Investigating Christianity: A List of Reasons

Why I rejected fundamentalist Christianity?

After I left the religion of my youth, people often asked me what led me to such a radical change. In response to this question, I composed a list of reasons.

I grew up as a Christian, and from age 17 to 24 I wanted to be a minister. At age 24, after years of spending most of my free time studying, I no longer was able to believe Biblical Christianity was literally true. While I did not reject absolutely everything about Christianity or the Bible, I found more and more problems with it. What follows is a list of problems that I have found with typical Christianity; some are statements, others are in the form of questions to which I found no satisfactory answer in orthodoxy. There is no set order (#17 and #20 are among my favorites), and the strongest reasons are not the initial ones, but the weight of the entirety.

If you are a fundamentalist yourself, AND a truth-seeker, then I challenge you [in a friendly, but sincere way I hope!] to read through this completely, answer these questions honestly, and show me if/where I'm wrong. I think anyone claiming to believe the stories owes it to him/herself and others to address these issues; otherwise, such faith seems to me indefensible, or even dishonest.

The idea that a personal all-powerful god is rewarding people with eternal life in paradise merely for believing in an unproven, questionable story and punishing others for not believing it is actually an extremely unjust idea. But I never admitted it until I had so much evidence that I was unable to believe anyway.

Should someone really believe that the god of the whole universe chose only one race, the Jews, to be his "chosen people"? The Bible says they were his chosen people for at least 2000 years (Abraham to Christ), and some Jews still think they're "the chosen." Why would god only reveal himself to one small group of people and totally ignore the Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, Persians, Northern Europeans, Celts, Africans, Hindus, Chinese, Australian Aborigines, American Indians, and all others? Why would he reveal himself to Moses and ignore the rest of the world as if they were trash, letting them suffer in ignorance? Does this idea seem arrogant? ethnocentric? mythical-sounding? What's more, when I look to legitimate history, I do not see reason to believe Jews have been favored any more than any other race by any divine force. I also think that racial pride has been far too divisive. So many ancient peoples seem to have believed themselves to be better than everyone else: the Greeks, Persians, Romans, ...; obviously Jews were the same way.

**It is illogical to believe that a personal, loving, all-powerful God of the whole world, who wished to be honored by creation, would do all of the following:

ignore the vast majority of the people of the world for countless thousands of years,
choose only one small race to be his "chosen" people for one or two thousand years,
only reveal himself to a handful of prophets in one small corner of the world, speaking only in riddles, dreams, and unclear language with many possible interpretations,
only appear in the flesh for a few years in a few cities of that same one race,
only appear resurrected from the dead to a relatively few, mostly uneducated poor people of questionable reliability of that same race,
avoid appearing to others,
go back into the sky and leave a few people to convince others of the miracles he supposedly did,
still ignore most of Asia (the largest and most populated continent), Africa, Australia, and America for another 1,500 to 2,000 years,
expect people to believe such a strange-sounding, contrary-to-nature-and-all-ordinary-experience story without any solid evidence and hardly any evidence at all other than a few questionable texts written during an age of wide-spread ignorance and superstition and propagated by an institution that is known to have been corrupt and frequently misguided for much, if not most, of its history,
and send by far most of the humans that have ever lived to eternal suffering in hell (see footnote 1), just for not believing this story without proof.

Yet these are the teachings of traditional Christianity. They are very disappointing when one thinks about them honestly and at length. Someone would need some really good evidence to convince me of something so horrible! And that kind of evidence is not to be found.

Fundamentalists claim that the almighty Spirit of God/Jesus is personally dwelling in them, and is not dwelling in those who do not believe the stories literally. While I recognize that many Christians live in love and happiness, practically speaking, Christians have no more "spiritual" power, love, or happiness in their lives than I do, and I know this very well from living with them all my life, from being one of them for most of my life, and from visiting all kinds of different denominations of their religion. I can see no evidence that life/nature/god treats them any differently. They are no more blessed than I am; their prayers are no more effective than mine are, if results are measured. Thus, Where is the evidence that a supernatural power is working in their lives in any way that is exclusive to themselves? If they claim morality, love, or happiness, I can truly say that I and my friends have all these things without Christianity, and morality was around long before Jesus or Moses. Furthermore, devout Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, Jews, Muslims, Wiccans, atheists and agnostics with whom I am personally acquainted have all these things as well--even though there are bad examples of members of those faiths too.

If Christians claim that their god works miracles for them, I first ask them for evidence of their miracles, and then I show that other religions and peoples throughout history have claimed (and tried to produce evidence for) miracles too, and still do, all the time; claims of miracles occur in most religions, and even outside of organized religion, and they are usually the same types of events. One can go to the library and find books about many mystics, and holy men in history who were believed to work miracles, including healing the sick and raising the dead. [Try it. The stories are fascinating.] I am not even necessarily denying (or affirming) that "miracles" occur; I merely deny their uniqueness to Christian circles.

