"What's the alternative? I'm happy to consider it. I'm exploring. Also, I'm kind of a spooky naturalist so you might be surprised what I would go along with."

Haha I like the term "spooky naturalist." For myself, I have found (separately) the existence of God and the resurrection of Jesus convincing. These were intellectually enough for me for awhile, but eventually after becoming a believer, I have had two dreams over a 10 year period that each were unlike anything else I have experienced, and changed the course of my life. In both cases, God spoke directly to me, wordlessly, and caused me to melt away the parts of me that I was holding back, the parts that were cold and dying and kills a man from the inside out. I can never look back after that. Look- I'm a skeptical bastard, but after some time, I couldn't deny what was clearly presented to me anymore.

I know you've probably examined Christianity, but that is my personal recommendation. Particularly, this information about the resurrection (I will add it in a few comments following). I am not looking to debate this, just sharing what I found useful to me. Some initial links:

From Dr. of Philosophy, William Lane Craig's website:

Historicity of the Resurrection: https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/popular-writings/jesus-of-nazareth/the-resurrection-of-jesus

"Also, one thing I value is present experience. It has nothing to do with necessarily lasting into the future. Do you?"

I value it much. At times, it is divine and surreal (e.g. on mountain tops, which is a common place for the God of Abraham to associate himself). But I would not feel so positive about it all if I knew it was going to leave me. I can't believe I'm quoting the Lord of the Rings but here's Gimli's thoughts, which I sympathize with:

"Gimli wept openly. 'I have looked the last on that which was fairest,' he said to Legolas his companion. 'Henceforth I will call nothing fair unless it be her gift.' He put his hand to his breast. Tell me Legolas, why did I come on this Quest? Little did I know where the chief peril lay! Truly Elrond spoke, saying that we could not foresee what we might meet upon our road. Torment in the dark was the danger that I feared, and it did not hold me back. But I would not have come, had I known the danger of light and joy."

"I'm enjoying the conversation."

Me too (: Philosophy is my passion, and existential stuff is bread and butter (my wife says I never stop talking about it). I'm also a diehard disciple of the living God and can't help but to share my faith with you!

"Because I have heard Muslims argue that if you study the entire Quran in its original language that its insurmountable beauty and truth will overwhelm you and you will have no doubt of the truth of Islam."

I, too, find this unconvincing. I have read the Quran and found the main issues to be with (1) it's conception of God who is only conditionally loving and (2) it's sharp disregard for the historical evidence on the resurrection of Jesus. It just doesn't match what the field indicates happened by a long shot. The fact that the Quran begins by attacking Christianity and Judaism is an earmark of suspicion for me. That said, I think Muhammad really did meet an angel (the enemy) in a cave, who gave him such a distorted image of God as tyrant and unloving. I love muslims and their passion, but I detest Islam.

"Are you going to shut down that potential ultimate truth without full explorarion?"

I did investigate it and came away with articulations for why I think it's false. While my search would otherwise go on if I had no faith, I am now comfortably passionate and happy with my Christian faith. If it were otherwise, I'd be delving off into study again as I did many years ago (and still do now, though to learn more deeply about God and creation and the intellectual tradition of the faith!)

"I kind of love this argument for Islam because of its sheer audacity. Imagine spending a decade getting to the point where you can personally examine the claim and being like, yeah, still not convinced."

It is oddly middle eastern-centric. One thing I love about Christianity is its universality: people from every corner of the world (one third!) resonate with its understanding of the human condition, and Christianity wins more by conversion than Islam where it's mostly growing by births.

(part 2)

Historical facts surrounding the Resurrection

Fact 1: Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Sanhedrin.

• ⁠Jesus’ burial was an old tradition: In 1 Corinthians 15:3-5, we find Paul quoting a short and stylized teaching using rabbinical terms such as “receive” and “deliver” that indicate he was given this teaching from prior. This tradition probably goes back at least to Paul’s fact-finding visit to Jerusalem around AD 36, when he spent two weeks with Cephas and James (Gal. 1.18). It thus dates to within five years after Jesus’ death. So short a time span and such personal contact make it idle to talk of legend in this case. • ⁠All four gospels (including the oldest, Mark) are united on the burial story, which indicates it was not around long enough to be influenced by legend. • ⁠Given that the Sanhedrin were enemies to the Christian followers (since they handed Jesus over to the Romans), it is unlikely that this detail is fabricated. • ⁠No competing stories of Jesus’ burial exist.

Fact 2: Jesus’ tomb was found empty by some of his female followers.

• ⁠Like the burial tradition, the empty tomb tradition was also part of the early Gospel summary told in Mark. The story is simple and lacks embellishment of other comparable legends during that time (see the apocryphal Gospel of Peter for an example of comparative legend). • ⁠If the tomb were not empty, it would have been well-known and easily discoverable by anyone living in the nearby area. • ⁠The Jews accused Christ’s followers of hiding/stealing his body. As a point of embarrassment for the Jews, this would have been unfavorable to admit and would have likely been told a different way if the empty tomb was less certain. For instance, they could have just laughed it off and ridiculed them if the tomb wasn’t really empty. • ⁠It is unlikely this detail would have been fabricated, because the testimony of women was seen as unreliable and lesser in value during that day. If it were fabricated, then we should expect to see male followers finding the empty tomb instead of his female followers.

Fact 3: There exists early independent attestations of Jesus’ post-mortem appearances between the four gospels: to the crowd of 500, to Peter, to his 12 disciples, to his brother James, and to Saul of Tarsus.

