I have been asked many times to explain why I left Christianity. I wrote this essay to give a basic answer that question. Anyone who wants to know more can ask me personally.
I wish I could explain it in an easy way, but it all took time. The most important parts took place when I was 23-25. It is a bit hard for me to remember the exact sequence, so some of what follows may be out of order. It started with a few minor things, as you will see, and those few things eventually multiplied and produced a synergetic effect.
In what follows, I have left out personal episodes involving other individuals, out of respect for their privacy and feelings.
I separated this into two parts:
My Childhood Background
My De-conversion
Plenty of people with whom I share my story want to know my background.
I was taught to believe in God / Jesus as a child from the time I could understand English. Children generally accept what they are taught, unless or until they have cause to believe otherwise.
From the time I was small, mom and dad taught me to talk to God and tell him anything and everything; so I grew up doing that. I talked to God either silently or aloud on a regular basis for all of my childhood and teenage years and into my twenties. I was taught to believe in God, who made/governed everything; I was taught that he loved me and everyone; I wanted to know him, because I wanted to know this Being who everyone said was responsible for everything.
I heard the following basic message:
* God created everything;
* People are sinners, having disobeyed God’s laws/will;
* God loves everyone;
* God became flesh in Jesus and taught people how to live;
* Jesus, God’s Son, sacrificed himself to pay the price for our sins;
* Jesus rose again from the grave; and
* Whoever believes in him and his message is forgiven and will live forever with him.
I believed what I heard, I asked God’s spirit to dwell in me, I turned from anything the Bible said was wrong, I prayed “in Jesus’ name” for forgiveness, I was baptized, and I lived in prayer, seeking to follow the teachings of Jesus as recorded in the New Testament.
I first made the decision as a child.
My father's side of the family had been Catholic. My mother's side was Baptist. When I was six years old or so, we started going to a non-denominational church. I told my parents one day that I wanted "to ask Jesus into my heart" and be baptized.
Within a couple of years my family stopped going to church for a while. We always believed the message, and we would read the Bible at home and talk about it, but we were not hearing it every Sunday in church or anything.
When I was in high school, I was thirsty for understanding. I went to church with a girlfriend and heard the same message described above, perhaps spoken with more emotion, flare, enthusiasm. I believed the message, and I thought that maybe I had not sufficiently known what I was doing when I was younger, so I made the same decision again.
I dedicated my entire life to following Jesus, his teachings. I prayed throughout each day for guidance. I sought to submit to God’s will for my life. I had grown up reading the Bible. Then, during my sophomore year in high school, I read through the entire Bible on my own initiative for the first time. I continued to read it again and again.
The aim of my life was to know God, to love God, to serve God. In my mind, I had said, “What could make more sense than to devote one’s life to the God of the Universe?”
As a 17-year-old, I had told people that God was the center of my life, that he gave me peace and purpose, that he heard my prayers and answered them, that he made his presence felt, and that everyone needed to experience God’s love and direction. I repeated the same message that I had heard, the same message that I had read in the New Testament, the message described above.
I wanted to give my all, and I believed that God wanted me to be a minister, to share the message of Jesus with people, so I prayed and read the Bible all the time, led Bible studies and prayer groups at school and at church, counseled people who had problems, brought friends, two of my brothers, and other people to believe in Christianity and devote their lives to following Jesus, and played piano at times and helped lead worship in the youth group. I was president of the youth group my senior year.
My goal of being a ‘minister’ lasted roughly from age 17 to 24/25. During that time, I continued to pray every day, read the Bible, try to follow its teachings, and teach others about God, Jesus, and the Bible.
- - - - -
In reality, my deconversion was more complex than this narrative can show, but in looking back, these were some of the steps along the path.
One of the first obstacles I encountered was the existence of different views of the Mosaic law within the Bible and Christian history. The OT (Old Testament) said the Mosaic law would be forever, and the prophets predicted its future greatness. The Jesus depicted in Matthew 5 still supported the law and said he did not come to abolish it and that none of it would pass away, but would endure as long as heaven and earth.
"17. Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. 19. Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven."
In fact, here Jesus says, "not the smallest letter" nor "the least stroke of a pen" will by any means disappear from the law "until heaven and earth disappear." To me, this seemed to agree with what Jewish prophets had predicted: that the law of Moses should still be followed and was not to be abolished or ignored by Christians.
"Paul," however, in Eph. 2:15, speaks of Christ "abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations." In Col. 2:13-17, he says that Jesus "canceled the written code, with its regulations. . . . He took it away, nailing it to the cross." New Moon celebrations and Sabbath days were just "a shadow." [Also, at this point I was still unaware that many scholars do not think Paul wrote Ephesians or Colossians.] And he said in Rom. 10:4, "Christ is the end of the law."
