My path out of Christianity began 30 years ago when I realized that evolution was a fact- that we evolved from very simple organisms that lived 4,000,000,000 years ago. I wondered why a god would use such a long, convoluted process to produce the desired human product, a process that included a 160,000,000 year reign of the dinosaurs and the countless suffering of animals that starved to death or were eaten alive. The way I got out of that conundrum was to suppose that God allowed everything to happen on its own and that only when intelligent beings evolved did he decide to intervene, and that perhaps he did the same on other planets where intelligent life evolved.

For a while, I was satisfied with that, but then I started to realize other problems. Modern humans have existed for 100,000 years, so why did God wait 95,000 years before he made contact? And why was that contact made with only a small tribe in the Middle East? The problem was further exacerbated by the question of why God would “choose” a certain people over another in the first place, while ignoring the many vibrant civilizations that existed all over the world at that time? Then it became worse when I realized that God allegedly not only favored the Jews, but he also helped them to fight their neighbors, even to the point of commanding them to kill the adversary’s women and children. Why would a god who had built the entire universe become involved in such cruel and petty absurdity? When looking at the other atrocities ascribed to God in the Old Testament, I also realized that no real god would ever act in that way. I also concluded that the god of the New Testament was very different and could not be the same as the one described in the Old Testament- though, if that is true, then Christianity fails a significant test of authenticity.

I was impressed by this quote from Richard Dawkins:

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

There are scriptures to back up every adjective in this quote.

Another quote from Mark Twain:

"Our Bible reveals to us the character of our God with minute and remorseless exactness. The portrait is substantially that of a man—if one can imagine a man charged and overcharged with evil impulses far beyond the human limit; a personage whom no one, perhaps, would desire to associate with, now that Nero and Caligula are dead. in the old Testament His acts expose His vindictive, unjust, ungenerous, pitiless and vengeful nature constantly. He is always punishing—punishing trifling misdeeds with thousand-fold severity; punishing innocent children for the misdeeds of their parents; punishing unoffending populations for the misdeeds of their rulers; even descending to wreak bloody vengeance upon harmless calves and lambs and sheep and bullocks, as punishment for inconsequential trespasses committed by their proprietors. it is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading, by contrast."

The story of Noah’s Ark never happened. But it was written as if it were a fact, so it made me wonder what other events in the Bible that, unlike Noah, seem plausibly true but are nonetheless fiction? What is even more telling in my observation is that if the story of Noah is true, as many fundamentalist Christians believe, would a god capable of such vicious cruelty be worthy of worship in the first place?

I also recognized that a real god would not require animals to be sacrificed for his gratification or demand that people who work on the Sabbath be put to death, or that disobedient children should be killed. It seemed obvious to me that men wrote scriptures that reflected the current culture and whatever appealed to them, but they were not in communication with or guided by a supernatural being during this process. Could the real god that made the whole universe be so petty, unjust, and jealous, or be a misogynist or homophobic, or be a racist, or be homicidal, or be so inconsistent and capricious as he is portrayed in the Old Testament? No, but humans certainly could. This god is nothing more than a reflection of the men who wrote the Old Testament, very much a fictional deity grounded in the times and environment of the people who created him.

That the Bible is a product of its times is also revealed by the Ten Commandments. Nowhere in these commandments is there a condemnation of slavery, genocide, child molestation, or cruel treatment of homosexuals or non-human animals, but it does suggest that a wife is the property of the husband (Commandment #10). It is apparent that the morality of modern civilization has surpassed that of the Bible, but if God was the author of these commandments, it begs the question: are we today more moral than God? It takes little effort by anyone to construct a more enlightened set of instructions than what is contained in the Ten Commandments.

I understood that the Bible viewed homosexuality as sin, but concluded that a real god would have understood the causes of homosexuality and would not have condemned what came natural to these people. He would have known that it wasn’t a choice, but rather an integral part of their essence. Such a god would not have condemned these people or their activity. The Bible’s condemnation of homosexuality reveals its man-made origins.

The story of the Jewish exile to Egypt has been disproved based on the absolute lack of evidence either in the Egyptian historical records or corroborating physical evidence. The story of everything associated with this sojourn was apparently a myth that was later written into the books of Genesis and Exodus. Once again, this casts doubt on the authenticity of the Old Testament.

So the next rationalization for me was to completely jettison the Old Testament and consider it apocryphal- just a series of legends that might in some cases have been remotely tethered to real events, and that Jesus came to the earth to correct the errors of Judaism as well as other religions. There were problems with that concept as well because Jesus appeared to be supportive of Old Testament history and law. There seems to be no way to separate Christianity from its Jewish roots without destroying its authenticity.

At this point my faith was hanging by a thread. I looked at how the universe was constructed and how things worked in my experience of life. Well, the universe did not seem to be anything a god would design, there being too much chaos and asymmetry, with asteroids pounding planets, galaxies colliding, and so forth. The universe is too large for it to have been created just for human earthlings, and it also seems to be farcical that the god that made all of this is a male and looks like a human.

