After I left the religion of my youth, people often asked me what led me to such a radical change. In response to this question, I composed a list of reasons.
I grew up as a Christian, and from age 17 to 24 I wanted to be a minister. At age 24, after years of spending most of my free time studying, I no longer was able to believe Biblical Christianity was literally true. While I did not reject absolutely everything about Christianity or the Bible, I found more and more problems with it. What follows is a list of problems that I have found with typical Christianity; some are statements, others are in the form of questions to which I found no satisfactory answer in orthodoxy. There is no set order (#5, #12, #17, and #20 are among my favorites), and the strongest reasons are not the initial ones, but the weight of the entirety.
If you are a fundamentalist yourself, AND a truth-seeker, then I challenge you [in a friendly, but sincere way I hope!] to read through this completely, answer these questions honestly, and show me if/where I am wrong. I think anyone claiming to believe the stories owes it to him/herself and others to address these issues; otherwise, such faith seems to me indefensible, or even dishonest.
1. The idea that a personal, all-powerful god with human-like emotions is rewarding people with eternal life in a paradise merely for believing in an unproven, questionable set of writings (created in a superstitious and pre-scientific era by uncertain authors) and punishing others for not believing it is actually an extremely unjust idea. But I never admitted it until I had so much evidence that I was unable to believe anyway. Some verses will suggest that reward/punishment is based on actions, but this is misleading, since my actions are just as good as the average Christian's (and often better) and are certainly not worse than the average Christian's actions/behavior. Yet the religion teaches that they will be forgiven and will live forever mostly because they believe a story (and merely try to follow certain rules).
2. Should someone really believe that the God of the whole universe chose only one race, the Jews, to be his "chosen people"? The Bible, which they wrote, of course, claims they were his chosen people for at least 2000 years (Abraham to Christ), and some Jews still believe the old stories and think they are "THE chosen." But ... Why would a real, universal God only reveal himself to one small group of people and totally ignore the Egyptians, Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, Persians, Northern Europeans, Celts, Africans, Hindus, Chinese, Australian Aborigines, American Indians, and all others? Why would "he" (?) reveal himself to Moses and ignore the rest of the world as if they were but trash, letting them suffer in ignorance of the truth? Does this (Jewish) idea not seem arrogant? ethnocentric? mythical-sounding? more like a local religious idea coming merely from one religion than a universal truth?
What's more, when I look to legitimate history, I do not see any reason to believe Jews have been favored any more than any other race by any personal divine force. Their history is filled with horrible suffering and destruction and cycles of gain and loss. It all has simple naturalistic, historical explanations. I also think that racial pride has been far too divisive in human history. So many ancient peoples seem to have believed themselves to be better than everyone else: the Greeks, Persians, Romans, ...; obviously Jews were the same way.
The Romans, too, believed the gods were on their side, and they certainly had much more to show for their claims than the Jews did. [In fact, the Roman empire only fell after it became mostly Christian. But of course I do not believe the claim that personal gods were actually responsible for Roman success, even if their faith in such gods did motivate them to accomplish much.] The Greeks claimed that the gods fought on their side during the Persian Wars in 490 and 480-79 BCE, and that amazing signs occurred (e.g. Herodotus' writings). Spiritual truth seekers all around the world throughout human history have developed their own individual ideas regarding divine matters. If there actually had been a single, true, personal, all-knowing God, it would have revealed itself to these other truth-seekers without showing favoritism to a few individuals in a single racial group in the Middle East over a mere 1-2 thousand years out of all the hundreds of thousands of years of human/humanoid history. [And of course the evidence is against those Jewish claims.]
