I was scrolling through a social media post recently, and it was one of those where people

are kind of talking about the reasons to believe in Christianity or not to believe in Christianity.

In this specific post, a lot of people were kind of piling on about what's wrong with Christianity.

And the comments were, they were pretty brutal, but they were ones that I had heard before because there were ones that I had thought before, especially in the years of

deconstructing and kind of leaving the faith for a while. So people were making fun of the

faith. They're saying it doesn't really make sense. And so that's not what stopped me. It was,

it wasn't the tone as much as the arguments themselves. And they

went something like this. You know, Jesus was dead for about a day and a half. You know, he missed his

weekend plans. Crucifixion was real suffering, sure, but if the whole point of the cross is the

amount of pain, you know, then plenty of people throughout history have suffered longer and worse. Prisoners of

war, torture victims, people who spent years in agony. If what makes the cross meaningful is the

pain, that comparison gets pretty uncomfortable, pretty fast. So if you've ever tried to respond to that,

you know what happens next. You kind of end up in an arms race of suffering,

is what I would call it? Well, do you know what crucifixion actually involved? You know,

do you know what the nails did? Do you know about the asphyxiation? And you end up trying to make it

sound far worse and worse because the whole argument depends on the suffering being bad enough.

And sure, it was bad, but people can then push back and say,

well, yeah, but what about this kind of suffering?

What about this kind of suffering?

And the skeptics just come back with that, right?

People have gone through something equally as bad or maybe even worse.

So the fact that you have to keep escalating the horror to make the case is kind of already

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