Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Posted in
Religion
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Christianity has been known as the "Good News" for most of the time it has been in existence. Indeed, the word "gospel" (which refers to the teachings of Jesus) is roughly translated as "good speak" from Old English. And the word "evangel" (as in evangelism) literally translates as "good news" from ancient Greek. The "good news" of Christianity is that we can be redeemed of our sins through the teachings of Christ.
But for most of the world, the Gospel is not the Good News at all. Rather, it is the Bad News. Indeed, for most people it is the Very Bad News. According to conservative Christian doctrine, the only way to be "saved" is to accept Christ as your savior; and since only a small percentage of the world's population does that, only a small percentage will be saved when the judgement comes -- and the rest of us will find ourselves in a "hand-basket to hell" (as that sinner Jimmy Swaggart used to say). At the very least, every adult who had knowledge of Christ but didn't believe in him will be damned, even if that person was born and raised in a non-Christian culture.
In other words, if you were raised in a non-Christian culture, that won't save you. If you were taught to believe in another religion, that won't save you. If you die before you have a chance to turn to Christ, that won't save you. If your quest for religious truth takes you in another direction, that won't save you. If you are Christian but don't have a strong faith, that won't save you. If you are not religious but do "good works", that won't save you. God, it seems, will brook no excuses from people who don't toe the line.
There's nothing about that that sounds "good" to me. If you total up all of the people who are not born-again Christians, you probably end up with 90% of the world's population (or more). The rest of us might as well be in hell already. As I asked in another article on this blog, could such a God possibly exist who is so cruel that he would condemn 90% of the world's population to eternal suffering? The answer, of course, is No. Whatever the true religion is, it must include everyone. If human beings must be redeemed (and I don't believe that we must), then the opportunities for redemption must be infinite.
Over the years I have come to see Christianity as something of a con game. We are conned into believing that we owe a debt we don't actually owe (original sin), and that we will come to harm (go to hell) if we don't pay up (repent and accept Jesus). But there is no objective evidence that any of that is true. All the "evidence" is found within the religion itself.
Every religion decrees a punishment for non-believers. Muslims have their own hell that non-believers supposedly go to. Does that mean that I should become a Muslim in order to avoid the Muslim version of hell? Of course not. We take the Christian threat of hell more seriously only because America is mostly Christian. The fact is, if all religions have their own version of hell, then that frees us from having to believe in any religion. If I believe in Christ, then I end up in the Muslim hell. If I believe in Mohammed, then I end up in the Christian hell. Perhaps, then, I should just believe what I want to believe without concern about punishment. Believing in something just to avoid punishment isn't true belief anyway.
The ancient religions make the mistake of assuminig that God has a punitive nature. In fact, the Christian god is probably modeled after the ancient Jewish ideal of a father. Tradition- ally, the Jewish father has been the head of his household. The Talmud states that the father must be revered even if he is vile, so we can assume that this attitude stretches back to ancient times. Fathers in ancient Judea most likely demanded love and respect from their families; and if they didn't get it, they probably meted out punishments. The Jewish god, who is a very angry god, was undoubtedly modeled after the Jewish father; and since Judaism is the foundation of Christianity, the Christian god is just the same. This explains why the god of the Bible is a vain, egotistical, demanding tyrant who is given to temper tantrums.
It bears noting that born-again Christians constitute a private club of sorts. Confident that they are "saved" because of their devotion, they can look down their noses at the rest of us, knowing that they are special because they were "chosen" (the idea being that God or Christ inspires or "chooses" those who become true believers). Believing that you are chosen is a way of feeling superior to the rest of humanity. And since the Bible gives human beings dominion over the animals and the earth, Christianity erases any sense of responsibility towards the environment.
I chose my own religion. My views are based on the Seth Material (the readings of a 20th-century psychic named Jane Roberts). Seth said that there is no heaven or hell, that God does not demand fealty, and that God is not harmed if you don't believe in him. (I refer to God as a male out of habit only, and because calling God "it" sounds a little strange.) However, a belief in God is something that every soul must arrive at eventually because, according to Seth, that is the reality of our existence. There is a God; and if we are not able to see that when we are living one of our physical lives, it nonetheless becomes clear to us when we "die". Since we all arrive at this understanding after death, arriving at the understanding during physical life isn't so important.
