AB,
You are quite right.
To an outsider who is happy with their own beliefs and position in life, Chritianity will have little to attract them.
Yes.
They would be expected to give up some of the simple pleasures in life, and waste time in prayer and attending church.
Why
waste time doing anything?
They might have to start offering help and service to people they do not particularly like.
They might, or they might do that anyway. They might also though have to adopt all sorts of morally questionable positions, to sit in judgment on others, to condemn while flaunting their smug self-satisfaction that they are somehow “chosen” etc.
They might even have to believe in such things as the virgin birth and the resurrection, or the devil!
That is a significant downside I agree. The abandonment of reason and evidence it entails is bad enough on its own, but there’s the danger that their new found irrationalism would leach into the rest of their lives too.
They will probably suffer rejection, ridicule or even persecution from their fellow human beings.
Possibly, though they could well do a lot of that to others too. In secular societies though, by and large if they don’t demand special privileges for their personal faith beliefs they’ll probably be left alone.
They will need to listen to the voice of their conscience.
Many do that in any case, fortunately though not all of us have our consciences determined by the morality of ancient tribal goatherders.
Life will no longer comprise of just existing and dying - it will have true purpose.
That’s very presumptuous. How would you know that your conviction about a “true” purpose is any more true than the purposes others already find in their lives?
Superficial pleasures will be replaced by the true joy of knowing God's love.
That’s called reification – yet another logical fallacy. Just asserting your personal, subjective belief to be a general, objective fact does not make it so.
You will not be alone, you will become part of Christ's presence on earth along with millions of others.
Well, by all means have a go at demonstrating this “Christ’s presence on earth” if you think it to be real but you’d have even
more like-minded pals if you joined the Islamic faith, and besides some of us prefer the less divisive membership of humankind as a whole in any case.
You will realise the truth that we are not shackled by the constraints of deterministic science, but have been given true free will - freedom to choose our own destiny.
You might be daft enough to make that mistake yes, but that’s not “realisation” – it’s just mistake.
We do not have freedom to choose the truth - it might not be what we like, but the truth will set you free.
Leaving aside for now the irony of that coming from someone apparently trapped in what are likely to be non-truths, yes you can “choose” to a large degree. When the evidence and the reason point one way, your choice is either to follow it or – as you do – to ignore it in favour of your faith beliefs. And that it seems to me is pretty much the
opposite of freedom.