What a glaring difference this is. Isaiah said that in the last days the law would go forth as a light to the nations and that foreigners would keep the Sabbath (which is Saturday, not Sunday) and make burnt offerings and sacrifices on the altar of the temple. Jeremiah said there would always be a Levitical priest to offer burnt offerings, grain offerings, and sacrifices before Yhwh (Jer 33:7-18), and Ezekiel wrote of the greatness of the temple system in an earthly paradise (Ezek. 40-48). But Pauline Christianity says Jesus the Messiah abolished the law, fulfilling it, superseding it, and removing the need for sacrifice.
This caused me great consternation for a time. Wanting to please God, I was not sure whether or not I should be honoring the Sabbath (Saturday) and such. I decided I should probably begin keeping the Sabbath holy and doing so on Saturday, as Yahweh told Moses and as the Prophets upheld. It seemed to me that Paul went counter to both the Old Testament prophets and the Jesus of Matthew, as best as I could tell. And I learned that the Catholic Church changed Sabbath observance from Saturday to Sunday, but I questioned whether they had the authority to do so, since this seemed counter to the OT prophets, in whom I believed at the time.
The OT messianic prophecies never called for an end to the law; in fact, they actually called for Gentiles to adopt the law of Moses, which was to be "a light to the nations." I had verses like Isaiah 66:19-23 in mind:
“Yhwh says he will gather the exiles back to Jerusalem and "will select some of them also to be priests and Levites. . . . As the new heavens and new earth that I make will endure before me, declares Yhwh, so will your name and descendants endure. From one New Moon to another and from one Sabbath to another, all mankind will come and bow down before me, says Yhwh."
(The writer of Colossians 2:13-17 says New Moons and Sabbaths do not really matter.)
I do not have time now to give you all the details. I wrote more about this topic here, including many quotes from the OT supporting the law (you will have to scroll down a bit, as it is part of a larger appendix I wrote): Epilogue to "Pre-Christian Jewish Messianism."
That same year, I noticed that the genealogies in Matthew and Luke are different, and when I sought apologetic commentary on the issue, even though I was on the fundamentalist side and wanted the Bible to be perfect as I had believed, I was very dissatisfied with the excuses apologists had developed, and it seemed to me that they were simply being dishonest and ignoring the plain evidence. It was perfectly clear to me that the genealogies contradicted one another, and I was unable and unwilling to pretend that they did not. (See Genealogies of Jesus)
I may have also realized at that time that the different gospels quoted Jesus in slightly different ways while trying to tell the same story. So these were not, then, the exact words of Jesus after all?
To see this for yourself:
Use a reference Bible (as I did) and compare passages.
Buy the reference book, Gospel Parallels, NRSV Edition: A Comparison of the Synoptic Gospels, by Burton H. Throckmorton.
Even better than that, and free, is The Five Gospels Parallels, edited by John W. Marshall, 1996 – 2001, Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto, at http://www.utoronto.ca/religion/synopsis/meta-5g.htm. [Sadly, the site is no longer functional.]
I did not have the latter two resources until much later. All they do is make studying easier by placing parallel passages side-by-side. When you do this, you will see that Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell many of the same stories, but the wording is different. In other words, they cannot be the exact words of Jesus.
Things get much more complicated, because once you know that Mark was written first and that Matthew and Luke used Mark extensively, you begin to see interesting ways in which Matthew and Luke purposefully changed the story. However, I was not so advanced at that time.
I have posted more on this topic here: The Words Of Jesus?
I may have also realized at this time that the NT book of Jude quoted the prophecies of Enoch, which were apocryphal. Why then were the writings of Enoch not part of scripture, I wondered. If they were fraudulent or errant, why was Jude considered a part of inerrant scripture?
14. Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied about them: “See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones 15. to judge everyone, and to convict all of them of all the ungodly acts they have committed in their ungodliness, and of all the defiant words ungodly sinners have spoken against him.”
(Jude 1.14-15, NIV, quoting the Jewish First Book of Enoch 1.9)
Here is the quoted passage:
And behold! He cometh with ten thousands of His holy ones
To execute judgement upon all,
And to destroy all the ungodly:
And to convict all flesh
Of all the works of their ungodliness which they have ungodly committed,
And of all the hard things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.
(1 Enoch 1.9, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, H.R. Charles Oxford: The Clarendon Press, http://www.ccel.org/c/charles/otpseudepig/enoch/ENOCH_1.HTM)
The Book of Enoch was written in stages from about 300 BCE to the end of the first century BCE. It pretends to describe the fall of the angels called 'the Watchers' -- the angels who fathered the Nephilim, the "giants" (see Genesis 6.4) -- and it describes Enoch's visits to heaven and his visions/ dreams/ revelations. Among other things, the narrator claims to see how the sun rises in the east, goes through any of 6 portals, and is drawn by a chariot across the sky (72)! Likewise with the moon (73)! Do angels really draw the sun, moon, and other bodies through the heavens in chariots? Is the earth really the stationary center of the universe as other biblical writers also believed?
I began to realize that Jews and Christians had created a ton of fiction in God's name, in Jesus' name, in the names of various supposed apostles and prophets. Clearly believers were willing to lie and/or create fantasies. Was the literature that became accepted into the Bible really more reliable than the other literature Christians produced?