Buddhism is perhaps the most rational of the ancient religions, but even Buddhism has its version of hell. Hell for the Buddhists consists of repeated incarnations on the Earth. Buddhists are so attuned to the suffering inherent in physical life that thousands of lives seem like hell to them. (Actually, that sounds hellish to me too!) Ironically, the Buddhist idea of heaven isn't much better: Your soul melds into others in a state of nirvana, and you lose your individuality. You achieve nirvana immediately after the life in which you achieve enlightenment -- which may explain why so few people achieve it (what rational person wants to lose his individuality?). But I digress: This article is not about Buddhism.
Christian doctrine is a very small spiritual box that believers must squeeze themselves into. The sides of the box are made of fear (the fear of punishment); the lock on the box is the lie of original sin; and the escape hatch is the lie of redemption. But you don't have to live in the box at all. If you were told that you do, you were misled. You may have been misled by well-meaning people (like your parents), but you were still misled.
It helps if you go back and look at the roots of the Bible. What you will discover is that the Bible is an imperfect document, written by hundreds or thousands of people over a period of about twelve centuries, and that it can't be considered the word of God -- unless you believe that all of its authors were divinely inspired, and that God expresses himself in clumsy ways. In actuality, the Bible is many small documents pulled together into one book, so it is not a cohesive document. You'll also find that the gospels (the books of the New Testament that convey Jesus' teachings) were written half-a-century after he died by people who never met him. That being the case, there's a good chance that his words and teachings were censored or reproduced incorrectly. (Seth said that his teachings about sexuality and reincarnation were censored.) When you realize that the Bible is merely a historical document, then you are free to live your life by your own principles.
Several paragraphs above, I said that Christianity is a con game. If you don't want to be conned, the solution is simply to walk away from Christianity and find something else to believe in. I recognize that that won't be easy for a lot of people, especially for those who carry a heavy load of guilt from their Christian upbringings. But there is another solution: Remain a Christian, but take the Bible with a grain of salt. To be a Christian, all that is required is that you believe in Christ as the messiah or the son of God. It isn't necessary to take every negative thing in the Bible -- and there are lots of them -- as a fact. If you stop viewing the Bible as the infallible word of God, but instead see it as the inspired but imperfect writings of ancient Jews and Christians, that allows you to take the good aspects of the religion and leave the negative aspects behind.
A few months after writing this article, I got into a discussion with Christians on another site, Christians who accept the six-day creation story in Genesis as the truth. To any reasonable person, it is obvious that the six-day creation story was devised by members of an ancient and unsophisticated culture. It is simplistic and crude and illogical, but it was the best that the ancient Jews could do to explain the unexplainable. But science is showing us that it CAN'T be true. For example, we all know that human beings and the dinosaurs didn't coexist, and that the dinosaurs flourished for millions of years -- yet the Bible would have us believe that the earth is only about six thousand years old. Modern Christians are faced with a choice: Either they abandon their logic and believe in the Bible, or they accept science and view the Bible as the writings of humans, which it clearly is.
Exchanging comments with those Christians helped me to clarify my objections to Christianity, and I've posted those objections below. Now, if it seems that this article is nothing more than an anti-Christian rant, let me say that Christianity does have a good side. The best things about Christianity are its focus on helping the poor and on forgiveness. Christians who aren't fanatics about interpreting the Bible literally, can be good people and do good things. My argument is with the fundamentalists. It is the fundamentalists who promote the mean face of the religion.
* The Bible promotes conceit among Christians who fancy themselves to be "saved" because it allows them to feel superior to others.
* The Bible promotes discrimination against women and gays, and it promotes personal irresponsibility by allowing such people to justify their prejudices with scripture.
* The concept of a devil promotes personal irresponsibility by encouraging people to blame an external force for their behavior.
* Having given humans dominion over other living things, the Bible encourages a reckless attitude towards the environment.
* By promoting the concepts of evil and original sin, the Bible makes people feel that they are inherently bad.
* By promoting the concept of judgement, the Bible makes people fearful, and it encourages them to judge each other.
* The Bible encourages people to deny reality since it conflicts with well known and accepted scientific theories and facts.
* The Bible promotes hypocrisy among fundamentalist Christians because in actual practice they pick and choose which scriptures to obey. For example, the Bible says a good deal more against divorce than it does against homosexuality, yet most Christians feel perfectly free to get divorced. Another example is Jesus' comment about a camel passing through the eye of a needle: That hasn't stopped any Christians from getting rich.