I considered a thought experiment, that I had been raised without any religious instruction or even hearing about religion as I grew up. Would I have concluded from what I experienced that there were supernatural forces at play? Did it seem like a world populated with gods, angels, devils, and demons? The answer was “no.”

The very concept of the Devil and Hell seemed to be a human invention, perhaps to scare and control people, but very unlikely to exist in reality. I understood that if I disbelieved in the Devil that I was also dangerously close to disbelieving in God.

I wondered how God could justify letting so much misery occur when he had the power to stop it. I examined the well-known quote by Epicurus:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
I found it hard to construct a convincing retort to this argument. After seeing people fall victim to Alzheimer’s disease, be eaten alive by flesh-eating bacteria, be drowned in tsunamis, be wracked with agonizing pain, I became weary of using the long-standing rationalization that ‘god works in mysterious ways.’ The amount of suffering in the world is too great to be considered a purposeful plan by a benevolent god. I realized one thing- if God is who most Christians think he is, omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent, then he is not compassionate, not sympathetic, and not deserving of admiration or worship.

A corollary to this issue is to ask what would a god do if he sees a very tragic event unfolding or about to happen, would he just watch and let it occur? An example is 9/11, or the great Indonesian or Japanese tsunamis. It seemed to be unusual that an existence overseen by a supernatural god would see such terrible events occur, and happen in a way that appeared to be unrestrained by any governing mechanism. If a person withheld information that could have thwarted the 9/11 attack, he would have been prosecuted as an accessory before the fact. But god gets a pass on this by Christians who seem to rationalize that god thought this event was somehow necessary.

I also evaluated the effectiveness of prayer and concluded that the prayers I had said in my life had not shown any sign of being answered beyond pure coincidence. I wondered why God refused to heal amputees and quadriplegics. I also wondered why Christians and atheists respond the same way when they get sick or wreck their car- that is, it seemed that being a Christian offered no tangible real-world advantage.

I was bothered by the fact that Christians did not pray for anything that would clearly require a supernatural force, such as praying for a dead person to be raised back to life, or an amputee to have a limb restored, or for a polluted lake to be cleaned up. And I had ask myself why this was so, because the Bible seemed to suggest such things should be possible through an all-powerful God. I wondered if it was because Christians know that prayers really do not work and to be safe it is best to use them only in situations where a positive ‘answer’ might result from a natural process.

I also wondered why God would be so secretive and aloof, and allow so many false religions to flourish. Even in the Christian religion, there are hundreds of denominations each with a different philosophy of Christianity. Wouldn’t it make more sense to be upfront with us and let us know exactly what we were supposed to believe, how to behave, and who to worship? Further, why are so many people born into circumstances that make becoming a Christian almost impossible?

I wondered why a god would author the perception that men were in any way superior to women, or had dominion over them. Our society has moved to a paradigm of equality between the sexes. Wouldn’t a god have been similarly enlightened and have promoted this concept from the beginning?

I wondered about the inconsistency of salvation, given that an infant who dies is supposedly given a free pass to heaven, but if he lived to be an adult and did not satisfy God, he could be sent to Hell. This seemed to suggest that dying as an infant was the best thing that could happen, for why risk an eternal reward for a few short years of earthly life?

Original Article: http://new.exchristian.net/2013/11/how-i-figured-out-christianity-is-not.html

My read of the Bible also suggested something atrocious- That Ted Bundy, the serial killer of over 30 women, is in heaven, while Dr. Albert Schweitzer, the great humanitarian who devoted his life to alleviating the suffering of impoverished Africans, is in hell. It is consistent to make this argument from the text of the New Testament, which suggests that no man is worthy of heaven without accepting the grace offered by Jesus’ death on the cross and that any person still alive, no matter their history, can have his sins absolved. Bundy did accept Jesus before his execution and Schweitzer did not accept Jesus as being divine. This outlandish scenario caused me to question the morality of the New Testament, but more importantly, the likelihood that a god would use such an injudicious system of reward and punishment.

I wondered why a religion started by the Jews was any different from other religions created by other cultures. In all cases, the gods exclusively favored the group that invented them, so why should I assume that the religion of the Jews was any different?

I considered the miraculous elements of Christianity- the virgin birth, the guiding star, the visitation by nobility, being put to death and resurrecting, and found that all of these elements existed in religions that preceded Christianity. This didn’t disprove these events as described in the Bible, but it did suggest the possibility that elements of previous religions were borrowed by Christianity.

I looked at the New Testament and found two disturbing problems, the first being the Roman census that was supposedly conducted during the time of Jesus’ birth (BC 4). There is no record of this in Roman history (the only census that took place in this time frame was in AD 6-7 according to the Romans meticulous records and did not include the areas of Nazareth and Bethlehem) and it never made sense anyway. The Romans would not have required people to journey to their birth city. This would involve cases where families would have been split, going to different cities, but more significantly, the Romans would want to know how many people were living currently in each area rather than how many were born in a certain city. I also realized why this was written into the Bible- Jesus was a Nazarene, but the scriptures said that the savior was to be born in Bethlehem, so some device was needed to convince followers that Jesus was not born in Nazareth as everyone had assumed, but rather he had the appropriate credentials of the savior.

