Well since I put out quotes on the political why not from the Christians? Here goes:
objectively speaking that is......
"If one takes a historically objective approach to the question, it is found that even secular history affirms that Jesus lived on earth and was worshiped as God. He founded a church that has worshiped Him for 1,900 years. He changed the course of the world's history." William Robinson-(Our Lord p.29)
I am so with you here...
"I am trying here to prevent anyone sayng the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I am ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg, or else He would be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God-or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool; you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord, and God. But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to." C.S. Lewis, (Mere Christianity, p.41)
he's just so good...back to C.S
"Take the case of a sour old maid, who is a Christian, but cantankerous. On the other hand, take some pleasant and popular fellow, but who has never been to church. Who knows how much more cantankerous the old maid might be if she were not a Christian, and how much more likeable the nice fellow might be if he were a Christian. You can't judge Christianity simply by comparing the product in these two people; you would also need to know what kind of raw material Christ was working on in both cases." (God in the Dock, p.59)
it's like a piece of a puzzle.....it's the God piece.
Within every human being, our Creator has placed a "God shaped void that only God Himself can fill." Blaise Pascal, French philosopher
Who chooses whom?
"We cannot find God without God. We cannot reach God without God. We cannot satisfy God without God-which is another way of saying that our seeking will always fall short unless God's grace initiates the search and unless God's call draws us to Him and completes the search. If the chasm is to be bridged, God must bridge it. If we are to desire the highest good, the highest good must come down and draw us so that it may become a reality we desire. From this perspective there is no merit in either seeking or finding. All is grace. The secret of seeking is not in our human ascent to God, but in God's descent to us. We start our searching but we end up being discovered. We think we are looking for something; we realize we are found by Someone. As in Francis Thompson's famous picture, "the hound of heaven" has tracked us down." Os Guiness (The Call, pp.13-14)
simply put,
"Don't stand there, love with your hands." Mother Teresa
bird's eye perspective?
"It's very hard to think this must have happened by chance.....You realize at the same time that there had to be a Master Designer, a Creator of this planet. And to me that makes life all the more special. Because that tells me that instead of me being something that just came along in the course of time to live and die, that instead of a meaningless existence, I have someone who cares for me who has made me and cares about me. Someone I can go to with my troubles and my cares, and my joys." Guy Gardner, Astronaut
After his conversion from atheist to believer, Lewis looked back on his journey to faith in Christ and discovered that "God closed in on me." He wrote,
"Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about "man's search for God." To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse's search for the cat (Surprised by Joy, p.179)
and last but not least.....
"There is not one square inch of the entire creation about which Jesus Christ does not cry out, "This is Mine! This belongs to Me!" Why? Because He is the Creator, and He is merely claiming that which He Himself has made." Abraham Kuper-Prime Minister of the Netherlands"