* In general, by promoting the narrow and fearful world view of an ancient culture, the Bible keeps Christian societies from growing, maturing and evolving.
But for most of the world, the Gospel is not the Good News at all. Rather, it is the Bad News. Indeed, for most people it is the Very Bad News. According to conservative Christian doctrine, the only way to be "saved" is to accept Christ as your savior; and since only a small percentage of the world's population does that, only a small percentage will be saved when the judgement comes -- and the rest of us will find ourselves in a "hand-basket to hell" (as that sinner Jimmy Swaggart used to say). At the very least, every adult who had knowledge of Christ but didn't believe in him will be damned, even if that person was born and raised in a non-Christian culture.
In other words, if you were raised in a non-Christian culture, that won't save you. If you were taught to believe in another religion, that won't save you. If you die before you have a chance to turn to Christ, that won't save you. If your quest for religious truth takes you in another direction, that won't save you. If you are Christian but don't have a strong faith, that won't save you. If you are not religious but do "good works", that won't save you. God, it seems, will brook no excuses from people who don't toe the line.
There's nothing about that that sounds "good" to me. If you total up all of the people who are not born-again Christians, you probably end up with 90% of the world's population (or more). The rest of us might as well be in hell already. As I asked in another article on this blog, could such a God possibly exist who is so cruel that he would condemn 90% of the world's population to eternal suffering? The answer, of course, is No. Whatever the true religion is, it must include everyone. If human beings must be redeemed (and I don't believe that we must), then the opportunities for redemption must be infinite.
Over the years I have come to see Christianity as something of a con game. We are conned into believing that we owe a debt we don't actually owe (original sin), and that we will come to harm (go to hell) if we don't pay up (repent and accept Jesus). But there is no objective evidence that any of that is true. All the "evidence" is found within the religion itself.
Every religion decrees a punishment for non-believers. Muslims have their own hell that non-believers supposedly go to. Does that mean that I should become a Muslim in order to avoid the Muslim version of hell? Of course not. We take the Christian threat of hell more seriously only because America is mostly Christian. The fact is, if all religions have their own version of hell, then that frees us from having to believe in any religion. If I believe in Christ, then I end up in the Muslim hell. If I believe in Mohammed, then I end up in the Christian hell. Perhaps, then, I should just believe what I want to believe without concern about punishment. Believing in something just to avoid punishment isn't true belief anyway.
The ancient religions make the mistake of assuminig that God has a punitive nature. In fact, the Christian god is probably modeled after the ancient Jewish ideal of a father. Tradition- ally, the Jewish father has been the head of his household. The Talmud states that the father must be revered even if he is vile, so we can assume that this attitude stretches back to ancient times. Fathers in ancient Judea most likely demanded love and respect from their families; and if they didn't get it, they probably meted out punishments. The Jewish god, who is a very angry god, was undoubtedly modeled after the Jewish father; and since Judaism is the foundation of Christianity, the Christian god is just the same. This explains why the god of the Bible is a vain, egotistical, demanding tyrant who is given to temper tantrums.
It bears noting that born-again Christians constitute a private club of sorts. Confident that they are "saved" because of their devotion, they can look down their noses at the rest of us, knowing that they are special because they were "chosen" (the idea being that God or Christ inspires or "chooses" those who become true believers). Believing that you are chosen is a way of feeling superior to the rest of humanity. And since the Bible gives human beings dominion over the animals and the earth, Christianity erases any sense of responsibility towards the environment.
I chose my own religion. My views are based on the Seth Material (the readings of a 20th-century psychic named Jane Roberts). Seth said that there is no heaven or hell, that God does not demand fealty, and that God is not harmed if you don't believe in him. (I refer to God as a male out of habit only, and because calling God "it" sounds a little strange.) However, a belief in God is something that every soul must arrive at eventually because, according to Seth, that is the reality of our existence. There is a God; and if we are not able to see that when we are living one of our physical lives, it nonetheless becomes clear to us when we "die". Since we all arrive at this understanding after death, arriving at the understanding during physical life isn't so important.