Also, Christians are affected by disease, tragedy, and natural disasters as much as anyone. At the end of March 2000, a tornado killed four people in Fort Worth, Texas and destroyed a prayer tower at local church. This is just one tiny example of how "God's elect" are no more protected than anyone else. 2003, a young college girl from Dallas preparing to be a minister, much loved and cherished by her local community, died in a car accident. In Texas, it always makes the news when a bus-load of church kids veers off the road and they all die. Everyone questions, "Why did God allow this," and all the church leaders hurry to explain the "truth" to the doubters, that surely God had a special reason for killing these children. A cancer patient recovers, and the Christians say God answered their prayers; he relapses and dies, and they say, "God just chose to take him." I've personally seen Muslims in Austin, Texas do the exact same thing. I see no reason to believe that their "god" is performing either action in personal response to their prayers.

I'm not denying that following the Bible's teachings can improve people's lives. I know lots of Christians who have been inspired by the Bible to try to live loving, honest, vibrant lives. But all the good in Christians' lives can and honestly should be attributed to sincere efforts to live a good life. The results depend on the effort of the person; the value of their beliefs is not in its truth, but in its ability to inspire effort. Sure, faith inspires many (certainly not all) Christians to a good life, but other religions and philosophies have shown themselves just as effective at the same task. And just because it inspires some good behavior doesn't make it true; consider the effect of Santa Claus on children's behavior. Conclusion ----There is no evidence that any personal god is showing special favor toward Christians, or that any all-mighty "spirit of God" is dwelling with Christians in any way that is exclusive of others.

If a personal god really wanted us to know him, yet didn't want to force us, why didn't he then and why doesn't he now just appear to everyone the way he allegedly did to certain Jewish people thousands of years ago in a superstitious age? All he would have to do is speak plainly and show us all who he is. Is that so hard? Why can't he treat us equally and fairly if he really, honestly loves us, and give us the same privileges he supposedly gave a few Jews 2,000 years ago?

If Jesus really rose bodily and imperishable from the dead, why didn't he just stay on earth after the resurrection and teach people the truth and lead the world to harmony and happiness? Would that have been too easy? Did he prefer to make things hard for us by going away and living in seclusion up in the sky and testing people to see if they would believe a story that sounds like fiction?

Why should one accept Jewish myths or Christian myths as true, but not Greek, Roman, Hindu, Muslim, or other myths? How many Christians even bother to look into other traditions? To me, Christianity is hardly more believable than these other faiths. Many elements of Buddhism and Taoism and Gnostic Christianity require much less of a strain on logic.

Did Jesus stop appearing to people after Paul? If so, why? Was he tired of traveling all that way from heaven to earth? Was is too hard for him? Why is he hiding up in the sky if he cares about everyone? What is he doing up there, hour upon hour, day after day, year after year, century after century, millennium after...? Is he busy building mansions for those who believe the story? I don't believe that Jesus rose into the sky and is waiting there and will one day descend again in a cloud (Acts 1).

If Jesus had to appear to Paul to convert him, why wouldn't he appear to everyone else and give them the same chance he gave Paul? Is he whimsical? Does he still play favorites? If the Bible is true, God gave Paul a privilege that he is not giving to other people, and Paul was supposedly fighting against Christianity. That would be very unfair if it were true.

The Bible was written in an age when people were very gullible (yes, I know we still are) and when many cultures had, and were even still in the process of writing, myths and miraculous stories of the gods' interventions in human lives. The bible is no more reliable than these other stories, and it sounds very similar. Medieval Christians were still making up stories about Jesus, Mary, Mary Magdalene, saints, and relics--even claiming to have pieces of "the true cross", locks of Mary's hair, Jesus burial shroud, etc.

The early Christians were very fragmented. There were many Christian groups with quite different opinions and beliefs. There is no way to know which set of beliefs was the true (original) set of beliefs. One group dominated and suppressed all the others and became the orthodox Roman Catholic Church, but who says that this group held the "true faith," and how can anyone know? Who can show that they did not destroy all their opponents' evidence? and we know they did destroy things which they did not like. There is no way to know. Often the winner of such political battles is stronger and more power-hungry, but not more genuine. There were other gospels and writings that the orthodox did not allow into the NT scriptures. No one knows for sure that those other writings were not reflective of a more original form of Christianity or an equally valid one? What if the Gnostic Christians had won the political battle and suppressed the "orthodox" version, instead of vice versa? The orthodox Christians threw out the Gospel of Thomas for example, but how do we know that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are any more authentic than the Gospel of Thomas or any other of the Gnostic gospels and writings? The Gnostic Christians claimed to represent the true faith, and the orthodox cannot prove them wrong. (See The Nag Hammadi Library, Ed. James M. Robinson, and Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels as excellent sources on Gnostic Christianity.) Some early Christian groups had such beliefs as these:

That Jesus was man but not God
That Jesus was God but not man
That the god of the Hebrew Scriptures was not the true God
That the Hebrew god was an angry, ruthless, bloodthirsty god
That Yahweh, an arrogant being who claimed supreme status and tried to suppress mankind, was the one who lied in Eden when he told Adam he would die when he ate the fruit (for Adam did not die); that the serpent, a momentary incarnation of wisdom to help mankind develop spiritually, told the truth, and Adam's and Eve's eyes were opened and they did become as the gods, knowing good from evil (Gen 3:22).
That the resurrection was not a literal, physical event, but a spiritual one
That Jesus was not literally, but spiritually born of a virgin, Wisdom/Sophia, the eternal virgin (or the Holy Spirit)
That the knowledge of the Christ was a knowledge of one's self
That it wasn't wrong for women to hold positions of authority
That ignorance, not sin, was the true problem of mankind
That there was an exoteric Christianity for the masses and an esoteric Christianity for initiates, just as Jesus supposedly told his disciples some things he did not tell the crowds (Mt 13:10-), chose 12 to be closer than other disciples, showed some disciples more than he showed others (Mt 17, 2 Cor 12:1-4), and warned against casting pearls before swine; and just as Paul spoke of special revelations that weren't permitted to be known by everyone (2 Cor 12:1-4).

