just want to stop here for a second because , again , when we're speaking to young people , we live in this age of moral relativism , right , I mean , 90% of the young people surveyed today , whether they really understand what they're saying or not , but 90% would say they're moral relativists . But you can't live like that .

They say they're moral relativists , but that seems to be a defense against moral norms which they find oppressive , so like when somebody says , hey , you shouldn't sleep with your boyfriend or girlfriend , which they're told are oppressive I don't know if they actually understand it or not yeah , actually that's bad , that's wrong , you shouldn't do that they say well , I'm

a moral relativist , that's your opinion , that's not mine . But of course that young man knows that if somebody else touched his girlfriend he'd be angry and he would say what they did was wrong . Somebody else forced themself upon his girl . They'd say that was wrong , you should pay because that was wrong , no matter what you think about it .

So we actually all , everybody believes in some moral , like absolute moral norm . So like , yeah , moral relativism isn't really possible . And this is CS Lewis's point in Abolition of man . You can't actually live as a moral relativist .

You know you , we might have made them up , but a lot of them were good stories , weren't they ?

This is really important when I was when I was studying , even things like you know , even outside of , say , pagan , you know like , like buddhism , hinduism , you know , that's what I found at the end . Nothing against that I . I thought there were some great qualities there , but at the end they just left me like man , it's just like not enough .

Not , there's got to be , another step , you know . So , so , so that that degree of not this completeness right , there's just I , man , there's gotta be something more right . So we go on , don't we ?

They have more power than us if and the point is , if you make a deal with the devil , the devil keeps his promises , kind of like , you can sell your soul and you will get rich from it .

If you sack , if you make a deal , the devil will sacrifice babies to you if you give us victory in battle , devil's very happy to make you victory victorious in battle . if you do all sorts of horrible things to it like , the end result of this course is he takes your soul . You do horrible things .

He takes your soul , but he's very happy to make you rich and powerful and famous in this life and of course he can like . Christianity , especially new Testament , is very clear the earth belongs to Satan . When Satan offers everything , christ says like I will give you these things , christ says , and they're not yours to give , he's well .

No , you should only worship God . So I'm only going to worship God . But he doesn't deny that Satan does have the power over the earth . He does .

You know , matthew , I'm going to just dwell on this again because you're saying so many good things and I don't want people to go over this quick . These powers are real in this world too , you know , so we can talk about . You know there are real witches out there and they're actually growing . There actually are a lot , you know , just like Genesis 3, .

You know you can be like God and you can decide what's good , what's evil . We want that power , don't we ? You see that with the world elites , you know the world elites , look , I'm not going to put you on the spot here , matthew , but I watch them speak sometimes and I'm thinking , man , they have been possessed .

You know whether I'm not talking about a total possession or not , but something's up with that . I mean you talk about , you know , selling your soul to the devil . You know this stuff can really happen .

But of course you do that by trying to control the supernatural powers , by making a deal with them . He says this requires sophistication or civilization , intelligence . He kind of said so , justin kind of flips . We have this idea from I don't know where , but some kind of false idea from modern universities , but that witchcraft is a thing of savages .

The savages were , or the uneducated , the dumb idiots of the past . The unsophisticated , uneducated savages , uncivilized people did witchcraft and human sacrifice and cannibalism . And Cheston flips that and says no , no , no , in order to make a deal with the devil you have to kind of be smart , you have to have a level of intelligence .

So witchcraft type religion , trying to make deals with the devil , you need education . In some sense you need to be like a rather advanced civilization . This isn't the earliest civilizations , like the man in the state of nature , as we're so might put it .

But actually this is only possible for some kind of high level civilization , he points out historically well like the mayans , tons of human sacrifice . That's witchcraft . The babylonians similar things . Carthage he has a whole chapter on carthage and the the war , the punic wars of carthage and rome as the witchcraft religions versus the pagan religions .

That didn't practice witchcraft . Rome did not practice human sacrifice and such things . They told their stories and offered sacrifices , but not human sacrifices . But Carthage did a ton of human sacrifice actually and we always forget that .