3. ** It is illogical (at best) to believe that a personal, loving, all-powerful God of the whole world, who wished to be honored by "his" creation, would do all of the following:
ignore the vast majority of the people of the world for hundreds of thousands of years, allowing them to live, suffer, and die in ignorance of "his" existence,
choose only one small racial group, to be his "chosen" people for possibly one or two thousand years,
only allegedly reveal himself to a handful of prophets in one small corner of the world, speaking in riddles, dreams, and unclear language with many possible interpretations, written in books, some of which were lost -- books that were edited over time, books to which most people had NO access, books which most people had no ability to read for themselves for most of human history,
only allegedly appear in the flesh for a few years in a few cities of that same one racial group, still ignoring all the rest of the world (unless you're Mormon and have a couple of extra visits on Jesus' itinerary, and even then, most of the world is still ignored),
only allegedly appear resurrected from the dead in weird ways and for a very brief time to a relatively few, mostly uneducated poor people of highly questionable reliability of that same race, the accounts of such alleged appearances only being recorded in a few contradictory stories, which were edited over time and were not actually even written by the alleged witnesses, except possibly in the case of Paul, who merely claimed to see a light and hear a voice. [But accounts of that moment differ, too. Carefully compare 1Cor 15.3-10; Gal 1.13-24; and the three different accounts in Acts 9.1-31; 22.1-21; 26.12-23],
absolutely AVOID appearing to other races, other individuals, in other places, at other times,
go back into the sky and leave a few people to convince others of the miracles he allegedly did,
still ignore most of Asia (the largest and most populated continent), Africa, Australia, and America for another 1,500 to 2,000 years,
expect people actually to believe such a strange-sounding, contrary-to-nature-and-all-ordinary-experience story without any solid evidence and hardly any evidence at all other than a handful of questionable texts written during an age of wide-spread ignorance and superstition and propagated by an institution that is known to have been corrupt and frequently misguided for much, if not most, of its history,
and send by far most of the humans that have ever lived to eternal suffering in hell (see footnote 1), merely for not believing without proof the story that is supposed to deliver them from the angry God himself and excuse them from guilt over sins supposedly so horrible as to be worthy of the death penalty and eternal torture.
Yet these are the teachings of traditional Christianity. They are very disappointing when one thinks about them honestly and at length. When I was a child and teenager, I believed what I was told by my beautiful, loving, but undereducated parents and by "authorities" in my community (just as any Muslim or Hindu or Mormon or Buddhist or pagan would do growing up). I was naive. Now that I have learned about history and science and have read widely in world literature and studied other religions, I realize that someone would need some really good evidence to convince me of something so horrible, unfair, and absurd! And that kind of evidence is not to be found.
Some other anonymous person on the internet put it this (humorous?) way:
So let me get this straight: the unending, origin-less, all-powerful force of creation that hand-made the entire universe funneled himself into the body of a single human fetus one day and then teleported the fetus into the uterus of a married virgin in a remote corner of a single planet. He then spent 30 whole years on earth walking around doing basically nothing remarkable whatsoever until one day in his 30th year he got baptized and started doing miracles and casting demons out of people and rearranged reality to set in motion events that would lead to his very own death...effectively committing suicide? And he does this because his death will, by some strange "logic" of his own (?), clear humanity's sin tally (which he, himself, is keeping up in heaven and getting angry over)? And then after his plans to get himself killed fall into place and he gets nailed up, he looks around and asks himself "My god, my god, why have you forsaken me" (i.e. "why have I, god, forsaken my own self, Jesus?")? Then he dies -- but not really, only in his bodily part for a short time (?) -- and then comes back to life in that human body and shows himself in just a few magic-trick moments to but a few people in weird ways for just a short time, and then goes up in a cloud, promising to come back soon to judge the entire earth? And he never bothered explaining any of this to the rest of the world himself?
4. Fundamentalists claim that the almighty Spirit of God/Jesus is personally dwelling in them, and is not dwelling in those who do not believe the stories literally. While I recognize that many Christians live in love and happiness, practically speaking, Christians have no more "spiritual" power, love, or happiness in their lives than I or others do, and I know this very well from living with them all my life, from being one of them for most of my life, and from visiting all kinds of different denominations of their religion. There is certainly no evidence that life/nature/god treats them any differently. They are no more blessed than I am; their prayers are no more effective than mine are, if results are measured. Where is the evidence that a supernatural power is working in their lives in any way that is exclusive to themselves?
If they claim morality, love, or happiness, I can truly say that I and my friends have all these things without Christianity, and morality was around long before Jesus or Moses. Furthermore, devout Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, Jews, Muslims, Wiccans, atheists and agnostics with whom I am (or have been) personally acquainted have all these things as well -- even though there are bad examples of members of those faiths too.
