Obviously Brain doesn’t quite understand the gospel (or the way syllogisms work, but one thing at a time). So in the spirit of How Things Work, here is How the Gospel Works. I’ll use Brain’s same eight points and the same eight verses (but I will move two of them around, and add the word “unless” at a very critical point). After reading this, “no normal, intelligent adult” would think Jesus didn’t know what he was talking about.

I recently came across a video ambitiously titled, “Proving that nobody can get into heaven.” It was produced by Marshall Brain, the same guy who founded the How Stuff Works website, and the author of How “God” Works, which is essentially an argument for atheism.

The video is ten years old, but it’s still making the rounds online. To spare you the 8-plus minutes of it, I’ll summarize Brain’s argument here. He claims he can prove that heaven is “a fairy tale” by looking at the eight times Jesus was asked what it would take to go there. According to Brain, here are the eight answers:  

1. Love God and your neighbors (Luke 10:25-28)
2. Honor your father and mother, plus sell everything and follow Jesus (Luke 18:18-22)
3. Hate your father and mother—and your own life!—(Luke 14:26)
4. Eat Jesus’ flesh and drink Jesus’ blood (John 6:53-54)
5. Become like little children (Matthew 18:2-3)
6. Be born again (John 3:3-7)
7. Have more righteousness than the Pharisees—keep all 613 OT laws (Matthew 5::17-20)
8. Believe in Jesus (John 3:16)

The gist of his argument is that these contradict each other. About a half-dozen times he says, “if you are a normal intelligent person” you would see how foolish Jesus’ answers are. And he has a point. I’d like to help Brain out here, and make his point more clearly than his video did: Jesus’ answers do contradict each other. He says that you need to love your father and mother, and then later that you need to hate them. He says you need to be like a child, but then that you need to be born again! Well, which is it?!?

Brain ends his video by saying that “If you are a normal, intelligent adult, three things are going to be obvious to you”:

1. “John 3:16 is only one slice of an 8-slice pizza. Why do you only hear about the John 3:16 step, but not the other ones?”
   • You have to love everyone, and hate everyone.
   • You have to be like a child, and like a law keeping Pharisee.
   • You have to eat flesh and drink blood, and sell everything.
   • “No normal intelligent adult is going to sell everything. That’s nuts!”
2. Jesus had no idea what he was talking about.
   • If Jesus was perfect, every time he was talking about eternal life, he would have said the same thing”
   • “If you are a normal intelligent adult” this chart should make it obvious.
3. Heaven is a fairy tale

Obviously Brain doesn’t quite understand the gospel (or the way syllogisms work, but one thing at a time). So in the spirit of How Things Work, here is How the Gospel Works. I’ll use Brain’s same eight points and the same eight verses (but I will move two of them around, and add the word “unless” at a very critical point). After reading this, “no normal, intelligent adult” would think Jesus didn’t’ know what he was talking about.

How the gospel works:

If you want to go to heaven when you die, Jesus says you must:

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