You're just trying to have a good life here and now . You recognize some basic moral values , you try to do what's right , have a good life , have happiness here and now , but that's all it is . It's philosophy , not religion . And he says usually in the ancient world these four different types of religions got separated .

They would not be united to each other , they were separate . They were never unified , they were always separate . Things Like Aristotle , who probably had the best idea of God , naturally knowable by reason , so you might say one of the best philosophers , still practiced the pagan mythic cults and stuff like that .

And just to make this point , because you study right now , you're studying St Thomas Aquinas too For people that don't know , I don't realize , or I don't know how many people actually realize , the beauty of our Catholic faith . And this is kind of segue into what we're going to be talking about next with Christianity is , you know , is also eminently practical .

You're right here , but but ? but the Thomists right , they built on Aristotle , you know so they took those ancient Greeks , Plato first , and then , and then St Thomas comes and says you know , let's , let's , let's try to fit Aristotle in here , Right , For for some obvious reasons we won't have time to get into .

But then the divine is built , Christianity is built there , and this is a stable foundation , right ? Yeah , it makes this awe and wonder that we search for this practical idea of philosophy and the divine all together , and it all comes together in this person , doesn't it ?

Christianity is , of course , monotheism , one God , but it's also kind of mythic , like we care about the stories . But Christianity , the story becomes real . God actually comes to earth . The Greeks told stories about God coming and walking among them as like a cow to seduce a girl or whatever , like weird things .

But Christ actually came and walked among us , like the myth became real , so to speak . But also , it's not witchcraft , but it is eminently practical . If you think about the biggest issues , what are the biggest issues we actually faced ? Well , sin , our own evil , evil in the world , moral evil in the world , and death .

And that's what Christianity came to solve . Christ comes to conquer death and give us grace to enable us to live a good , moral life . So Christianity isn't super practical . If you want to get rich , powerful and famous in this life , it is the most practical thing .

If you want salvation and eternal life , if you want perfect , utter bliss and happiness and fulfillment with God , it's the only thing that'll get you that , and anybody that actually tries to conquer sin in their own life realizes that you can't do it on your own .

It's always going to be an encounter with an event , an encounter with a person , and that encounter will give you a new horizon and a decisive direction for your life , and so this is important . You think about all these ancients . They sensed something , even in those stories that they told . Right , it's almost like it was in us .

Matthew , we're fallen again , so we don't grasp it , but even those ancients right in telling these myths about this God coming into Earth . It's almost like man . We need this to happen , and then it happens , and it changes everything , doesn't it ? But my point being , you can encounter this person , and so that's the power of the story here , that's the power .

But also like all your , your imaginations , uh , the , what you wish could be true in the myths . When we talk about the myths , what , everything , all your imaginations , what you wish could be true in the myths , what we talk about in the myths , all your dreams can be met and also you can encounter God . You can be part of the myth .

It's no longer just a story that other people do . It's not just talking about a kid .

But then in baptism God becomes the God of Jack and the God of Matthew . He becomes like our God and we get united into that story . And the story , like Chesterton , ends the everlasting man by talking about the church . But now the church is us . We are members of the church .

We know we want to be part of this bigger story .

We're incorporated into it , we're grafted on branches , grafted onto the vine that is Israel . We are participators in the story of David . That's our story now . And then , of course , christ comes . God enters the story himself . The author of the book has come into the book as a character .

The creator of the video game is now a character you can play with and go on missions with , so to speak . But now God's here and we get baptized into his life , shares in his life , baptized into his death . Christ's death on the cross isn't just a story , it's something we re-present . We make presence at the mass and then we unite ourselves to that .

Our , our lives are united to Christ's life . And also just the whole church , like Acts of the Apostles , part of the Bible is just the story of what the members of the church did . But then , of course , acts of the Apostles ends , but the church doesn't end there . The church keeps going . We are the church .

We are continuing what the apostles did in Acts of the Apostles evangelizing the world and worshiping God . The life of Christ continues in us .

