One of the strangest arguments I have ever heard atheists present is that if we believe Jesus rose from the dead, we must also accept the claims of every other religion on the planet. Since I've seen this argument pop up three times in the space of two days, I thought I'd dedicate a post to pointing out the insanity of it.
First, I'd like to discuss the little known logical law of non-contradiction. Although I say "little known" sarcastically, I'm really not sure if the sarcasm is merited. It genuinely seems these days that no one understands the law of non-contradiction.
Simply put, a contradiction is when two opposing statements are said to be true in the same sense at the same time. For example, "I am standing up, and I am lying down". It is impossible to stand up and lie down at the same time. Therefore, only one of those statements can be true. This is not the case if time has elapsed between the two. I can say "I am lying down", then stand up, then say "and I am standing up". That is not a contradiction.
If I believe that Christ is risen, that absolutely requires me to reject all religions that say Christ is not risen. Jehovah's Witnesses do not believe this. His spirit rose, they claim, but His body remained dead. It is impossible to believe Jesus was both physically dead and physically resurrected at the same time, therefore my Christian faith, rather than requiring me to accept the dogmas of the Watchtower organisation, requires I reject them.
Muslims do not believe the resurrection either. There are internal disputes within Islam, but the Qur'an says that Jesus was never crucified, but rather Allah made it look like He was to trick the Jews, whereas Jesus was really taken straight to Heaven. I cannot believe Jesus never died while also believing He died and rose from the grave, therefore my Christian faith, far from making it necessary for me to become a Muslim, makes it necessary for me to dismiss Islam.
Other religions have a range of different gods. Must I believe in these gods if I accept Jesus as Lord? This, too, would be a contradiction. Christianity is a monotheistic faith. We believe in one God, who was God from all eternity, and will be God for all of eternity. Therefore, I simply cannot justify believing in any other god, as this would be a contradictory worldview.
Whenever atheists claim that accepting Christianity would require the acceptance of other religions, they are basically telling a Christian to ignore the logical law of non-contradiction and be consistently inconsistent. This makes sense, since atheists themselves are consistently inconsistent, but there is a greater fallacy at work here: The loaded question fallacy.
But how is this so? No question was asked. At least, not in the way I phrased the argument. So I'll rephrase it: Why do Christians accept one risen Savior and not the others? The assumption loaded into this question is that there is equal evidence for other resurrected gods. But is there?
The answer to this is an emphatic no. For one thing, even many of the gods that come to mind are actually not as much like Jesus as conspiracy theorists claim. Take Horus, for example. Conspiracy theorists often claim that Jesus is just a Jewish version of Horus, whom they claim was also born of a virgin on the 25th of December, died by crucifixion and rose again. In reality, Horus had a father (either Ra the sun god, or Osiris, who actually slept with Horus' mother while the two of them were still in the womb), Jesus probably wasn't born on December 25th, and crucifixion hadn't even been invented when Horus was worshiped. More to the point, he had the head of a falcon. Was Horus a historical figure? Nope. He was a developing myth.
By contrast, few historians are willing to throw away their credibility by attacking the historicity of the Lord Jesus Christ. Even anti-Christian sceptics are quick to laugh off any idea that Jesus might not have lived, died and disappeared. No historical figure, certainly none who claimed to be gods, is as historically attested as the Son of Man. There are even governmental figures from His own time whose memory exists in fragments, and so the ample evidence we have of Jesus, even in the Bible alone, makes any rejection of Him as ridiculous as claiming Julius Caesar did not exist. Being a Christian is really just a case of accepting historical facts and taking them to their logical conclusion. There is no sense in adding pagan mythology to that.