If Christians claim that their god works miracles for them, I first ask them for evidence of their miracles, which they seldom have since such claims are most often products of overactive imaginations. Even the Roman Catholic Church, that great bastion of superstition, rejects more miracle claims than it approves. Anyway, when Christians do try to back up their miracle claims with testimonies, I show them that other religions and peoples throughout history have claimed (and tried to produce evidence for) miracles too, and still do, all the time. Claims of miracles occur in most religions, and even outside of organized religion, and they are usually the same types of events. One can go to the library and find books about many mystics, and holy men in history who were believed to work miracles, including healing the sick and raising the dead. [Try it. The stories are fascinating.] I am not even necessarily denying (or affirming) that "miracles" occur, but I do certainly deny their uniqueness to Christian circles. The ancient Mediterranean world in which Christianity evolved was full-to-overflowing with miracle stories, divine interventions, ghosts/spirits, visions, dreams, trances, fasting, praying, healings, signs, omens, prophecies, oracles, miraculous birth stories involving divinely impregnated virgins, people coming back from the dead, heroes ascending to heaven, religious initiates ascending to heaven, statues weeping or bleeding, divine solar eclipses, trips to the underworld, recollections of past lives, and much much more. One example, you can still visit the ruins of the ancient Greek city of Epidaurus, and you can see relics from the Asclepius temple there, where countless people went to be healed by the god, and where people left carvings or statues as "proofs" in honor of the healings that allegedly took place.
Also, Christians are affected by disease, tragedy, and natural disasters as much as anyone. At the end of March 2000, a tornado killed four people in Fort Worth, Texas and destroyed a prayer tower at local church. This is just one tiny example of how "God's elect" are no more protected than anyone else. 2003, a young college girl from Dallas preparing to be a minister, much loved and cherished by her local community, died in a car accident; a similar event happened in my home town when I was growing up. Of course it makes the news when a bus-load of church kids veers off the road and they all die. Everyone questions, "Why did God allow this," and all the church leaders hurry to explain the "truth" to the doubters, that surely God had a special reason for killing these children (or letting them die). In 2017, Devin P. Kelley entered a rural Texas Baptist church with a military-style rifle, and he killed at least 26 people. Does the Christian god not protect "his" people even in church? ... A cancer patient recovers, and the Christians say God answered their prayers; he relapses and dies, and they say, "God just chose to take him." I've personally seen Muslims in Austin, Texas do the exact same thing. I see no reason to believe that their "god" is performing either action in personal response to their prayers.
I am not denying that following certain biblical teachings can improve people's lives, but so can other teachings. I know lots of Christians who have been inspired by the Bible to try to live loving, honest, vibrant lives. But all the good in Christians' lives can and honestly should be attributed to sincere efforts to live a good life. The results depend on the effort of the person; the value of their beliefs is not in its truth, but in its ability to inspire effort. Sure, faith inspires many (certainly not all) Christians to a good life, but other religions and philosophies have shown themselves just as effective at the same task. And just because it inspires some good behavior does not make it true; e.g. consider the effect of Santa Claus on children's behavior. Conclusion ----There is no evidence that any personal god is showing special favor toward Christians, or that any all-mighty "spirit of God" is actually dwelling with Christians in any way that is exclusive of others.
If the spirit of God or Jesus were actually inside a Christian, we could expect such Christians to be doing all kinds of amazing things, as in the fanciful stories of the New Testament. Some Christians will take their religion seriously enough to claim to be able to communicate with God, but if you try to put such claims to a genuine test, even in an honest quest for truth, they will back off or excuse themselves by suggesting it would be sinful for them to test God, despite the fact that their New Testament says that God will give them "whatever" they ask for in Jesus' name. In short, they talk big but have no real power. Yes, miracle crusades are all over Christian television programs, but all of that can be faked and/or will rely on the wishful thinking/credulity of people more than willing to be psychologically manipulated into making unfounded claims and having emotionally charged experiences. I have been to these miracle crusades and lots of charismatic churches, and I have witnessed plenty of this in person.
5. If a personal God really wanted us to know him, yet did not want to force us, why did he not then and why does he not now simply appear to everyone the way he allegedly did to certain Jewish people thousands of years ago in a superstitious age? All he would have to do is speak plainly and show us all who he is. Is that really so hard? Why could he not treat us equally and fairly if he really, honestly loved us, and give us the same privileges he allegedly gave a few Jews 2,000 years ago? If the concept of the all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful, righteous and fair personal deity were valid, and if "he" really did want all to know the truth and have a "personal relationship" with him, he could and would simply reveal himself to all. It is not as if such would be "too difficult" or would go against his principles, since he allegedly did such things for some people. The fact that no "personal" God is open, honest, loving, and self-revealing to ALL people equally and fairly is one of the many clues that Christianity is but one of many false ancient religions invented by imaginative humans.