I also realized that the process of accepting books into the cannon was an institutional and even political process conducted by fallible humans. I discovered that there was so much early Christian literature. I wanted to read it all and to know what the earliest Christians were like, so that I could be like them. I came to realize that early Christians argued over which texts were to be accepted into scripture. The book of Revelation, for example, did not make many early lists of scripture, and some early church fathers did not approve of it. [I now can easily see why.] The same was true of Ecclesiastes for the Jews.
If you have never studied the history of the development of the Bible, you should do so. If you are thorough, you will see that it was certainly a human process, not a divine one!
And why?
At that time, I suppose I was not ready to ask the bigger question, but later on I would come to ask why.
Why would a God who supposedly loved everyone not simply speak to everyone in a clear way? That would be the most honest and loving thing to do. Why could a God not write his own book and give it directly to all people? Better yet, why could a real God not simply show up, speak clearly, directly, honestly, openly, lovingly, etc.? The bible compares God to a good human father. If that were true, why would God not do the things a good human father does, like be present, in person, face-to-face?
My faith specifically in the infallibility and perfection of the Bible was gone, but not all of my faith was gone, definitely not. I concluded that the Bible was written by humans and had some errors, but that the gist of the story was still true. So I still considered myself Christian and a follower of Christ. However, I did begin to think that people who simply dismissed errors or accepted lousy, infirm explanations were being dishonest.
At this time, I had not yet even encountered the problems involved in the manuscript tradition of the Bible and the thousands of errors and disagreements of various manuscripts.
One of the other early problems started the next year. My wife was a chronic doubter. I was always trying to convince her of the truth of the Bible and giving her apologetics to read. One day, she asked me, "When did God make Adam and Eve, according to the Bible?"
The question led me on a mission to understand the chronology of the Old Testament (OT) and how "history" developed. I had previously managed somehow to get a degree in history, with a 4.0 GPA, without this issue coming up! (SCARY!!!) It had probably failed to arise because I had studied history mostly from the Renaissance forward, with only the general outline of ancient history in my head, having heard NO comparison between Biblical history and history in general -- which is a shame.
I was eager to answer the question.
I used the OT itself and one secure date from history (the 586 BC destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians) to reconstruct the time line of the Bible. I had not paid much attention to such before, because the OT was written before modern dating notation of BC/AD, or BCE/CE. I realized that the OT has a very firm time-line, though. It gives the age of every important male when his most important son was born, and it tallies the number of years between great events.
The genealogies, numbers, and stories given in the Old Testament amount to the following if written according to our dating system (see my paper, “Old Testament Chronological and Historical Problems" for the verse citations and the specifics.):
c. 4100's BC - Adam and Eve are created by Yahweh.
c. 2400's BC - Noah and his family survive a world-wide flood in a big box with a bunch of animals. Supposedly all people and animals on the whole earth were destroyed except Noah's family and the animals in his big floating box.
c. 2400's - 2100's BC - Up until now supposedly all humans spoke the same language (and lived in the Middle East). But now, when Yahweh gets bothered by people building a really high tower in the Middle East, he decides to scatter people around the globe and confuse all their languages. And that is how different languages supposedly developed and that is supposedly why the place was called Babylon (because “Babel” sounded like Hebrew for “confused.”).
c. 2000's - 2100's - Abraham (a man whose name means "Father of Nations") moves around the Levant receiving divine promises of great things for certain of his descendants.
c. 1400's - Moses allegedly leads about 2.5 million people out of 400 years of Egyptian slavery amid great catastrophes for Egyptians and miracles for Israelites.
c. 1300's - Joshua supposedly defeats his Canaanite enemies as Yahweh performs miracles like stopping the sun in the middle of its sky-crossing for about a day so that the battle at Gibeon can last longer.
c. 900's - Solomon supposedly has a vast Israelite Empire from the Euphrates to the Egyptian border, 700 wives and 300 concubines, stables with 40,000 stalls of horses, 1,400 chariots, 12,000 cavalrymen, so much wealth that silver is "as common in Jerusalem as stone" (1 Kgs 10:27); he supposedly "excelled all the kings of the earth in riches and in wisdom" so that "the whole world" sought his presence (1 Kgs 10:23-4). [Yet he is not even mentioned in a single known Egyptian or Mesopotamian text.]
It turns out that this entire set-up flies in the face of everything known about history, IF it is taken literally and one believes that the details are true.
I ended up doing all kinds of mental gymnastics to see if the Biblical stories could match known world history. I imagined that carbon dating was fallacious. I tried to figure out how the entire human population could have developed from a starting point in the 4100’s, and how it could have started all over again from scratch after Noah’s flood in the 2400’s BC. I imagined that scientists must not correctly understand fossils or archaeology (which I knew little about). I had never previously even seriously considered evolution, because I simply assumed it was wrong and the Bible was true.
