Blogging on my phone today,  so excuse the typos please. A few days ago my excellent wife solved for me a philosophical/religious problem which has haunted me for a few years now. I think I blogged about the problem once before, but it's such a simple problem that I haven't been able to really develop it, so I haven't posted much about it here.

Here's the issue: how can I know that my religion is true when I haven't carefully examined all the alternatives? I haven't really paid super close attention to the evidence and argument in favor of Islam, for example (mostly because I haven't yet heard a good rebuttal to the arguments against Islam).  There are  plenty of religions out there. What if I'm wrong? But yet, Christianity is infinitely deep.  People spend their whole lives mining treasure out of the Bible and they barely scratch the surface. In fact, the argument for the Christian God finds its completion deep in an understanding of the attributes of God! All the best and most influential arguments for God have come from an extended study of just a small subset of those attributes -- the ontological argument and TAG for example show the superiority of Christianity over against atheism,  the judicial argument over against Islam, the consistency argument against Mormonism, the trinitarian argument against JW, Tertulian's feasibility argument against the Roman pantheon, the rationality arguments against the gods of Hinduism, etc etc etc.  I haven't fully understood the scope of Christianity's justification, because I haven't fully understood Christianity's God.

I can't say I really know my own religion,  so how can I adequately compare it with any other?

Well, I presented this to my wife, and she effortlessly produced an answer, similar to Pascal's wager of all things.

She said I don't need to learn about any other religion,  because Christianity teaches good works,  and every other religion says you are saved by good works.

Most other religions even have a caveat so that nonbelievers can be saved if they're good enough behaviorally. But only Christianity excludes everyone,  no exceptions,  on the grounds of their lack of belief in Christ.  So, by pursuing deeper knowledge of God,  and thereby firming up my convictions about Jesus,  I find myself saved in the best religion --  but even if I'm wrong, I'm basically eligible for salvation in every other major religion too.

Anyway, I don't want to go too far with saying how much i was relieved by this. I know better than to hedge my bets by putting any faith in something outside Christ, but if I'm totally honest here, the thought takes a bit of a burden off of me. Anyway I'd rather specialize and be excellent in one field of knowledge than study everything and be mediocre in all of it. I'd hate to be wrong,  but it doesn't appear that I'm wrong; it each day increasingly appears that I'm right. Now I can say that in every sense of the phrase, and against all others,  "following Jesus is the only sure way to be saved".

"You're the best atheist."