Let there be no mistake:

During my journeys around the internet, I occasionally run across an atheist who says "You'd have to be insane to be a Christian." I got called a "Christophrenic" once, which made me chuckle a bit. Being the philosopher I am, I figured I'd overthink and codify a point I've been trying to make for a couple years now that the posters I've talked would probably hate hearing. Here it is:

Let there be no mistake: I am saying, with full knowledge of the options, that either God exists, OR I am a madman of the highest order.

I do not live a life that allows for me to be "mistaken" about my faith in Christ. If Jesus is not God, and God does not exist, then I am a man with a severe mental illness who talks to the voice in his head, and dangerous to the extreme because of the utter disregard he has for the consequences of obeying the voice.

It bothers me intensely when I hear "Christians" say things like "Science doesn't support Creationism, so I'm an evolutionist, but I'm a Christian too" then go on to explain that only a madman disregards scientific evidence. I hear folks say that they can't have faith because it doesn't make sense. I see all these people who stand there and say "Fundamentalist Christians are lunatics because they believe the Bible!" (Thrown in exclamation points and profanity where necessary.)

Well, yeah, it would take someone absolutely insane to do that. Someone like...me. I'll be that guy.

I'm done dancing around the honesty of what having faith in Christ really means. Faith is not science. Faith is not weighed and measured, and decided based upon the evidence. Faith is an suspension of disbelief. It believing in things we cannot see, and trusting that things will happen.

I'm sick and tired of people trying to make "faith" and "reason" coexist inside Christianity. To be fair, Christianity makes sense, but not because the evidence supports it, or because Jesus is performing miracles in Central Park every Sunday morning before His sermon. It certainly doesn't make sense because Jesus was a "moral teacher with a good message" as I heard one man say.

No, Christianity makes sense because every madman's leap of faith I've ever made has paid off. The voice in my head, the one I pray to and call God, is right every time. Every. Single. Time I have ever placed my trust in God, I've been rewarded. There have been things that I do not understand, of course, and not everything has worked out like I thought it should, but my life has gotten better, and more rewarding, every time.

It makes sense because of Faith, because of trust placed in the the barely-comprehensible God, through which things begin to make sense in the way that JFK assassination theories make sense once all the parts of the conspiracy are seen. Disregarding small pieces of Christianity because they don't make sense soon leads to larger and larger chunks not making sense, and it all falls apart. If Jonah never got swallowed by a fish, then what was Jesus talking about when He talked about the "sign of Jonah"?

Much like C. S. Lewis stated, Jesus is either exactly who He said He was, or He was a madman, or He was the Devil himself. His followers, the ones who actually place their faith in Him, are much the same: We are either right, or we are utterly insane. Jesus wasn't asking for people to believe small things that aren't very important, or to make only a few small changes to the way they lived, and anyone who is actually trying to follow Jesus' teaching isn't making minor changes to their lives.

Jesus asked people to leave their families, and their jobs, and everything they'd ever known to follow Him. He didn't offer it as a career improvement, with better benefits and vacation pay, or even dental benefits, He promised that His followers would be hated, and that it would suck intensely.

Christianity is not a religion that can be added to one's life, it replaces it. Choosing Christ is choosing to change everything. It's choosing to leave your old life, with your old ways of acting, your old ways of thinking, and the old places, behind. It's choosing to become an entirely new person.

It is choosing to adopt a way of life that, should you be wrong, means you have chosen insanity, but if you are correct, means that you've chosen an eternity with God. You can choose to try walking on water in Faith, or you can choose to stay in the boat because the idea of walking on water is crazy, but you cannot choose to both walk on water and say that it makes sense.