Now, all of a sudden, even apart from any reading about evolution, I realized that no matter how hard I tried, I could not even make the Bible stories fit in with known world history and literature. Eventually I gave up my suspicion that science and archeology were part of a vast conspiracy with fabricated evidence, because I realized how foolish I was becoming. I read about Egypt, Sumer, Babylon, Canaan, Phoenicia, etc. Also, I realized that the Pentateuch was the Jewish equivalent of the myths and legends that so many cultures produced for themselves – Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, and others. The creation story, flood story, Babel, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Egyptian captivity, Moses, the Exodus, the Mosaic Law, Joshua, Judges – these stories contained significant amounts of myth and legend with little bits of real history behind certain parts. The literature of other ancient cultures has the same features. To me, the conclusion seemed undeniable.
I typed up some of my reasoning and conclusions here: Old Testament Chronological and Historical Problems
One night, while sitting alone in my apartment, I did a thought experiment which seemed to pop into my head. I started by assuming the existence of God, the creator, and assuming that he really was omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. I imagined a time when only God existed, and I asked myself several questions:
When God was alone in the beginning" (i.e. before creation), did "he" think?
If so, what did he think about?
If he thought of creating, whence the thought?
ALL aspects of creation - how did they come to God's mind?
What did God made the world and its beings out of?
Where was the world and its beings located?
If God was thinking, before anything else existed, does that imply that God has parts, internal movement, etc.? Can thinking occur without change/movement of ideas/impressions/etc.?
My thought experiment went something like this:
1. When God was alone in “the beginning” (i.e. before “creation”) did "he" think?
Well, it would probably make no sense to speak of this God as thinking, because our model for “thinking” comes from our own experience, in which we work with what we experience through our senses. This God would have no external world, nothing to ponder except himself. So maybe thinking doesn’t make sense in such a scenario. Perhaps this God would better be described as impersonal, transpersonal, meta-personal, or the Source of personalities.
BUT assuming he ...
[Wait, “he” makes no sense. Did this God have a penis? No. So “he” is not really appropriate. Maybe I should use “it” or at least realize that I do not really mean “he” when I say “he.”]
2. BUT assuming “he”/it DID think, what did he think about? If God was thinking, before anything else existed, does that imply that God has parts? internal movement? Can thinking occur without change/movement of ideas/impressions/etc.?
IF “he” thought, it must have been about Himself/Itself, there being nothing else to ponder. If there were thoughts, then yes, God would be both unity and multiplicity. Yes, thoughts imply movement and change and multiplicity. So God, as a thinking being, would necessarily be moving internally, changing internally while remaining God, evolving while remaining God.
3. If “he”/it thought of creating, whence the thought?
The thought(s) would have to be (an) aspect(s) of himself, there being nothing else. God’s thoughts would still be “God,” parts/aspects of God, made of God, existing within God.
4. ALL aspects of creation - how did they come to God's mind?
They would have to be aspects of God – “himself” working/playing with “himself.”
5. What did God make the world and its beings out of?
“Himself.” There would have been nothing else. Thus “creation” would have had to be more like emanation. God would have to let some thought become, and he would always be operating within himself. Everything would be God.
6. Where was the world and its beings located?
Within God. No other “place” existed. All things would have to be a manifestation of God..
. . .
So, it dawned on me and became so simple and so completely clear that given such a starting point, pantheism would be the only logical, rational, even legitimately possible option. The universe would be “God” or “in God” or a manifestation of God.
There could never arise anything separate from such a God. If something could arise as a separate entity, then it would have to have arisen of its own power, apart from God, and that would mean God is not omnipresent or omnipotent. It would make God part of yet a larger universe including himself yet greater than himself. In which case, that larger universe should probably be called God; or else “God” would have to be only an aspect/manifestation of that larger universe.
So, going back to the premise and accounting for the conclusions:
If such a God existed, I was part/manifestation of such a God.
If such a God did not exist, I was still part/manifestation of the Universe, which might just as well be called God in a meta-personal or impersonal or trans-personal way.
There might theoretically be finite divinities or a finite divinity, but these could not be omnipresent, omniscient, or omnipotent.
[I knew that in some places, the Bible supported such a form of pantheism or panentheism (e.g. “In him we live and move and have our being.” Acts 17.28); “If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art there.” Ps 139.8), but that in others, the idea of separation seemed MUCH more prominent.]
I also came across Greek and Roman mystery religions for the first time. The more I read, the more I realized that so many elements of Christianity were already present in paganism. More and more, it began to seem that there was hardly anything really novel about Christianity. “Christian” elements present in pre-Christian mystery religions included baptism or ritual washing and cleansing, sacrifice, forgiveness and/or purification from sins, experiencing the presence of the divine, being “born again,” and the promise of a better or blessed afterlife. Such mysteries included those of Osiris and Isis, those of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, those of Dionysos, those of Orpheus, and those of Mithras. Other Gods and Sons of Gods and heroes had been depicted as dying or descending to Hades and coming back to life and/or rising up into heaven. Osiris was the earliest known God to be a man, die, be reconstituted, and become king of the afterlife. Hercules descended into hell and returned. He also brought at least one human back from the dead. He was also the son of God, Zeus, and born of a woman who was previously a virgin. He also rose into the sky to live forever. Dionysos or Bacchus, Asklepios, Attis, Adonis, Orpheus, Mithras, and others all had stories similar to the stories told of Jesus.