• ⁠The list of witnesses of the appearances of Jesus are given by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:5-7, meaning the appearances are early and well attested in the pre-Markan tradition. • ⁠We have biblical data that neither James nor the rest of Jesus’ brothers believed in his divinity during his lifetime. There’s no reason to think the early Church would have generated fictitious stories about his brothers’ unbelief had they been genuine followers all along. • ⁠In addition, the 1st century historian Josephus records and confirms that James went on to be a leader in the early Church, eventually being martyred for his beliefs a few decades later.

Fact 4: The original disciples came to believe in Jesus’ resurrection, despite every predisposition not to.

• ⁠The Jews had no cultural predisposition to believe in or understand a dying and rising Messiah. They largely believed that the Messiah would overthrow Rome and re-establish the new Jerusalem, as other fake messiahs of Jesus’ time tried to do. • ⁠Jesus was condemned as a heretic by the Jewish Sanhedrin, which is the exact opposite of what was expected of the Messiah. • ⁠The Jews did not believe that there would be any sort of resurrection prior to THE resurrection of all the dead at Judgment Day. Jesus’ resurrection to a glorified body was totally unheard of.

(part 3)

State of the field concerning these four facts

According to Mark Allen Powell, the chair of the Historical Jesus section of the Society of Biblical Literature, ‘The dominant view is that the passion narratives are early and based on eyewitness testimony’ (Journal of the American Academy of Religion 68 [2000]: 171). Specifically, with respect to the burial, Kendall and O'Collins note Bultmann, Fitzmeyer, Porter, Gnilka, Hooker, ‘and many other biblical scholars’ who recognize a historically reliable core in the account of Jesus' burial by Joseph of Arimathea. They observe that ‘every now and then’ the burial story is dismissed as unhistorical, for instance by John Dominic Crossan; but notwithstanding, ‘The standard recent commentators on Mark (Ernst, Gnilka, Haenchen, Harrington, Hooker, Pesch, Schweizer, etc.)...do not invest him with the kind of creativity needed to invent the burial story...’ (Daniel Kendall and Gerald O'Collins, ‘Did Joseph of Arimathea Exist?’ Biblica 75 [1994]: 240). O'Collins and the renowned New Testament scholar Raymond Brown both confirmed that only a small minority of scholars who have published on the subject would deny the historicity of Jesus' interment by Joseph of Arimathea. Similarly with respect to the empty tomb, already by the late 1970s Jacob Kremer, an Austrian specialist in the resurrection, was able to report, ‘By far most exegetes hold firmly to the reliability of the biblical statements concerning the empty tomb’ (Die Osterevangelien--Geschichten um Geschichte (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1977), 49-50).

The role of women in discovering that the tomb was empty has been especially persuasive to scholars. According to Raymund Schwager, ‘it has recently become usual to assess positively the women's role at the death of Jesus and on Easter morning,’ in contrast to the legend hypothesis (Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche [1993]: 436). As for the post-mortem appearances and the disciples' coming to believe that Jesus was risen, well, no one doubts those facts. For as Paula Frederickson (no conservative!) says, ‘The disciples' conviction that they had seen the Risen Christ... [is] historical bedrock, facts known past doubting’ (Jesus of Nazareth [New York: Vintage, 1999], 264).

It's also not hard to find what you call ‘neutral’ or ‘opposition’ scholars who accept these four facts. Some of those already mentioned above fit that description. As examples of neutral scholars, take Pinchas Lapide and Geza Vermes, who are Jewish scholars who defend the historicity of these four facts. Vermes writes, ‘When every argument has been considered and weighed, the only conclusion acceptable to the historian must be that...the women who set out to pay their last respects to Jesus found to their consternation, not a body, but an empty tomb’ (Jesus the Jew, p. 41).

As an example of an opposition scholar, take Bart Ehrman, who writes, ‘The resurrection of Jesus lies at the heart of Christian faith. Unfortunately, it also is a tradition about Jesus that historians have difficulty dealing with. As I said, there are a couple of things that we can say for certain about Jesus after his death. We can say with relative certainty, for example, that he was buried. I say with relative certainty because historians do have some questions about the traditions of Jesus' burial... Some scholars have argued that it's more plausible that in fact Jesus was placed in a common burial plot, which sometimes happened, or was, as many other crucified people, simply left to be eaten by scavenging animals (which also happened commonly for crucified persons in the Roman Empire). [Ehrman is referring here to radical critics like John Dominic Crossan, whose skepticism about the historicity of the burial has been widely rejected, as mentioned above. Ehrman will now reject it, too.] But the accounts are fairly unanimous in saying (the earliest accounts we have are unanimous in saying) that Jesus was in fact buried by this fellow, Joseph of Arimathea, and so it's relatively reliable that that's what happened. We also have solid traditions to indicate that women found this tomb empty three days later. This is attested in all of our gospel sources, early and late, and so it appears to be a historical datum. As so I think we can say that after Jesus' death, with some (probably with some) certainty, that he was buried, possibly by this fellow, Joseph of Arimathea, and that three days later he appeared not to have been in his tomb’ (Bart Ehrman, From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity, Lecture 4: "Oral and Written Traditions about Jesus" [The Teaching Company, 2003].)

Perhaps the most objective evidence for the current lay of the land in New Testament scholarship concerning these four facts would be a bibliographical survey of the relevant literature. Such a survey has, in fact, been conducted by Gary Habermas (‘Experience of the Risen Jesus: The Foundational Historical Issue in the Early Proclamation of the Resurrection,’ Dialog 45 (2006): 288–97). In a survey of over 2,200 publications on the resurrection in English, French, and German since 1975, Habermas found that 75% of the scholars surveyed accepted the historicity of the discovery of Jesus' empty tomb. Belief in the disciples' experiencing post-mortem appearances of Jesus is virtually universal."