At least some forms of early Christianity were much like the Greek mystery religions, with deeper knowledge for initiates and a surface myth for lower-level followers. The eastern half of the Roman Empire had been immersed in Greek culture for over 300 years (since Alexander the Great). The NT was written in Greek; New Testament authors even used the Septuagint (Greek) version of the Hebrew Bible. Anyway, to summarize this point, no one knows which version of Christianity was the earliest or most authentic, even though plenty of people claim to know.

***The Christian god does not appear or speak for himself. Instead a bunch of people with an out-dated story-book run around trying to tell everyone what god thinks, what he wants everybody to do, and what he is going to do to those who don't listen.

Although it is the source of Christian "knowledge," the Bible contains myth, legend, and much false information. Here is a list of some examples, and it is by no means an exhaustive list:

See my paper Old Testament Chronological and Historical Problems, which explains how the Creation story, the Noah story, most of the Abraham-Isaac-Jacob stories, and much of the Exodus story are legend and myth and contain false data.
The sun did not stand still in the sky for a day while Joshua and his men killed all their enemies. No other, more advanced Near East cultures recorded such a cosmological phenomenon; there is no geological or scientific evidence for it; and besides being obviously made up, this story presents an earth-centered universe theory. Anyway, what would happen to the earth if it suddenly stopped rotating on its axis?! Many other stories are just as obviously fictitious, like the Samson story, or Jonah's 3 days in the fish's belly, or the walls of Jericho crumbling after the 7-time march around the city.
The books of the prophets are filled with false prophecies which never came to pass, but most people are uneducated in Jewish history and read the OT through the manipulative filter of Christian propaganda and interpretation. See my paper The Pre-Christian Jewish Concept of the Messiah for detailed information. Here is just one small example of a false prophecy: Jeremiah 33:7-18 (speaking to Jews in the 500's BCE) claimed that Yahweh was saying to Israel:
I will bring Judah and Israel back from captivity and will rebuild them as they were before. I will cleanse them from all the sin they have committed against me and will forgive all their sins of rebellion against me. Then this city will bring me renown, joy, praise and honor before all nations on earth that hear of all the good things I do for it; and they will be in awe and will tremble at the abundant prosperity and peace I provide for it. ... In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will dwell in safety. ... David will never fail to have a man to sit on the throne of the house of Israel, nor will the priests, who are Levites, ever fail to have a man to stand before me continually to offer burnt offerings, to burn grain offerings and to present sacrifices (v17-18).
Jeremiah's prediction failed miserably. Although a good portion of Judah did return to Jerusalem after 539 BCE, they were not rebuilt "as they were before" but were dominated by Persia, and the tribes of Israel never returned at all--they even ceased to exist as a separate ethnic group. The prophecy of the abundant peace and prosperity of Jerusalem was probably one of the most ironic statements ever made in human history, since for 2,750 years it has been one of the least peaceful places on the face of the earth. The Jews were not allowed to establish a kingdom when they returned to Jeusalem under Persian control, so they had a priest-lead theocracy; the city was war-torn under the Seleucids (Greeks), and although the Jews did create a new kingdom (not Davidic) again in the 100s BCE, it did not last; and the Romans destroyed Jerusalem again in 70 CE after a Jewish rebellion. There has not been a Davidic king on the throne of Judah (or Israel, as they somewhat misleadingly call it now) since the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. The Jews do not have a king today; they are fine with having a prime minister. And even Christians, who insupportably think Jesus is the Jewish King (?!?), still do not have a Levite to "burn grain offerings" or present sacrifices, as Jeremiah prophesied.
Ezekiel, Isaiah, and other "prophets" all thought the Jews would come back from captivity and build a great earthly kingdom, but it did not happen. And there were always those groups of Jews who tried to reinterpret their scriptures to account for the mistakes, but historians have the records to prove the prophets false. If their contemporaries had known what the future of their nation would be like, by their own law they would have had to stone Jeremiah and the others to death as false prophets. Again, see the above-mentioned paper for a much more detailed account.
Much of the book of Daniel is a pseudepigraphon (a false writing); at least significant parts of it were not written until the 2^nd century BCE but were falsely ascribed to a legendary Jewish hero, Daniel, to give authority to the writings. One may read the Harper's Bible Dictionary article on Daniel or The Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. VIII pp. 324-387 for a couple of sources. The events described in chapter 11 of Daniel all happened in the 100's BCE and are mostly in the right order and accurate until a certain point where they start deviating from what actually happened. The author(s) had witnessed the persecution of Israel by Antiochus IV of Syria and the violation of the Jewish temple in 168 BCE (the "abomination of desolation"), and so he/they wrote down what had happened onto a manuscript and said that it had all been prophesied by Daniel 400 or 500 years before. Only, the writer(s) of Daniel