The other story was the release of Barabbas at the Passover. There is no record outside of the Bible of the Romans having a tradition of releasing a prisoner of the crowd’s choice during the Passover, and common sense suggests that this could not be true. The Bible suggests that a murderer named Barabbas was released in lieu of Jesus at the behest of the crowd. It was clear to me that this was written to make the point that Jesus was crucified at the will of the Jews and to exonerate the Romans. It also seems likely that the crowd screaming for the release of Barabbas was actually referring to Jesus, and that Barabbas, translated to “son of the father” might have been his nickname. It also seemed to be very peculiar that the same crowd that enthusiastically regaled Jesus on Palm Sunday would turn against him 5 days later and urge the Romans to crucify him while selecting a callous murderer to be released in his stead.

I convinced myself that these two stories were not true and further discovered the motivation that led to their inclusion into the gospels. When I realized that these two stories were not true, I began to question the validity of everything written in the New Testament.

As many historians theorize, Jesus was crucified by the Romans for the charge of sedition and was only one of many Jewish leaders of the time that met the same fate. The Romans were suspicious of any Jewish leader that was recognized to be a threat to the Roman occupation, and Jesus certainly fell into that category. But the gospels tell a different story- the Romans (Pontius Pilate) didn’t want to execute Jesus and left it up to the Jews to decide his fate. The Roman soldier was the first to comprehend Jesus’ divinity. The centurion had faith that Jesus could heal his servant. What may have happened is that after the Roman- Jewish war decimated the Jews , the existing oral traditions and scriptures were revised to favor the Romans, because they then became the focus of Christian evangelism. This proselytizing focus on the Romans would later lead to the explosion of Christianity across Europe and later the remainder of the world.

I considered the following scriptures:

I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.” -Matthew 16:28

And he said to them, “I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power.” -Mark 9:1

I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God.” -Luke 9:27

I had to conclude one of two things- either Jesus made this statement and was wrong, and was therefore not God himself, or it was purposely added to the scriptures to create a sense of urgency among the followers. I concluded that the latter was the more likely explanation, and likewise, this caused me to doubt the veracity of everything in the gospels referring to the words spoken by Jesus. This ploy would have caused people to be much more willing to donate their goods to the church and be more eager to serve the faith. In actuality, this tactic is still being used today by some evangelical preachers.

The philosophy that Jesus espoused was in many ways irrational and suggested that he thought the world order was about to end. Here is a list of what passes under the radar of most Christians:

If you do something wrong with your eye or hand, cut/pluck it off (Matthew 5:29-30, in a sexual context).
Marrying a divorced woman is adultery. (Matthew 5:32)
Don't plan for the future. (Matthew 6:34)
Don't save money. (Matthew 6:19-20)
Don't become wealthy. (Mark 10:21-25)
Sell everything and give it to the poor. (Luke 12:33)
Don't work to obtain food. (John 6:27)
Don't have sexual urges. (Matthew 5:28)
Make people want to persecute you. (Matthew 5:11)
If someone steals from you, don't try to get it back. (Luke 6:30)
If someone hits you, invite them to do it again. (Matthew 5:39)
If you lose a lawsuit, give more than the judgment. (Matthew 5:40)
If someone forces you to walk a mile, walk two miles. (Matthew 5:41)
If anyone asks you for anything, give it to them without question. (Matthew 5:42)

Very few Christians, even fundamentals, follow even one of these precepts, and yet they will tell you that Jesus is their role model (What would Jesus do?). But clearly, it suggests a person who is convinced that the world is ending as it was known and that planning for the future or defending your possessions was a waste of time. Of course, if Jesus was really God, he would have known that the world would continue on for at least another 2000 years.
contd
http://new.exchristian.net/2013/11/how-i-figured-out-christianity-is-not.html

The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God.Ps. 14:1

interesting read

Daree88:
The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God.Ps. 14:1

A schizophrenic claimed he serves a god that can't be proven. Evidence 1:1

akintom:

A schizophrenic claimed he serves a god that can't be proven. Evidence 1:1

Since both u & I wil die one day, no need to prolong issues, let's see if He wil prove Himself or nt then? Hw are u sir?

Daree88:

Since both u & I wil die one day, no need to prolong issues, let's see if He wil prove Himself or nt then? Hw are u sir?

Am good. Hope you are too?

akintom:
Am good. Hope you are too?

Yes, I am sir, tks.

Daree88:

Yes, I am sir, tks.

I presume you have read the thread, what do you make of the submission.

akintom:

I assume you have read the thread, what do you make of the submission.

Which submissn sir?

Daree88:
Which submissn sir?

of Michael Runyan in the OP.

akintom:
of Michael Runyan in the OP.

It's clear wht I stand 4.That God is d creator of mankind.He is God!