If I believed in god, which I don't, why would I choose Christianity over any other religion?

It is a fair question, and the accident-of-birth point behind it has real force: most people hold the religion of their childhood. That fact should make everyone, Christians included, examine why they believe what they believe.

1. Agreement is not the test of truth. People disagree about medicine and politics without concluding there is no truth in either. Many religions no more proves them all equally valid than many opinions proves no opinion correct. The number of claimants is a fact about people, not about the world.

2. Pluralism is itself a religious claim. The view that all paths lead to the same summit was popularized by John Hick, and it is not neutral ground. The traditions contradict each other on God's very nature — a personal Creator who speaks, versus an impersonal absolute — so they cannot all be describing the same reality. Pluralism is a competing position, not the absence of one.

3. Christianity stakes itself on an event. Its central claim is not a private experience but a public death and burial and an empty tomb, which is why Paul can say “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile” (1 Corinthians 15:17). Most religions do not hinge on a checkable historical fact. This one invites the check.

4. The historical case is substantial. The empty tomb, the appearances to named witnesses (1 Corinthians 15:3–8), the transformation of frightened disciples, and the conversion of hostile skeptics like James and Paul are data historians weigh. Gary Habermas and Michael Licona catalogued the consensus and built the inference to the best explanation. You can disagree with the conclusion, but the evidence is not nothing.

5. Grace is structurally different. Most religious systems say, in effect, do these things and you will be accepted. The gospel says acceptance is a gift received by faith, “not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9). That matches what we know about ourselves: we cannot make ourselves clean enough to stand before a holy God.

6. God came down, we did not climb. Christianity claims that God entered history rather than that humans reached him by technique. Paul describes one who “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:7), and Luke grounds his account in investigation of eyewitness testimony (Luke 1:1–4). This is news of something done, not advice about something to attempt.

7. Birth location is a bias for everyone. Nabeel Qureshi was raised a devout Muslim, studied the evidence for years, and became a Christian; others have moved the other direction. “You only believe that because of where you were born” is a fair warning about social pressure, and it applies equally to the person who inherited secularism. The remedy is the same for all of us: examine the reasons.

8. Exclusivity is not arrogance. Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6), and the apostles added that “there is salvation in no one else” (Acts 4:12). That is a stumbling block, and it is what the sources say. But the content of the claim is that everyone, without exception, needs the same mercy (Romans 3:23) — which humbles the believer rather than exalting him.

9. Other faiths deserve accurate description. Islam's insistence on the unity of God, Hinduism's variety of devotional paths, and Judaism's covenant are not parodies, and Christians should not caricature them. The disagreement is real and specific: does God become incarnate, and did this man rise? Those are answerable questions, not insults.

The choice is not between one religion and none, but between accounts of what is actually the case, each with its own evidence and its own costs. Christianity's wager is unusually public: it rests on a tomb that either was empty or was not.

Sources: Nabeel Qureshi; Gary Habermas; Michael Licona; Ravi Zacharias; Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus; John Hick.

Related challenges:
• So I’m to believe in a God who is one and three at the same time, with one of the three killing another of the three and then sending another of the three to console humans about how to go on in the absence of the other two!? Why not just Allah instead?
• If I were raised in India, I’d most likely be a Hindu. You would be a Muslim if raised in Saudi Arabia. Is it ‘fair and just’ of God to have billions of people’s eternal destinies determined by “God’s Divinely ordained” place of birth?
• Truth is relative. Only narrow-minded bigots believe in absolute truth!