didn't know what would happen next, so he/they made some predictions, and the predicted details of the end of the war between the Syrians and Jews turned out to be wrong. Also, he/they thought the resurrection of the dead was about to occur, and it didn't ² (see endnote 2). Many Jews kept reinterpreting this book too, just as they did with the other "prophets." If the NT gospels quote Jesus accurately, he was still thinking the "abomination of desolation" would happen in the future! The Jews had to reinterpret Daniel this way or else admit that it was wrong. Daniel does have some other mistakes. For example, Daniel 5:2 mistakenly says Belshazzar's father was Nebuchadnezzar, but Belshazzar was actually the son and viceroy of Nabonidus, not Nebuchadnezzar, and he also was not king, as 5:1 calls him. In the Hebrew canon, Daniel is not placed with the prophets, but with the writings; this is further evidence that it was added at a late date, possibly when the collection of prophets had already been closed. If you look at Daniel in a Roman Catholic Bible, you'll even see further additions to the text, Susanna and Bel and the Dragon.
The NT is full of misinterpretations and out-of-context quotations of the Jewish Scriptures. Jews knew this all through the Middle Ages, and it was one of the many good reasons why they did not believe in Jesus as their Messiah; but Christians hated the Jews, and Christian scholars were unwilling to look into it honestly until modern times. See my paper, The Pre-Christian Jewish Concept of the Messiah: Appendix D: New Testament Interpretations of the Old Testament for several excellent examples. Just one example is the supposed prophecy of the virgin birth of the Christ. Isaiah 7:14-17 actually says in Hebrew, "Behold, the young woman will conceive"; it does NOT say "a virgin will conceive." Hebrew has a word that specifically means "virgin;" it is used in many places in the Bible, but not here. The writer of Matthew was using a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, which used the Greek word parthena and can refer to a virgin, but does not necessarily do so. Virgin births were very common in Greek stories of heroes.
But there is much more. The child Isaiah prophesied about was supposed to live in the 700's BCE!!!: "...and before the boy is old enough to know the difference between right and wrong, the land . . . will be laid waste by the king of Assyria" (7:14-17). That happened in 732 and 722-21 BCE. The birth of the child was supposed to be a sign for King Ahaz in the 700's. Thus, there is NO WAY Isaiah was referring to some far off virgin birth of a spiritual messiah. There is no prophecy of a virgin birth of the messiah anywhere in Jewish scripture! Christians usually do not bother to read the rest of that passage in Isaiah. They too often do not bother to read the OT in context or learn Jewish history at all, and that is why they are easy prey for preachers and evangelists (who were once easy prey for others, etc. ad infinitum).
Matthew and Luke give different genealogies for Jesus. Which one (if either) is right? Some Christians have tried to explain this away by saying one of the genealogies is of Mary, but that is a lame attempt ant it's NOT what the Bible itself says. Matthew says Joseph's father was Jacob; Luke says Joseph's father was Heli. And those aren't the only problems: 1) They conflict with each other on whether Joseph (Jesus' "father") descended from David through Solomon or Nathan, 2) Luke 3:35 follows the Septuagint and contains an extra name conflicting with the list in the Hebrew Genesis, and 3) the genealogies would not matter anyway if Joseph was not really Jesus' father (i.e. Virgin birth). Since the Messiah was to be a descendant of David, the Gospel writers thought they had to "prove" the genetic link. To "prove" such a genetic link, evidently they were willing to make stuff up. If the gospels are giving false information about the simple kinds of details which should be easier to believe, why should we ever believe the stuff that SOUNDS fantastic, mythical, irrational, or contrary to nature and common experience?
The Gospels contradict each other in many details about what happened after Jesus' resurrection. See my paper Resurrection Discrepancies for details. Especially note the disagreement on whether post-resurrection events took place in Galilee or Jerusalem; this is a glaring problem, revealing that the compilers of the orthodox New Testament were gathering myths, legends, and hearsay, not reliable, factual history. There are also inconsistencies regarding who went to the tomb, to whom Jesus appeared and in what order, how long he stayed on the earth, and more. Given additional problems of logic (mentioned in the paper cited above) and the fact that some early Christians considered the resurrection a spiritual, not a physical event, the whole literal resurrection and ascension story appears too fishy.
The Bible constantly uses special numbers like 3s, 7s, 12s, 40s, and their multiples in its stories. The overabundant use of these numbers greatly detracts from the Bible's credibility, and gives the appearance of myth, legend, and symbolism rather than history. If you're not aware of just how often these numbers are used, get a concordance some time and look them up, or just see my paper The Use of Special Numbers in the Bible for more details, including a nearly exhaustive list of occurrences of these numbers in the Bible. This can be a truly astounding point, if you look at it patiently. Other peoples of the ancient world also used these same numbers in their most significant myths.
Do you really think people remembered all those detailed conversations they recorded in the Bible, or did they likely make some things up? Think about it? A huge amount of text is devoted to quotations and conversations that the writers did not witness.