Now, years later, when I study Greek and Latin literature, I still find so many parallels and shared symbols. It is great fun to study.
All my questioning was, at first, causing me great trouble/anxiety. Really. I loved God more than anything, and I wanted to please God more than anything. I had become afraid of the direction I saw my research heading, yet I really longed to understand. I wanted the truth. I had to pray every day, throughout the day, “God, please do not let me be deceived. Please, guide me into all truth and understanding.”
I now think it is woefully sad that religious people around the world are still afraid to ask questions and afraid to pursue answers and deal with evidence honestly. People are afraid of going to hell because of doubt. What kind of "loving" being threatens people who do not believe, but does not bother even simply to talk to doubters and explain things to them? The whole concept is shameful. Only a human religion could be so wicked.
I still remember one day thinking about these verses:
Matthew 7:7-11 “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asks receives; and he that seeks finds; and to him that knocks it shall be opened. Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?”
And I knew also Luke 11:9-13.
I began to realize that it was a sad thought that I should be so afraid of questioning and researching and seeking truth. I realized that if God were there and actually loved me anywhere near as much as my earthly parents loved me, then I had nothing to fear at all. I knew that my own parents would never disown me for seeking truth. These thoughts along with that thought experiment leading to implicit pantheism, really helped give me the courage to continue pursuing truth.
I cannot remember which came first, the thought experiment or the Matthew 7 passage.
I began to consider it VERY sad that so many were afraid of God’s wrath.
I took a philosophy of comparative religion class. I had always wanted to understand the world’s religions, and from my Christian perspective I had wanted to understand how they had gone astray and why they were not Christian. (I had always assumed their falsehood, even before I knew anything about them. Now I realize that such is shameful.)
I was still very much a Christian at this point, still hoping eventually to be a full-time minister. I think the Old Testament breakthrough and this class may have coincided, but it has been a while, so my memory may be faulty.
In the process of reading about the world’s religions, I realized that there had been so many truth-seekers, and that people had developed and written so many interesting things. I actually found that even though I did not like all of it or want to change religions, I could not help but feel an affinity for/with certain ideas, especially within philosophical Taoism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. I could not help but feel a kind of companionship with the people who had written the literature I read and who had been on such similar quests, pursuing Goodness, Truth, Love.
Also, I once again returned to questions that had bothered me in childhood, but which I had subsequently dismissed as irrelevant considering God’s omniscience and goodness:
Why God would allow so many people to go astray?
Why would He punish so many in hell?
Why did He not reveal Himself to the Egyptians, Sumerians, Hindus, Chinese, American Indians, Celts, Africans, Greeks, etc.?
Why would He only appear to a few people out of one little tribe in one little part of the Middle East, if He loved everyone?
Why would the incarnated God of the whole world only appear to a few people in a small rebellious province most humans would never hear about?
Why would the resurrected Jesus not appear to Romans, Pontius Pilate, Tiberius, etc.?
I could not deny that other people around the world had been truth-seekers too.
I did not have good answers to these questions. These questions had to be shelved, but their presence was felt, and they did bother me, just as they bother any child who has nice friends from other religions and who is not yet fully brainwashed.
For the philosophy of religion class, we also had to read the Humanist Manifesto, I and II. I had grown up hearing from preachers about how EVIL "secular humanism" was. I was surprised to find that humanism had been very unfairly portrayed by Christian media, and I came to respect highly those men who were involved in its founding. Loving and caring about others is part of humanism just as much as it is part of any good system of thought. I eventually came back to the humanist manifestos and developed an affinity for humanism.
For a religion class, I did a paper on messianic prophecies in the Old Testament. I worked part-time, and I took only 2 classes that semester; so I had lots of free time, which I devoted to reading. This turned out to be a big deal for me. I had often wanted to do such a study, and although I had done a little with it before, I finally got my chance to be thorough. I listed every single NT citation of a fulfilled prophecy. I also read every OT prophet, word for word, times over, and read about Jewish history in far more detail than I had ever considered before.
This was different for me, because when I had been in high school, I had read the Bible multiple times, hungry for understanding of God, but when reading the prophets, I could only really grab onto the general stuff that could apply to anyone if taken out of context (like “I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, and they are plans for your welfare, not of your destruction.” - and such).
My study was thorough. During the process and afterward, I came to realize that the Jewish prophets never called for anything like the Jesus of Christianity. I also realized that what they did predict never happened; Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and others were actually false prophets. I saw that some elements of the Jewish population had eventually given up traditional Judaism to become more like Greeks and Romans, but that the lower classes continued to RE-interpret the prophets and develop all kinds of literature, leading into apocalypticism. I saw that the New Testament is dishonest in its treatment of OT “prophecy,” taking sentences and phrases out of context and making them mean things they obviously were not intended to mean when they were written. I also realized that Isaiah was written at different periods by different people addressing different circumstances; this became completely obvious to me, and scholarly work I read agreed. I also realized that at least parts of Daniel were pseudepigraphic, written during the 2nd century BC and falsely attributed to a legendary hero in order to lend authority to the work.