This is really important when those young men , again , this Gen Z men , are waking up and saying something's wrong . That's what everybody was saying , that's what we're saying here .

If , like , I'm not a football athlete , but if I was , like , my greatest dream might have been I'll play with tom brady . Yeah , very few of us actually get to do that . Yeah , very few of us get to storm the beaches of normandy with patton or patton wasn't at normandy but very few of us get to serve under these heroic generals .

Very few of us get to serve under these heroic generals . Very few of us get to fight alongside Achilles or America's great , most decorated warrior oh gosh , what's his name ? The guy from World War II . He was America's most decorated warrior . I forget his name now . It's embarrassing , but , like , very few of us get to fight Now .

We get to be involved with this great captain and savior and king , jesus Christ christ . We get to be his servants and his brothers . We get to call his father father . He came and made his father to be our father and his mother to be our mother . So we get to be brothers with the humanity of christ and so sons in the son of the father .

We get incorporated into this story . And you know , matthew , I wrote an article , boy , it was probably a couple years ago it might have been in the catholic exchange .

Because we're looking for heroes , you know , and it reminds me , you know , the power that you're describing is rising us up to the point where I am the hero , you know , in my own story , as a father , as a husband , as those people and I don't create , I don't say I'm the hero , but I see the way my kids or my grandkids now look at me .

And if you rise up with Christ , you give them a model , even in our fallen nature and I'm very , very fallen , right and far from perfect , and they don't expect me to be perfect , but they still say , hey , if we need something or somebody's on our case , we know we can go to grandpa or dad or whatever . And we all become that hero .

If we take on Christ , if we live as great friends , good husbands , whatever that is , whatever that role , a good priest , a great priest , a bishop you become the hero of your own story , whether people know it or not , they don't see it or not right .

Sometimes you climb pretty quietly on the cross yourself , but you become a hero in the story and I think we all want that , don't we ?

As men , I mean who wants to look back at your life , matthew , when you're 85 years old , sitting on a rocking chair sipping lemonade , thinking about all the things you could have , should have , would have done right , yeah , yeah , it sounds horrible . It does sound horrible . Yeah , but that's where we're going if we're not careful .

Yeah , right , yeah , fearful , yeah , yeah , look at , look at how many . How look ? I'm from chicago 80 of those young boys in the minority homes are grown up without fathers .

You think about the effect that that has on the , on the , on the absent fathers and also on those sons , right , they say most of the , the men in prison it's like a holding pen for children without fathers .

I think in the article I said something like I think if GK was around today he would say the same thing . He would reply what's wrong with this culture , what's wrong with what we see ?

And this includes , like , the difficulties of it , of living it , but it also includes , like believing and embracing the philosophy of the church , the , the truths of the creed of the of the church , which , of course , protects the truth of the church , the truths of the creed of the church , which , of course , protects the truth of the story .

No , jesus literally came and literally died and literally rose from the dead . It wasn't just not , it's not something we made up later on . It's not something Christians , 200 years later , made up and wrote in a book . No , christ literally came and walked in Nazareth , in Jerusalem .

He literally died under this guy punches Pilate , and then he literally rose from the dead body and soul three days later anthony , as we start to get run out of time here , I I want you to stay with that .

He came for what , matthew ? Before the last segment of today's show , I just want to thank our sponsor , aim Energy Group . That's aimenergygroupcom . You know demand for electricity and natural gas is growing tremendously across the nation . Is your business prepared for the resulting cost increase of 15% or more in the coming years ?

As a local , family-owned energy broker and consultant , aim Utility Advisors has been helping small and medium businesses reduce energy costs for over 30 years . Reduce energy costs for over 30 years . Aim will leverage these decades of experience with leading market analytics to produce a straightforward savings plan tailored to your business needs .

Aim operates without a quota , so you can request a no-pressure cost analysis for free through their website , which is aimenergygroupcom . That's AIM , as in A-I-M energygroupcom . See the show notes for my friend TJ Lally's direct phone number and for more information . Back to the concluding episode of today's show . And this is one of the things you say .