All through the Middle Ages, people could be put to death for questioning the Bible (that's how great the Church was!), but especially during the Enlightenment of the 1700's much truth about this collection of writings began to be discovered. For example, tradition had ascribed the first 5 books to Moses, but even Jews of early modern times began to question and eventually easily prove that the Torah could not have been written by Moses. *See Richard Elliott Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible? for a short history of Biblical scholarship and some excellent explanations, and see my paper "Old Testament Chronological and Historical Problems: Late Authorship, Not Mosaic. " Among many other reasons for rejecting Moses' authorship, the texts have many anachronisms that could not have been written until just a few hundred years BCE. Another small but important bit of evidence for late authorship of the Torah is the fact that the author(s) could not even name the Egyptian Pharaoh during the legendary Exodus. The first pharaoh mentioned by name is Shishak (c. 945-924 BCE). New Testament scholarship has also come a long way. For example, some "Pauline" epistles are now believed to be falsely ascribed to the Apostle Paul. See Burton Mack's Who Wrote the New Testament?, among other sources.

To summarize this rather long "point", the Bible is in NO way a reliable source. People usually believe it because they want to, or because they are told they should, or because they are afraid not to.

Perhaps the central claim of orthodox Christianity is that Jesus was the messiah foretold by the Jewish prophets, but this is also one of the most historically absurd claims. The Jewish prophets called for a renewed, earthly Jewish kingdom and the restoration of the line of David upon the earthly throne--a political, worldly king (see my paper The Pre-Christian Jewish Concept of the Messiah for a detailed explanation). They also thought all the nations would come to Jerusalem to offer animal sacrifices at the temple, to bring riches to the city, and to worship Yahweh. None of that happened, or should ever happen. Jesus certainly never became king of the Jews, and Christians don't believe in the sacrificial system anymore, so how could the prophecies ever be fulfilled? Christians try to say Jesus fulfills the prophecies of the restoration of the sacrifice system by becoming the ultimate sacrifice--but that is NOT what the prophets foretold (for example, Is 19:21, Is 56:6-7, Is 60:1-22, Jer 33:18, Ezekiel 36-48). And anyone can demonstrate that Jesus is not the king of the Jews or Israel. All you have to do is go to Israel and ask the prime minister who the king is, and he will tell you there isn't one. The Christian claim is like someone claiming King Arthur is the true king of England, "spiritually."

During the Greco-Roman era, it was relatively common for groups to write stories or "prophecies" or other literature and falsely attribute the writing to a hero, ancestor, prophet, or spiritual leader. I have already mentioned Daniel, but there were many others. For example, early Christians had a document called the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, a Jewish pseudepigraphon into which they basically inserted a bunch of "prophecies" about Jesus and claimed that the prophecies were made by the 12 sons of Jacob almost 2000 years before Jesus. In other words, it was a fraud. Other examples of such pseudipigraphal and/or apocryphal works are the following Jewish and Christian texts: I and II Esdras, Tobit, the Wisdom of Solomon, the Wisdom of Jesus Ben Sirach, Baruch, Letter to Jeremiah, some additions to Daniel (Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon), Prayer of Manasseh, III and IV Maccabees, I and II Enoch (quoted by Jude in the New Testament), Ascension of Isaiah (more Christian "prophesies" of Jesus falsely attributed to Isaiah), II Baruch, Psalms of Solomon, Pseudo-Phocylides, and the Sybilline Oracles. At least in the cases of Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and Ascension of Isaiah, we basically have proof that early Jews and Christians were in the business of making up stories and attributing them to certain authors. In other words, people were inventing religion. And that's not all. Other early Christian (esp. Gnostic) writings included a Prayer of the Apostle Paul, Gospel of Truth, Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Mary, Gospel of Philip, Apocryphon of John, Gospel of the Egyptians, Acts of Peter and the Twelve, Thunder, Perfect Mind, Letter of Peter to Philip, Testimony of Truth, Eugnostos the Blessed, and much more (most of these were just discovered at Nag Hammadi, Egypt this century). And this is only what we know about! Who knows how much other literature was destroyed. As you can see, people at that time were writing a tremendous amount of religious literature and passing it off as authoritative. In summary, NO early Christian writings are truly reliable or verifiably authentic. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are just as likely to be pseudepigrapha as any other early Christian writing, only they were written from what became the "orthodox" viewpoint and were thus kept by the "orthodox" church while other writings were discarded. No one knows if the orthodox texts are more authentic than the others; the only reason some people claim to know, is that they believe the orthodox tradition. When "holy" texts and the power to read are in the hands of only a few people, many of them priests, it is much easier for priests to manipulate the public; and such was the case for hundreds of years.

The Greek philosopher Empedocles claimed the ability to impart cures for sickness and old age, to control the wind and rain, and to raise men from the dead. The Greek philosopher Pythagoras was once seen in two different cities at the same time. Appolonius of Tyana was an ascetic wandering teacher, wise man, and miracle-worker of the 1st century Roman world. He had a miraculous birth, gathered a circle of disciples, knew the past and the future, and performed miracles such as healing a demoniacal boy, a lame man, a blind man, and a paralytic. He was put on trial and disappeared. He is an example of a "divine man," a theios aner of the Greco-Roman world. The deification of heros, rulers, and charismatic men was common in ancient times. Many Roman emperors became gods upon their deaths. Herakles and Dionysus were both born from the union of Zeus with human women, like Jesus was born to Yahweh and Mary. Oracles, prophecies, dreams, divination, healings, miracles, magic, astrology, and astral religion were all common. Many of the stories of Jesus fit in with all the rest of such beliefs in the ancient world and are not verifiably more authentic than any of these other stories.

