Easley Library Bookworms discussion

A faith commitment to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior involves a repentance from selfishness and egoism, a conscious recognition of God's law and will as the blueprint for human happiness, individual and collective, and a willing self-surrender to God in trust and gratitude. Until a person is ready for this psychologically and spiritually, he/she most likely isn't going to accept any demonstration that Christ's claims are objectively true. Most humans have too stubborn a capacity for blinding themselves to any truth they don't want to acknowledge, or that doesn't serve their own perceived vested interests or appetites. (Recognizing this kind of stubborn bias, and seeing it as an evil to be surmounted, is not the same thing as accepting the postmodernist dictum that objective truth doesn't really exist, and embracing bias as the key to what's subjectively "true for us.")

Given that fact, do books on evidences for the truth of Christianity serve any purpose? I would contend that they do. First, they demonstrate to Christians that our faith rests on a basis, and isn't just another case of believing whatever we want to by fiat. Second, for those non-Christians who DO care about intellectual integrity, and who actually want to honestly investigate truth claims for themselves, they provide the foundation for serious consideration of Christianity. Easley Library has quite a few books that provide intellectual grist for these functions. Here are links to my reviews of two of them:

Jesus' resurrection from the dead is the core fact of our faith, on which it stands or falls. Frank Morison's Who Moved the Stone?: A Skeptic Looks at the Death and Resurrection of Christ is an excellent treatment of this topic. www.goodreads.com/review/show/25772834 .
Anti-Christian propagandists frequently appeal to the Gnostic Gospels (or to distorted popular portrayals of the latter) as "evidence" against Christianity. A good basic treatment of one of these "gospels" (which is relevant to the rest) is The Lost Gospel of Judas: Separating Fact from Fiction, by Stanley E. Porter and Gordon L. Heath. www.goodreads.com/review/show/68014239 .