Interview with Anne Rice

What a fascinating interview at the White Horse Inn with author Anne Rice.

She details why she left her Catholic faith when she was 18 years old after going to a secular university. She married a passionate atheist. Became one herself for the better part of 30 years. She now has come full circle and has rejoined the Catholic church.

Here is what I find interesting. While there are many skeptics of Christianity, there are very few who bother to really investigate and search to see if the claims of Christianity are true or not.

Rice details what she discovered in her investigation:

Having started with the skeptical critics,those who take their cue from the earliest skeptical New Testament scholars of the Enlightenment, I expected to discover that their arguments would be frighteningly strong, and that Christianity was, at heart, a kind of fraud.

[...]

What gradually came clear to me was that many of the skeptical arguments—arguments that insisted most of the Gospels were suspect, for instance, or written too late to be eyewitness accounts—lacked coherence. They were not elegant. Arguments about Jesus himself were full of conjecture. Some books were no more than assumptions piled upon assumptions. Absurd conclusions were reached on the basis of little or no data at all.

In sum, the whole case for the nondivine Jesus who stumbled into Jerusalem and somehow got crucified by nobody and had nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and would be horrified by it if he knew about it—that whole picture which had floated in the liberal circles I frequented as an atheist for thirty years—that case was not made. Not only was it not made, I discovered in this field some of the worst and most biased scholarship I’d ever read.

Initially, she was afraid of what she was going to find when she started her journey of discovery. I think she thought she would find out that the skeptics were right all along, but that did not happen.

Because she looked into investigating the claims herself and did not rely on scholars, she came to discover the truth about Jesus Christ and the historicity of the Scriptures.

Go listen to the interview. I know we have skeptics who read this blog, but my question to them is "have you looked into it yourself before you dismissed Christianity"?