6. If Jesus really rose bodily and imperishable from the dead, why did he not simply stay on earth after the resurrection and teach people the truth and lead the world to harmony and happiness? Would that have been too easy? Did he prefer to make things hard for us by going away and living in seclusion up in the sky and testing people to see if they would believe a story that sounds like fiction? The story is not only suspicious; when combined with the state of evidence, the conflicting and late accounts written by a religious movement known to have created lots of fiction, it is absurd. If Jesus really had risen from the dead and really had been God in flesh, of course he would have shown himself alive to all and could still be walking the earth today making the world a good place, since he should be able to be in multiple places at once. If he had really been divine and all-powerful, he would have had nothing to hide, no reason to withdraw from the world and leave the most important matters to clumsy, fallible humans who commit all kinds of errors in his name. He would have acted openly, lovingly, decisively. The ascension story, taken literally, is for the gullible.
7. Why should one accept Jewish myths or Christian myths as true, but not Greek, Roman, Hindu, Muslim, or other myths? How many Christians even bother to look into other traditions? To me, Christianity is hardly more believable than these other faiths. And certain elements of philosophical Buddhism and Taoism and Gnostic Christianity require much less of a strain on logic.
8. Did Jesus stop appearing to people after Paul? If so, why? Was he tired of traveling all that way from heaven to earth? Was is too hard for him? Why is he hiding up in the sky if he cares about everyone? What is he doing up there, hour upon hour, day after day, year after year, century after century, millennium after...? Is he busy building mansions for those who believe the story? I cannot believe that Jesus rose physically into the sky and is waiting there and will one day descend again in a cloud (Acts 1). The idea that divinities live in the sky is ancient superstition created by people who thought that the earth was stationary, that heaven was above it, that hell was below it, and that the sun revolved around the earth. There is no place up in the clouds for Jesus to go; modern educated people ought to see through the ancient superstition and not let tradition cloud their minds.
9. If Jesus had to appear to Paul to convert him, why would he not appear to everyone else and give them the same chance he gave Paul? Is he whimsical? Does he still play favorites? If the Bible is true, God gave Paul a privilege that he is not giving to other people, and Paul was supposedly fighting against Christianity. That would be very unfair IF it were true. Such could not be the action of an all-loving, righteous and fair personal God.
10. The Bible was written in an age when people were very gullible (yes, I know we still are) and when many cultures had, and were even still in the process of writing, myths and miraculous stories of the gods' interventions in human lives. The Bible is no more reliable than these other stories, and it sounds very similar. Medieval Christians were still making up stories about Jesus, Mary, Mary Magdalene, saints, and relics--even claiming to have pieces of "the true cross", locks of Mary's hair, Jesus burial shroud, etc.
11. The early Christians were very fragmented, and Christian history was plagued by factions, disagreements, and politics indicative of human (not perfect divine) endeavors. There were many Christian groups with quite different opinions and beliefs. There is no way to show that one surviving set of beliefs represents what truly happened or even an "original" Christianity. One group dominated and suppressed all the others and became the orthodox Roman Catholic Church, but who (other than Roman Catholics themselves) says that this group held the "true faith," and how can anyone know? We do know that the Roman Catholics destroyed things which they did not like. The fact that they won the political battles does not make theirs the most authentic form of the religion. Often the winner of such political battles is stronger and more power-hungry, but not more genuine. There were other gospels and writings that the orthodox did not allow into the NT scriptures. If faith can be exalted over reason, can't those other writings be reflective of equally valid forms of Christianity? What if the Gnostic Christians had won the political battle and suppressed the "orthodox" version, instead of vice versa? The orthodox Christians threw out the Gospel of Thomas for example, but do we know that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are any more authentic than the Gospel of Thomas or any other of the Gnostic gospels and writings? And for that matter, the authors of Matthew and Luke relied very heavily on Mark, often copying it word for word, though they altered his language and details when they felt like it and added extra layers of legend. They can hardly be called authentic. The Gnostic Christians claimed to represent the true faith, and the orthodox cannot prove them wrong. (See The Nag Hammadi Library, Ed. James M. Robinson, and Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels as good sources on Gnostic Christianity.) Some early Christian groups had such beliefs as these:
That Jesus was man but not God.