The whole study took me SO much time. It turned out to be very influential in leading me to reject Christianity. Everything began to line up and point to the fraudulent nature of Christianity, if scriptures were to be taken literally and not as mere symbols.
My entire paper is here: Prophecies of the Messiah.
Some sections which especially influenced me were these:
Appendix D: Christian Misinterpretations of the Hebrew Scriptures
Appendix B: The Suffering Servant
Epilogue: Why Jesus Was Not the Messiah, the Christ
I encountered discrepancies in the resurrection, empty tomb, and appearance stories in the gospels.
I realized that there were both major and minor differences in what each evangelist claimed happened after the crucifixion, and I could not make them harmonious without altering details.
I wrote on the topic here: The Resurrection: Discrepancies and Evaluation.
I also came to realize the order in which the gospels were written, and how each subsequent author/community edited or added elements to the story.
I also began to consider it very telling that not even the Christian stories themselves claimed that Jesus bothered to appear to Pontius Pilate or any Romans or other groups. When taken together with the discrepancies in the accounts, the symbolic nature of the writing, the mythological elements comparable to other religions, the numerology, the embodiment of the solar cycle/myth, the late dates of authorship, the fact that no Roman, Greek, or Jewish historians recorded these events, the strange and unlikely nature of the whole tale, and all the other problems I had found in the Bible, this began to make the whole thing look like a very obvious sham.
I also found problems with ancient cosmology, including the cosmology of the Bible and its authors.
First, the Bible teaches that the earth is stable/unmoving, and the writers of the Bible used a geocentric model of the universe. They did not know the earth revolved around the sun.
Second, many ancient people and their writings, including the Bible, taught a three-tiered universe: heaven above, earth in the center, and hell beneath.
Doing word studies, I realized that heaven and sky were the same place to Jews, Greeks, and Romans. I had heard stories about Russian astronauts saying, “There’s no God up here,” and I had thought, "How foolish those Russian atheists were." But I came to realize that my thinking about heaven was based on reinterpretations made after Copernicus and Galileo. Before them, the writers of the Bible and early Christians for hundreds of years really DID think that God was up in the sky. In fact, that is why the Jews, Greeks, Romans, etc. (and the Biblical characters) all raised their hands when they prayed.
Yahweh had not even always been depicted as omni-present, but had evolved from a local-national storm God to a more universal God. I began to examine and reconsider passages in the Old Testament that had quite primitive concepts of a God who was neither omni-present nor omniscient, passages in which he hears bad news and has to come down from heaven to check it out.
I still remember this, too: On World News Tonight one night, I heard Peter Jennings say that Pope John Paul had declared that hell was not a place beneath the earth, but was a state of separation from God. I did a Bible study for myself, and I knew that many parts of the Bible DID propose that hell was beneath the earth – just as the uneducated (and even many educated) among Greeks, Romans, and others thought.
The literal heaven and hell above and below the earth are ancient superstitious fictions born of the human imagination. Christians feared hell and exploited other people’s fears of hell just as religions had done in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, India, and elsewhere long before Christianity existed and borrowed the concept. The writers of the Bible did not get their information from a personal, perfect God.
I also began to find problems with the ancient concepts of spirit, soul, matter, and body.
I realized that the ancients did not know what they were doing when they developed their ideas and terminology.
I wrote about some of these issues (spirit/soul/body and heaven/hell) here (scroll down to reasons #24-25): Why I Rejected Fundamentalist Christianity?,
and (dualism/spirit/soul/body) here: Dualism.
Regarding Jesus’ ascension, I realized that different early Christian communities had different ideas/stories, and that the whole ascension story did not even make sense with modern cosmology. It seemed obvious, then, that only ancient people who believed that heaven was sky would invent such a story of an ascending savior god.
And ancient people DID invent such stories. I encountered Livy’s story of the ascension of Romulus (Livy – book one – written in the first century BC). I saw that Romulus, too, was a son of a God, had a miraculous birth story, rose into heaven, and was called a God himself. Romulus reappeared to a senator on a mountain top and told him to “Go” and give the people his message that Rome would one day rule the world (cf. the Great commission, Mt 28).
By the time Livy wrote, some educated Romans were skeptical of their own tradition, so Livy included skepticism in his account, but it was obvious that the ancient Romans, well before Livy, actually believed the stories of Romulus. All of this was well before Christianity was invented.
I found plenty of other Greek stories of saviors born of virgins to divine fathers, performing amazing feats, descending to Hades and returning, ascending to heaven, etc. Hercules ascended to heaven. Caesar ascended to heaven. Practically nobody doubts that Caesar was a real man. To the Greeks, Heracles/Hercules had been a real man. Spartan kings and others claimed descent from his children. Perseus, Theseus, Orpheus, the Egyptian Osiris, Asclepius, Apollonius of Tyana, Empedocles, etc. – in various cultures there were such miraculous stories, and the common people believed they had really occurred.