This is unique . Nobody else does this . First of all . You say in here , I'll just say it real quick , so I don't goof you up , but he's the only one to claim to be God first of all . Yeah , you say in here , I'll just say it real quick , so , so , so , I don't goof you up , but but you know , he's the only one to claim to be god first of all .

And people don't realize that . The buddha , you say in here , abraham mo , muhammad confucius , they didn't say they were god , did they ? So he says I'm god , and then he comes into the story , but he comes in for a purpose . That kind of blows your mind , doesn't it ?

He had Isaac Confucius taughtdha , taught different things with a philosophy or enlightenment muhammad and conquered and fought christ . Yes , yeah , he taught a lot . Christ the teacher very important , certain amounts as crucial , but christ didn't come mainly as a teacher . They they called him teacher , but he came mainly as the Savior .

This , of course , when Gabriel appears to Mary , who used to celebrate his feast day yesterday , march 25th , you will conceive in your womb a very son and he will save his people from their sins . Christ came to save us from sin and death by the cross .

So of course , fulton Sheen says Fulton Sheen was also a huge fan of Chesterton says Christ is the only man ever born to die . Christ came to die . His mission three years long not very impressive . The lives and careers of all your religious founders were a lot longer than that . Christ was his mission , his public ministry three years and aimed at the cross .

He comes to the cross . He predicts his own death and resurrection and then does it and says on the cross it is finished . This is what he came to do . He didn't come just to teach us moral truth . He wasn't just a moral teacher .

He came to die and save us from our sins and then overcome death in his resurrection , so we could also overcome death in his resurrection as well .

You know , if you get down on your knees and you really ask , right , Matthew , 7 , 7 , huh , Ask , seek and knock , huh . If you do that , he's not going to look , he's not a vending machine , he's not going to just spit out the candy for you . It may take a while .

It may take , because Jesus says hey , Matthew , I want your heart , but I want your effort too . Right , In order to get your heart , you got to put some skin in the game too , but I will give you the grace right to complete that game . And this is something we can encounter . So it's not just like boom , it's over here on the shelf .

That power of the cross that you're talking about , Matthew , we can experience it , we can . The cross is the power of the cross that you're talking about , Matthew .

And the historical proof of the resurrection is that the apostles preached the resurrection at pentecost , 50 days like after the ascension , so something like less than a couple months after the resurrection happened . They preached the resurrection . They said , hey , christ rose from the dead in jerusalem . Jerusalem was not it's not like a modern city .

It was really small , a couple hundred yards across . Everybody there could walk over to the tomb and see the empty tomb so is that right ?

But , like the ancient cities , especially drusum , because the whole city was walled in and because you want to have a walled in city and it's really hard to build walls and build rocks and stuff , so you have a smaller city right and so that's why , like , you sit at the gates of the city to do things , because you don't have these big .

Ancient cities were smaller . Especially drusum was a small city . Everybody could just walk over in a couple minutes or like in an afternoon to go look at the tomb .

You could also go over talk to the talk to the roman soldiers , be them in the tavern or something , and talk to them over a beer , so like and those , and saint paul when he was talking about those 500 witnesses , that some of them were gone then at that time .

I know there's a few things you could probably say , but yeah .

When you try to compare Christianity to other faiths , you end up not being able to compare much because they're so different . You end up almost only being able to contrast . Christianity alone claims that's the founders of God . Christianity alone has the way to overcome , even claims to have the way to overcome sin and death .

Christianity alone combines monotheism with a rich philosophy in Trinitarian theology , with the robust ethical system , with also a real historical story . The vigor that comes with myth and story , because it's a myth come true . Christianity alone does all these things . It's so unique among other faiths the , the .

The vigor that comes with myth and story , because it's a myth come true . Christianity alone does all these things . It's so unique among other faiths , that unique because the self is a big argument in support of its reality whoa .

Anything else you want me to put in the show notes no , no , that's good . All right then . Thanks for joining us everyone . Hope you enjoyed today's show . Talk to you again soon . Bye-bye .