When God's children disobeyed their heavenly Father, they damaged everything. When Adam and Eve rebelled against the King of the universe, they broke the whole world. This is why there is evil and suffering. Bad things happen in a world that's broken.

If man is not special, if he's not deeply different from any other thing, then there's no good reason not to treat him just like any other thing when it's convenient for us to do so.

I want people to see that Christianity claims to be true in the deep sense, and if it isn't, then it solves nothing at all.

Man had freedom to choose the good, but this same freedom also allowed him to choose the bad. This is called moral freedom.

If the Story is not accurate to reality, it's not any kind of truth at all. So it can never be 'my truth' or 'your truth,' even though we may believe it. It can only be our delusion or our mistake or our error, but it can never be our 'truth.'

Why so many mentions regarding Jesus from such a wide variety of sources (Pliny, Tacitus, Lucian, Josephus, to name a few)? Because Jesus of Nazareth was a man of history, who made a profound impact on history. There's no good reason to doubt that Jesus existed, or to think the real Jesus was completely different from the one depicted in the Story.

Trouble, hardship, difficulty, pain, suffering, conflict, tragedy, evil - they're all part of the [Christian] Story. Indeed, the problem of evil is the reason there's any Story at all.