The Christians just wanted to make their stories about Jesus as great as the earlier pagan stories about various Gods, Heroes, and Saviors.
I give more information elsewhere. See, for example, my paper "Caesar and Christ" for comparisons between Earlier Roman Stories and the Stories Christians wrote about Jesus!
I had often noticed that certain numbers recurred in the Bible: 3’s, 7’s, 12’s, 40’s.
BUT I eventually realized that other nations’ mythology used the same special numbers in their myths. I studied the use of the numbers in the Bible and in other myths and found that the numbers seem to be used in symbolic ways. Certain numbers show up in certain situations.
I wrote about it just a bit here: Numerology.
Once I saw how numbers were used, it made any story which used such numbers in certain patterns SUSPECT, likely to be myth/legend, or artificially or symbolically constructed, rather than simply historical.
Both the Old and New Testament were full of special numbers.
They even show up in the genealogies, lending further credence to the conclusion that they’re fabricated. In Matthew, there are 3 sets of 14 generations from Abraham to Jesus: 3 x 14 = six 7's. Then Jesus is the seventh 7. In Luke, although it is a different genealogy, Jesus is the 77th in descent from God through Adam. I already knew that the genealogies were contradictory, and I could never honestly accept the attempts of apologists to excuse the differences. This numerological element only confirmed what I had already come to think.
If you look, you will find these numbers everywhere.
I also realized that the biography of the real Jesus, assuming there was one, had been increasingly augmented over time, and that the Christian story of Jesus had been purposefully constructed in such a way that it conformed to the same symbolic patterns as OT events.
A few examples follow of the Mythical Nature of the Jesus Story:
* Baby Moses endangered by evil king = Baby Jesus endangered by evil king (in Matthew alone);
* Israelite sojourn in Egypt = Baby Jesus has a sojourn in Egypt (in Matthew alone);
* Moses - the law form the mountain = Jesus - sermon on the Mount (in Matthew alone)
* or, Moses - the law form the mountain = Jesus - great commission from mountain (Mt 28 alone);
* Moses on Mount Sinai = Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration.
* Passover lamb – 1st born slain in Egypt = Jesus as slain Passover lamb;
* 3 days darkness in Egypt = Jonah 3 in whale = Christ 3 in tomb (cf. 3 hrs darkness on cross);
* Exodus = Resurrection;
* Israelites 40 years wandering before promised land = Jesus 40 days before ascension (Acts alone);
* Promised Land = Heaven;
* Crossing the Jordan River = baptism.
Moses, Elijah, Jesus all fast 40 days/nights.
I had already done my research on Jewish messianic prophecy; so I had seen how NT authors took scattered bits from the OT and wove them into the story of Jesus in order to try to portray him as fulfilling prophecy. Now even more it looked as if certain people scoured the Jewish scriptures and used bits and pieces to add all kinds of fictitious elements to Jesus life/resurrection/ascension.
The miracle stories, too, seem designed to create and portray a savior who does all the traditional works of Moses, Elijah, Elisha combined – multiplying food, raising the dead, healing people, etc. – and betters them.
Eventually, I encountered Randel Helms’ Gospel Fictions (1988. Prometheus Books) and other literature which further confirmed what I felt must be the case.
I realized that humans over millennia had invented countless stories, many of which they were more than willing to die for. Christianity became an obvious example of but one more such, instead of the only true such.
A "Personal Relationship with Jesus Christ":
This phrase began to appear so ridiculous that I became embarrassed that I had grown up hearing and using it. I had to admit that the phrase was nonsense. Neither myself nor any Christian I had ever known had had a genuine "personal" relationship with Jesus. In a personal relationship, one person is able to talk to AND hear from the other person in a clear manner. Also, a personal relationship can actually be demonstrated quite easily. I have known plenty of Christians who claimed to talk to and hear from God/Jesus (I did so myself), but the things they claim to hear are always ideas from the bible or other things that anyone could make up, i.e. such people simply have a dialogue with their own mind. Growing up, I soooo much wanted to "hear God's voice" as all the characters in the Bible allegedly had. More than anything in the world, more than anything, anything, anything, I wanted to hear God and know God. Who knows how many times I sat on the floor in my room rocking back and forth and crying even and pleading with God to speak to me and direct me.
In my youth group, the youth minister would have us sometimes go into separate rooms of the church to be alone with the Bible and with "the Lord," and when we came back, we were expected to talk about what God had "told" us. Everyone used this language, "God told me ...," "God put it on my heart to ...," etc. Basically, you could read something in the Bible and have feelings about it, and that meant God was talking to you. But IF that counts as "personal communication," then I could have "personal communication" with just about any dead person found in literature! Such is no indication of a personal relationship.
I eventually began to challenge other Christians. I knew that they were claiming a "personal relationship" with something that was really just in their heads. I knew that they could not really ask God something and hear an answer from God.
This is easily testable. Simply ask a Christian something that he has no means of finding out by human measures.