That Jesus was God but not man.
That the god of the Hebrew Scriptures was not the true God. (e.g. see Marcionism)
That the Hebrew god was an angry, ruthless, bloodthirsty god. (e.g. see Marcionism)
That Yahweh, an arrogant being who claimed supreme status and tried to suppress mankind, was the one who lied in Eden when he told Adam he would die when he ate the fruit (for Adam did not die); that the serpent, a momentary incarnation of wisdom to help mankind develop spiritually, told the truth, and Adam's and Eve's eyes were opened and they did become as the gods, knowing good from evil (Gen 3.22).
That the resurrection was not a literal, physical event, but a spiritual one. While there were many Gnostic Christians who held this view, it seems that Paul himself may have held this view. [See Richard Carrier's Essay on "The Spiritual Body of Christ" in The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave (Prometheus Books, 2005).] Of course, eventually the more popular view was that the resurrection was bodily, and the spiritual resurrection concept became "heresy."
That Jesus was not literally, but spiritually born of a virgin, Wisdom/Sophia, the eternal virgin (or the Holy Spirit).
That the knowledge of the Christ was a knowledge of one's self.
That it wasn't wrong for women to hold positions of authority.
That ignorance, not sin, was the true problem of mankind.
That there was an exoteric Christianity for the masses and an esoteric Christianity for initiates, just as Jesus supposedly told his disciples some things he did not tell the crowds (Mt 13.10-), chose 12 to be closer than other disciples, showed some disciples more than he showed others (Mt 17, 2 Cor 12.1-4), and warned against casting pearls before swine (Mt 7.6); and just as Paul spoke of special revelations that were not permitted to be known by everyone (2 Cor 12.1-4).
At least some forms of early Christianity were much like the Greek mystery religions, with deeper knowledge for initiates and a surface myth for lower-level followers. The eastern half of the Roman Empire had been immersed in Greek culture for over 300 years (since Alexander the Great). The NT was written in Greek; New Testament authors even used the Septuagint (Greek) version of the Hebrew Bible. Anyway, to summarize this point, no one knows which version of Christianity was the earliest or most authentic, even though plenty of people claim to know.
12. * * * The Christian god does not appear or speak for himself. Instead a bunch of people with an out-dated story-book run around trying to tell everyone what god thinks, what he wants everybody to do, and what he is going to do to those who do not listen. Fishy is it not? And this is the same way so many other religions work.
13. Although it is the source of Christian "knowledge," the Bible contains myth, legend, and much false information. Here is a list of some examples, and it is by no means an exhaustive list:
See my paper, "Old Testament Chronological and Historical Problems," which explains how the Creation story, the Noah story, most of the Abraham-Isaac-Jacob stories, and much of the Exodus story are legend and myth and contain false data. Yet they are the foundation of both Judaism and Christianity. The Christian authors of the Jesus stories passed down to us depicted Jesus as believing in all of these old Jewish myths as if they were true. When one finds out they were not true, it undercuts New Testament Christianity as well as Old Testament Judaism.
The sun did not stand still in the sky for a day while Joshua and his men killed all their enemies. No other, more advanced Near East cultures recorded such a cosmological phenomenon; there is no geological or scientific evidence for it; and besides being obviously made up, this story presents an earth-centered universe theory. Anyway, what would happen to the earth if it suddenly stopped rotating on its axis?! Many other stories are just as obviously fictitious, like the Samson story, or Jonah's 3 days in the fish's belly, or the walls of Jericho crumbling after the 7-time march around the city.
