Nuggets from "An Urgent Call to a Serious Faith" by Dave Hunt

Nuggets from “An Urgent Call to a Serious Faith” by Dave Hunt

It is astonishing how many millions of otherwise seemingly intelligent people are willing to risk their eternal destiny upon less evidence than they would require for buying a used car. Thomas Hobbes, for example, a seventeenth-century philosopher and mathematician who spent years analyzing the evil in man and attempting to find a social system to bring universal peace in this brief life, failed to make adequate investigation and preparation for the next life, which will never end. Consequently, as death approached, he made this sad confession, “Now I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.” It seems irrational to take a leap into the dark in any direction—but into eternity?

Omar Khayyam viewed death as the door of darkness to “the road, which to discover we must travel, too.” But it’s too late once one has passed through that “door” onto that unknown road. Thus, Shakespeare suggested that “in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause.” But more than “pause” to reflect, we need certainty and we need it now, backed not by wishful thinking but by solid evidence.

Whatever expectations people entertain of life after death, such beliefs are generally categorized as part of their religion. Another word for religion is “faith,” and by that definition, there are many “faiths in the world. “People of faith” (a term used for those who hold to some religious belief) are joining together in political and social action, supposedly to make a better world…

This cooperation to improve society for mutual benefit has brought a new tolerance for all religions, no matter how contradictory their opposing views. And here we face another anomaly: according to recent polls, a surprisingly high percentage (the majority among both Catholics and Protestants) of those who identify themselves with a particular religion nevertheless believe that many other religions, if not all, will also take their followers to whatever “heaven” they offer.