Do YOU claim to have a “personal relationship” with “the” “one true” god?
If so, what can you show for it? If you ask “him” a question, will "he" answer you?
If you say yes, then I propose we test this hypothesis. I will give you the question to ask your “god,” and IF you REALLY have a “relationship” with this so-called god and “his” “spirit” really does “dwell” inside you and you are not just deluding yourself with empty words, then he will answer you and you can tell me what he says. THAT might give me some evidence that maybe, just maybe you have something REAL, as opposed to some ancient words.
Will you say, “Oh, but you should not put the Lord your God to the test”??!!
Well now, how convenient for your claims, huh?! Any prayer request whatsoever can be considered a “test.” Yet your holy book says God/Jesus will give you ANYTHING you ask for in faith. I guess we will see what kind of faith you have.
Christians do not have any real personal relationship with Jesus, other than a Jesus mentally constructed in their head from what they have read and heard from preachers and the Bible.
The claim is that Jesus'/God's very Spirit dwells within them. Yet it is very obvious to non-Christians that there is nothing supernatural about the lives of Christians.
Christians no more have a personal relationship with Jesus than I have a personal relationship with Socrates or any other dead person or mythical character.
Christian History and the Holy Spirit’s Guidance:
It is also interesting to note what a big MESS the "guidance" of the "holy spirit" made of early Christian history and then Roman Catholicism and Protestantism and all the other offshoots.
All these different questions and studies came together with such force that I found myself no longer able to believe the Bible and no longer able to be an orthodox Christian. I was no longer afraid of such a conclusion as I had previous been, because everything seemed so obvious and fit together so well.
If children are told about God throwing unbelievers into hell, and they then learn how many unbelievers there are and have been, and especially if they have friends who are not part of their brand of Christianity, and they realize that non-Christians are so often sincere, loving people, ... the natural reaction of most children is to think that such a thing is sad and unjust. "Why would God do such?" "Will God not find a way to save everybody? Of course he will; he is all-powerful." But over time, so many children within the Christian religion have their natural inclinations replaced with all kinds of explanations, justifications, pseudo-rationalizations, and they buy into the story and still call God “just,” simply because "just" is part of the a priori definition of God fed to them by their parents and other well-meaning-but-ignorant authorities.
I was so happy to be able to see the world outside of the perspective of my youth. I felt “born again.” I was free!
Christians have no clue just how bound up they are in ignorance, superstition, guilt, repression, and all kinds of psychological issues, and if they ever break out of it, they often feel like I felt – born again and happy to be free, happy to see the world for what it is, happy not to have to defend foolish ideas any longer.
I no longer had to make excuses for Yahweh's behavior in the OT or for anything else that people often feel in their gut to be screwy.
I had previously acquired such a reputation as a zealous Christian, that many were very startled to discover my change in beliefs. I composed a list of some of my reasons, so that I could more easily share them: Why I Rejected Fundamentalist Christianity?
Also, while happy to be free from what I had come to realize was simply a cult that had become very popular, I was quite ANGRY that I had been lied to and manipulated. The process of coming out of Christianity had been so emotionally/ psychologically difficult, EVEN with my being open-minded enough to seek answers.
The difficulty of the process is not easy to convey to someone who has not experienced it.
I had friends who were actually unable to even question or listen to me, because they were afraid of hearing it. I knew my parents had not lied on purpose; I knew they had done the best they knew how. But I resented the whole establishment of Christianity, and I saw that so much of the rest of the world was in a similar condition – each region having a huge population of people believing to some degree or other in ancient superstitions.
I created a simple web site to post some of my work.
I have, since then, gone on to study Latin, Greek, and ancient history, religion, and philosophy; to teach high school Latin for a while; to return to classics and ancient studies, earning a Master of Arts degree from the University of Texas at Austin. I have since earned other degrees, but they are in different fields.
In and after graduate school, I constantly encountered material that reaffirmed the conclusions I had reached by age 25. Sometimes I added papers to this website, like "Caesar and Christ" (comparing Christianity with Roman religious propaganda, which was so fascinating and enlightening), but I found that I have often been too busy to continue my old projects for various papers and studies; so the web site is always incomplete.
As zealous as I used to be for Christianity, so zealous was I, for a time, in trying to show people its error if taken literally. But not everyone is willing to question seriously. Christianity often appears just as embedded in many families/communities as Islam is in the Middle East, Pakistan, and Indonesia, as Mormon Christianity is in Utah, and as Hinduism is in rural India. Such conditions only hinder human progress.
I have tried to be more relaxed in recent years, but I see that Christianity is a real problem, and its teachings continue to distract people from reality or force them to see reality through a strange filter, leading them to waste countless amounts of time and energy maintaining a falsehood, an illusion, and sometimes fighting against better ideas: science, research, homosexual rights, women’s rights, family planning, sex education, et cetera. Islam is causing the same trouble elsewhere in the world.
Religion and racial/ethnic prejudices remain two of the greatest hindrances to world peace and human progress.
written around June 20, 2008.
Last Revised: 2009-01-19.