Last Tuesday I was cycling past a church building with my youngest son and was both taken aback and provoked when he asked me why the cross, fixed to the outside of the building, was the symbol of Christianity. Taken aback because I had brought him up as a Christian (taken him to church every week and read him Bible stories at bedtime, etc.) until the age of six when I lost my faith. And I was provoked by the content of the ensuing conversation, which I will attempt to summarise rather than write a transcript.
I explained to him that Christians believe that God created the world, including human beings. I explained in a child-appropriate way (he is now nine years old) that the first human beings, although God loves them very much, did naughty things and disobeyed God and how this is called „sin“ and how every human being since then has inherited sin and that’s we all do bad things. God – who is also Jesus – still loves us very much, however, and he came to earth and died on a cross to forgive us and to take away our sins. Three days later Jesus rose again from the dead and some time later he ascended into heaven in bodily form and there he will be for all time and we will go to heaven to be with him forever if we choose to believe in him.
My son asked me to repeat the details again as he couldn’t grasp it all, and when I had finished repeating it, he said that all that was impossible and that it sounded just like a fairy story and added that you would have to be mad to believe that.
His comments provoked me to question what is actually the difference between religious faith and madness. Then I realised that the answer is simple. If just a few people believe a strange story that sounds either impossible or mad, then we conclude that these people are probably deranged and require psychiatric help. However, if a sufficient number of people believes the story, then it becomes both acceptable and can even become a religion.
Conclusion: the only difference between insanity and Christianity is a number. That is to say, Christianity’s existence as a religion is contingent solely upon the number of deranged people who believe this divisive and pernicious myth. Were there just a few people who believed it, it would be classified as madness.