***Honestly, If 2 men from a rebel group in Iraq were to come to your house tomorrow and tell you that they had a leader named Ali, who was born to a virgin teenager, performed numerous awesome miracles like healing the sick, casting demons out of people, even walking on water, and that he was killed by the U.S. government but came back from the dead 2 days later out in the desert and appeared miraculously to a few of his favorite followers and once even to 500 Iraqi disciples at the same time, but only to them and not to Iraqi leaders or U.S. agents, and that he then went up in a cloud into the sky, promising to return soon and commanding his followers to teach the world his message, would you believe these 2 men?

What if they told you that if you did not believe their story, you could not live forever in their paradise and you would be condemned by their God, who is the only real God, to burn in fire for your wickedness and disbelief? What if they promised that if you did believe it and followed their rules, you would go to a paradise in the sky when you died? They can't prove Ali rose from the dead but they promise you that his body is nowhere to be found. The U.S. government says it is just a foolish, superstitious Iraqi cult stirring up trouble. The Iraqi cult members tell you Ali's spirit is always with them, and they even claim some miracles are still happening. Would you believe it?

Better yet, what if it wasn't even these people themselves, but second or third generation self-proclaimed followers of these people who conveyed this message to you, claiming that it was all written down by the witnesses and their disciples? Say you notice their writings don't perfectly agree on precisely what happened after Ali's resurrection. And what if Ali's followers had disputes about his teachings, disputes settled only when one group kicked the others out by force and burned their writings? Would you believe their story? I doubt it. And if you wouldn't believe that, you shouldn't be a Christian. But I bet if the movement became popular enough, most would begin to join the bandwagon--even if 2,000 years went by and Ali still hadn't come back yet!

How many people in the U.S. have seen Elvis since his death? Elvis is alive!! Long live the king! How many people have seen UFO's? How many people have claimed that they were abducted by aliens? How many people have claimed to see the Virgin Mary? How many thousands of people have successfully remembered the details of their past lives? Do statues of Mary really cry? Do Hindu statues really drink milk? How did Mormonism grow so fast in the United States? How did Islam spread so fast after 632 CE and Muslims take the "holy" land, the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia Minor from the "more righteous" "truth-believing" Christians? How easily were the people of colonial Salem swept into the frenzy of the witch trials? How many people in the U.S. call psychic hotlines? Why didn't the Holy Spirit warn sincere Christian people that Jim Baker was a crook, or that Jimmy Swaggart was sleeping around, or about all the fraudulent, money-grabbing faith-healers and evangelists? People will believe just about anything, especially 1) if they are uneducated, or 2) if the belief is part of their cultural heritage, or 3) if they're desperate for something to hope in. And that's today; credulity and superstition were much worse in ancient times when Christianity was invented.

I cannot believe that there is a god so hot-headed that he would send people to an eternal fire ¹ (see endnote 1), especially just for not believing a story. A loving god would not play such games with fragile lives either, and would not condemn someone for not believing he exists, especially when the person would believe if only the god would show that he's real. And as best as I know, a person does not choose to believe or not to believe something is real. You either believe it, or you don't. Doubt is the same way; it is not something you try to do. I used to know lots of Christians who were upset that they couldn't keep themselves from having doubts. When I stopped believing, I did not try to stop; it just happened. The more I studied history and ancient religion, the more I studied the Bible, the less I believed it and the more holes I found, even though I was trying to be the best Christian I could be. I had wanted to be a minister and I set out to gain understanding. I had honest questions; I pursued answers; I found answers; I realized I didn't believe it anymore. If there were a god who would send me to eternal fire for that, such a god would be unjust in the extreme. Hell is a Christian scare tactic to get people into the Church and then keep them from questioning authority. Fear has been one of Christianity's greatest tools, and I groan inwardly when I think of how many little children and teenagers on any given Sunday are being frightened into faith. Plenty of people will never question the Bible out of fear of hell. What a loving God they serve?

What kind of god is unable to forgive sins or mistakes without the shedding of blood? The Bible teaches that "without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness" (Heb 9:22). It teaches that Yahweh required animal blood to appease his anger, and that his son became the final sacrifice once for all. Such a god, if he existed, would have a serious anger management problem. I forgive people all the time for doing things I don't like, and I don't demand any blood. Am I then more forgiving than the Christian god? And what have I done that is so horrible that blood should be shed? I have been a gentle, loving person since I was a teenager. What if we all acted like the Christian god of the Bible and demanded blood sacrifice anytime someone did something we didn't like? Some Christians say God does this because he is so "righteous," but I don't buy that anymore. You don't need to demand death and bloodshed to be righteous. A god who would lovingly counsel those who err would be much more righteous; yet not only does the Christian god fail to show up and lovingly, personally counsel those who make mistakes (like a real father would), Christians can only point to an ancient story-book to tell others what their god thinks, because he doesn't even speak for himself. The idea of blood sacrifice comes out of the distant past when fearful, unknowledgeable men tried to appease invisible gods by offering them food, drink, and blood. The Hebrews borrowed the idea from their nighbors, and Christianity just modified the Hebrew idea with a touching story of self-sacrifice. And the Hebrew law demanding blood sacrifice was not really given by a god to Moses on a mountain after a great and miraculous Exodus from Egypt anyway; it was written by priests well after the supposed time of Moses (see my paper Old Testament Chronological and Historical Problems).