Buddhism is perhaps the most rational of the ancient religions, but even Buddhism has its version of hell. Hell for the Buddhists consists of repeated incarnations on the Earth. Buddhists are so attuned to the suffering inherent in physical life that thousands of lives seem like hell to them. (Actually, that sounds hellish to me too!) Ironically, the Buddhist idea of heaven isn't much better: Your soul melds into others in a state of nirvana, and you lose your individuality. You achieve nirvana immediately after the life in which you achieve enlightenment -- which may explain why so few people achieve it (what rational person wants to lose his individuality?). But I digress: This article is not about Buddhism.
Christian doctrine is a very small spiritual box that believers must squeeze themselves into. The sides of the box are made of fear (the fear of punishment); the lock on the box is the lie of original sin; and the escape hatch is the lie of redemption. But you don't have to live in the box at all. If you were told that you do, you were misled. You may have been misled by well-meaning people (like your parents), but you were still misled.
It helps if you go back and look at the roots of the Bible. What you will discover is that the Bible is an imperfect document, written by hundreds or thousands of people over a period of about twelve centuries, and that it can't be considered the word of God -- unless you believe that all of its authors were divinely inspired, and that God expresses himself in clumsy ways. In actuality, the Bible is many small documents pulled together into one book, so it is not a cohesive document. You'll also find that the gospels (the books of the New Testament that convey Jesus' teachings) were written half-a-century after he died by people who never met him. That being the case, there's a good chance that his words and teachings were censored or reproduced incorrectly. (Seth said that his teachings about sexuality and reincarnation were censored.) When you realize that the Bible is merely a historical document, then you are free to live your life by your own principles.
Several paragraphs above, I said that Christianity is a con game. If you don't want to be conned, the solution is simply to walk away from Christianity and find something else to believe in. I recognize that that won't be easy for a lot of people, especially for those who carry a heavy load of guilt from their Christian upbringings. But there is another solution: Remain a Christian, but take the Bible with a grain of salt. To be a Christian, all that is required is that you believe in Christ as the messiah or the son of God. It isn't necessary to take every negative thing in the Bible -- and there are lots of them -- as a fact. If you stop viewing the Bible as the infallible word of God, but instead see it as the inspired but imperfect writings of ancient Jews and Christians, that allows you to take the good aspects of the religion and leave the negative aspects behind.
* * *
A few months after writing this article, I got into a discussion with Christians on another site, Christians who accept the six-day creation story in Genesis as the truth. To any reasonable person, it is obvious that the six-day creation story was devised by members of an ancient and unsophisticated culture. It is simplistic and crude and illogical, but it was the best that the ancient Jews could do to explain the unexplainable. But science is showing us that it CAN'T be true. For example, we all know that human beings and the dinosaurs didn't coexist, and that the dinosaurs flourished for millions of years -- yet the Bible would have us believe that the earth is only about six thousand years old. Modern Christians are faced with a choice: Either they abandon their logic and believe in the Bible, or they accept science and view the Bible as the writings of humans, which it clearly is.
Exchanging comments with those Christians helped me to clarify my objections to Christianity, and I've posted those objections below. Now, if it seems that this article is nothing more than an anti-Christian rant, let me say that Christianity does have a good side. The best things about Christianity are its focus on helping the poor and on forgiveness. Christians who aren't fanatics about interpreting the Bible literally, can be good people and do good things. My argument is with the fundamentalists. It is the fundamentalists who promote the mean face of the religion.
* The Bible promotes conceit among Christians who fancy themselves to be "saved" because it allows them to feel superior to others.
* The Bible promotes discrimination against women and gays, and it promotes personal irresponsibility by allowing such people to justify their prejudices with scripture.
* The concept of a devil promotes personal irresponsibility by encouraging people to blame an external force for their behavior.
* Having given humans dominion over other living things, the Bible encourages a reckless attitude towards the environment.
* By promoting the concepts of evil and original sin, the Bible makes people feel that they are inherently bad.
* By promoting the concept of judgement, the Bible makes people fearful, and it encourages them to judge each other.
* The Bible encourages people to deny reality since it conflicts with well known and accepted scientific theories and facts.
* The Bible promotes hypocrisy among fundamentalist Christians because in actual practice they pick and choose which scriptures to obey. For example, the Bible says a good deal more against divorce than it does against homosexuality, yet most Christians feel perfectly free to get divorced. Another example is Jesus' comment about a camel passing through the eye of a needle: That hasn't stopped any Christians from getting rich.
* In general, by promoting the narrow and fearful world view of an ancient culture, the Bible keeps Christian societies from growing, maturing and evolving.
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