Reddit reviews Don't Check Your Brains at the Door

I read through this book a couple of times in high school - it's a great intro to apologetics, and it's very simple. Don't Check Your Brains at the Door

The one I read when I was that age was Josh McDowell's Don't Check Your Brains at the Door, which was really accessible and helpful. Easy to grasp and covers most of the difficult questions.

When I was in ninth grade (so five years later?), my school used Living Loud by Norman Geisler, which was helpful in that it also addressed other religions and philosophies.

I mean, keep in mind these'll both be classical or evidential rather than presuppositional, but even having a good apologetic foundation does wonders at that age.

There's a lot of great apologetics out there that make the case for Christianity and the Bible. Don't believe everything you hear. A lot of people try to cast doubt on the Bible as being unreliable but that simply isn't the case.

A book that helped me a lot when I was in high school was "Don't Check Your Brains at the Door". Although like I said there's a ton of stuff out there, you just have to look for it because it's not heavily promoted, even sometimes by churches. Anyway, you're right, you don't have to "just believe". By that logic, any religion is true. There are reasons Christianity and the Bible are true.

For reconciling science and the Bible, I like this organization and here are some more apologetics on the Bible.

Ask questions, seek answers, they're out there. After all, God created the Universe and made us in His image right? So wouldn't studying the Universe, His Creation, point to the Creator? Of course. Wouldn't using the logic and reason that God gave to us point to Him? Of course.

EDIT: It seemed right to try to address some of your questions here rather than simply do a linkstorm. The authors of the NT don't treat the OT as solely symbolic. For example, in Matthew 19 Jesus Christ refers back to Genesis to make the case for marriage. If God Himself thought the OT was reliable, shouldn't we? Plus, the OT has a lot of history in it and archaeology has constantly backed it up. People used to say King David wasn't real, but then they found an inscription from another culture talking about King David of Israel, and there are many other examples I simply can't recall.

I have no idea where you're getting the idea that the Gospels were written so long after Jesus's death, I'm not aware of any scholar that claims this.

C.S. Lewis cautions against claiming Jesus was just a good teacher. Actually, he proposes it is a tactic of the devil to lead people astray. Jesus Christ claimed to be God's son, either He was or He wasn't and if He wasn't then I don't see how any teaching of His is worth following. If He was, then He was far more than just a good teacher.

The Greeks had a pantheon of gods who basically were just magic humans, they were corruptible, fickle, and often cruel. They had multiple legends surrounding them, some contradictory. That's not what you see with Scripture. With the Bible you have a book that tells a cohesive story of God and His plan to redeem humanity even though it was written over thousands of years and by multiple authors.