Should we question the validity of a substitutional sacrifice (a)for moral reasons, (b)for its value and appropriateness in changing people's behavior, (c)for its effectiveness in appeasing god's wrath and persuading him to forgive?

great

Someone long ago asked me this, "If Jesus was God and he knew it, and he knew he was all-powerful and would rise again from the dead anyway, how hard would it have been to sacrifice himself? How hard would it be for a God to let his "word" (?) become a man and die, if he knew the whole time it was just a temporary moment of suffering and that he was really immortal and would be back in full strength in no time?"

A Jewish man named Jesus was "supposedly" (according to the church) "fully God and fully man", yet suffered and was tempted in every way "as we are." But this doctrine is nonsense (unless we too are fully God and fully human). If he knew he was divine, then he knew he wasn't really a man but rather God-with-a-body (unless men are divine). If he knew he was divine and "born of a virgin," then he did not know what it was really like not to be divine, unless he was not always divine. Knowing his own divinity would have been an advantage that most people don't seem to have. And if he did not know he was divine, then he was not fully God, if (as most Christians say) God knows all things (see also Mark 13:32, "No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."). James 1:13 says "God cannot be tempted," but Heb 4:15 says Jesus was "tempted in every way, just as we are - yet was without sin," even though John 14:9 says anyone who saw Jesus saw the Father. So was he untemptable God, or a temptable man? If a God spoke to him as a father to a son, then he did not suffer the same way we suffer; if he could heal the sick and walk on water and raise the dead, then he did not suffer the same way we suffer; if he knew he would rise from the dead after a couple of days and would rule the universe, then he did not suffer as we suffer. In the superstitious minds of plenty of ancient Greeks and Romans, great men could become gods, and assuming Jesus existed, he was only one more example of a leader deified by those who lived after him. [And back to Hebrews 4:15, how did the writer of this verse know Jesus was sinless anyway? Did he watch Jesus every moment? Answer: he didn't know, it's just a doctrine made up by the church.]

Christianity promotes the belief that there is a duality of spirit vs. matter, and some modern Christians are even fond of saying that spirit is outside of space and time. I see no reason to believe that people have a soul or spirit that is not physical, or that is not made of the same energy that makes up everything else. If spirit exists, it has to be made of the same energy/substance that makes up matter, or else spirit could have no interaction with matter at all. For there to be interaction between two things, they must have something in common, or one could not touch, move, influence, affect, sense, or in any way be aware of the other. If matter cannot affect spirit, Christians should not say that material sins affect a person's spirit.

If spiritual beings can see, or feel, or think, you might as well say they are physical beings, because seeing, feeling, and thinking or all physical. The ancient people did not know that, so they thought that anything you could not see was not physical, like thoughts and breath and air. And they thought that the invisible breath is what makes us alive AND conscious. Thus, "spirit" comes from Latin spiritus (breathing, breath, breeze). We see it in our word reSPIRation. The Romans had another word animus which we also translate as "spirit." Animus is from anima (wind, breath). We see it in our word ANIMA-L, a breathing thing. The Greek word anemos also meant wind.

We call "soul" what the Hebrews called nephesh (something that breathes) from their word naphash (to breathe). The ancient Hebrews believed that man was dirt which God had shaped and breathed the air of life into:

Man = dirt + wind/breath/air

Also when you see the word "spirit" in the English Old Testament, it is really the Hebrew word ruwach, which meant "wind" and by association "breath." In fact, even every time you read the word "wind" in the English version of the Old Testament, it is really the exact same Hebrew word, ruwach!! The ancient Hebrews made NO linguistic distinctions at all between the wind that blows locusts (Ex. 10:13), and clouds (1 Kg. 18:45), and dust (Ps. 18:42), or the wind that we breathe, and the wind that they thought was responsible for thoughts and emotions like jealousy (Num. 5:30), wisdom (Ex. 28:3), anguish (Ex. 6:9), anger (Ecc. 7:9), a troubled mind (Job 21:4). All of these things, they thought, were done by the mysterious wind force, invisible air. And they thought air was "non-physical" because they could not see it.

In the New Testament, there are 2 important words: psuche (or psyche) and pneuma. The English translated psyche as soul, and pneuma as spirit. Psyche is Greek for "breath", from the Greek verb psycho (to breathe, blow air). We see it in our word "psychology", because the Greeks over time decided that our air/breath was also responsible for our thinking ability (like the ancient Hebrews). Pneuma means "a blowing, a breeze, wind, blast, breath, odor" and comes from Greek pneo (to blow, breathe). In fact, the Greek word for your lungs was pneumon. We see it in our word pneumonia.

We now know that air is made of the same stuff as our bodies and everything else. We also know that air itself, our breath, is not of itself the thing that allows us to think and feel emotions. Our mind is a physical thing; emotions and thinking are physical, chemical processes. That is why if you take a certain drug, it will change your thinking process. If thinking is a spiritual, non-physical process, then why do physical chemicals affect your thoughts or even destroy them? Depressed people can take a pill to change their mood, their temperament. That is why ancient people thought marijuana and magic mushrooms were "the flesh of the gods," and that is why alcohol is called "distilled spirits!!" That is why our thinking starts to deteriorate at the same time as our brain starts to deteriorate in old age. If you start poking holes in your brain, do you think your thoughts will go on as normal because they are really spiritual? Dogs, cats, monkeys, and other animals have thoughts and emotions too, even if they are not quite as complex because of genetic differences in their DNA. Yet Christians do not usually say that animals have souls (and many Christians are in denial of their nature as animals and of their mortality--except when they cry at funerals even though they supposedly believe the person is with God). Our bodies/brains can sense light and objects because everything is made from the same energy in the form of atoms and sub-atomic particles. If our mind were not made of matter, it would have no way to sense or contact physical things.

So I believe, as did the writer of Ecclesiates (in the Bible), that there is little difference between humans and other animals. I believe what nature shows me, that we decay when we die. Nature gives me no evidence that I am permanent, only that the ultimate energy I am made of is permanent, in one form or another. I'm not saying mortality is necessarily easy to accept, but it makes it much harder to accept when we are presented shaky promises of eternal life either in the sky or in some fantastic unseen dimension.

The idea that spirit is outside of space and time is absurd, and the Bible does not even teach that to begin with. To exist is to occupy space-time. Without time, also, there could be no thinking, for you could not have one thought before or after another--so such a God or spirit could not think or compare thoughts, or even be known or sensed or thought about. And without time, you could not live forever, because there would be no duration. Without space-time, number would not exist, so their could not be multiple spirit beings; you would not be able to distinguish between one thing and another, or (more accurately worded) one part of a whole from another part. For example, if there were no space-time in heaven, you could not say you were separate from God, since the word "separate" necessarily implies differentiation, which is space-time. "Separation" is a relative word; a thing is said to be separate "from" another thing. And there is no such thing as complete separation anyway; for example, I say my head is separate from my foot, but that does not mean that my head and foot are not connected. All things are connected in space-time. Without space-time, there can be no change. Without change there can be no thought or desire. Without change we cannot talk about life. To live, know, love, think -- all imply change, differentiation between multiple entities and events, i.e. space-time. If you exist, you are, or are in, space-time. If there were such a thing as a spiritual world, it would still have space-time.

I find problems with the Biblical ideas of heaven and hell.

Ancient people believed God, or the Gods, lived up in the sky. In Hebrew (the Old Testament), the word for sky is shamayim; in Greek (the New Testament) the word is ouranos. People did not have two different words for sky and heaven; they were the same place. So when English Bibles translate shamayim and ouranos sometimes as sky and sometimes as heaven, they mislead modern readers into thinking there was a difference. In the Bible, the sky/heaven (shamayim or ouranos) is a place:

The ancient people, including Jews and Christians and the Bible, believed in a 3-tiered universe: 1) the heavens above, 2) the flat earth below (a flat circle/disk or a flat square), 3) sheol/ hades/ hell/ tartarus beneath.

Now we know that this is incorrect. But instead of giving up belief in heaven and hell, people simply began to imagine them as existing in some invisible dimension instead of "above" or "beneath" the earth. But that is not the way the Bible teaches it. In Acts, Jesus is depicted as rising into the sky until a cloud hid him from view (Acts 1:9-11). And in Revelation 1:7 a Christian writer says, "Look he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him..." Such descriptions are clues that the ascension and other stories are made up. It would be pointless for Jesus to have gone up into the sky; nothing is up there but air. And if heaven were in some other dimension, Jesus could have simply disappeared into that other dimension. The fact that the Christian story depicts him going up into the air to heaven simply betrays their ancient world view that heaven was the upper sky; and this is one of the many clues that the story is a fabrication.

The Bible teaches that just as the sky/heaven is above the earth, so is hell below/within the earth. Consider the following:

The early Christians and their Bible along with other ancient people thought hell was under the ground, the earth was flat, and God was up in the sky. It has only been in the last 400 years (since Copernicus, d.1543, and Galileo, d.1642, who's theory the Church condemned) that science has slowly driven (or begun to drive) ancient cosmology from people's minds.

To my conservative Christian friends: Are these enough reasons for me to doubt? Again, I never tried to doubt; I could not help it. If my questioning is honest, and I sincerely seek the truth, why do you believe God would disown me simply for that? Does God not repect sincerity and honesty? If any personal higher power exists, it is my sincere wish to know and love him/her/it, as I wish to love all.

Tell me what you think.

Endnotes

1 Concerning hell and who goes there: Speaking of Jesus' name, the Bible says "there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we may be saved" (Acts 4:12). The Bible quotes Jesus as saying, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father but through me" (Jn 14:6); "Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned" (Mk 16:16); "Whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only son" (John 3:18). What kind of condemnation awaits those who don't believe the story? Fire that lasts indefinitely ("fire of aeons" in Greek, usually translated eternal fire), "where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched" (Mk 9:43-48--see also Mt 13:40-42,13:49-50,18:8-9,25:41-46; Lk 3:16-17,13:28; Jn 15:6; Rev 21:8). "The cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars--their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfer. This is the second death" (Rev 21:8). Notice how those who don't believe are considered just as bad as the worst criminals.

2 By the way, the Jewish idea of the bodily resurrection shows up in full force only after the Jews had contact with the Persians (539-300 BCE), whose religion, Zoroastrianism, taught that doctrine. In other words, they likely borrowed the idea. Even in the first century CE, the Jewish Sadducees still didn't believe in the resurrection, because they knew it was not originally part of their religion and had not been mentioned by "Moses."

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