The books of the prophets are filled with false prophecies which never came to pass, but most people are uneducated in Jewish history and read the OT through the manipulative filter of Christian propaganda and interpretation. See my paper Prophecies of the Messiah for more detailed information along with a review of Jewish history. Here is just one small example of a false prophecy: Jeremiah 33:7-18 (speaking to Jews in the 500's BCE) claimed that Yahweh was saying to Israel:
I will bring Judah and Israel back from captivity and will rebuild them as they were before. I will cleanse them from all the sin they have committed against me and will forgive all their sins of rebellion against me. Then this city will bring me renown, joy, praise and honor before all nations on earth that hear of all the good things I do for it; and they will be in awe and will tremble at the abundant prosperity and peace I provide for it. ... In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will dwell in safety. ... David will never fail to have a man to sit on the throne of the house of Israel, nor will the priests, who are Levites, ever fail to have a man to stand before me continually to offer burnt offerings, to burn grain offerings and to present sacrifices (v17-18).
Jeremiah's prediction failed miserably. Although a good portion of Judah did return to Jerusalem after 539 BCE, they were not rebuilt "as they were before" but were dominated by Persia, and the tribes of Israel never returned at all--they even ceased to exist as a separate ethnic group. The prophecy of the abundant peace and prosperity of Jerusalem was probably one of the most ironic statements ever made in human history, since for 2,750 years it has been one of the least peaceful places on the face of the earth. The Jews were not allowed to establish a kingdom when they returned to Jeusalem under Persian control, so they had a priest-lead theocracy; the city was war-torn under the Seleucids (Greeks), and although the Jews did create a new kingdom (not Davidic) again in the 100s BCE, it did not last; and the Romans destroyed Jerusalem again in 70 CE after a Jewish rebellion. There has not been a Davidic king on the throne of Judah (or Israel, as they somewhat misleadingly call it now) since the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. The Jews do not have a king today; they are fine with having a prime minister. And even Christians, who insupportably think Jesus is the Jewish King (?!?), still do not have a Levite to "burn grain offerings" or present sacrifices, as Jeremiah prophesied.
Ezekiel, Isaiah, and other "prophets" all thought the Jews would come back from captivity and build a great earthly kingdom, but it did not happen. And there were always those groups of Jews who tried to reinterpret their scriptures to account for the mistakes, but historians have the records to prove the prophets false. If their contemporaries had known what the future of their nation would be like, by their own law they would have had to stone Jeremiah and the others to death as false prophets. Again, see the above-mentioned paper for a much more detailed account.
Much of the book of Daniel is a pseudepigraphon (a false writing); at least significant parts of it were not written until the 2nd century BCE but were falsely ascribed to a legendary Jewish hero, Daniel, to give authority to the writings. One may read the Harper's Bible Dictionary article on Daniel or The Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. VIII pp. 324-387 for a couple of sources. The events described in chapter 11 of Daniel all happened in the 100's BCE and are mostly in the right order and accurate until a certain point where they start deviating from what actually happened. The author(s) had witnessed the persecution of Israel by Antiochus IV of Syria and the violation of the Jewish temple in 168 BCE (the "abomination of desolation"), and so he/they wrote down what had happened onto a manuscript and said that it had all been prophesied by Daniel 400 or 500 years before. Only, the writer(s) of Daniel didn't know what would happen next, so he/they made some predictions, and the predicted details of the end of the war between the Syrians and Jews turned out to be wrong. Also, he/they thought the resurrection of the dead was about to occur, and it didn't 2 endnote 2). Many Jews kept reinterpreting this book too, just as they did with the other "prophets." If the NT gospels quote Jesus accurately, he was still thinking the "abomination of desolation" would happen in the future! The Jews had to reinterpret Daniel this way or else admit that it was wrong. Daniel does have some other mistakes. For example, Daniel 5.2 mistakenly says Belshazzar's father was Nebuchadnezzar, but Belshazzar was actually the son and viceroy of Nabonidus, not Nebuchadnezzar, and he also was not king, as 5.1 calls him. In the Hebrew canon, Daniel is not placed with the prophets, but with the writings; this is further evidence that it was added at a late date, possibly when the collection of prophets had already been closed. If you look at Daniel in a Roman Catholic Bible, you'll even see further additions to the text, Susanna and Bel and the Dragon.
The NT is full of misinterpretations and out-of-context quotations of the Jewish Scriptures. Jews knew this all through the Middle Ages, and it was one of the many good reasons why they did not believe in Jesus as their Messiah; but Christians hated the Jews, and Christian scholars were unwilling to look into it honestly until modern times. See my paper, "Prophecies of the Messiah: Appendix D: New Testament Interpretations of the Old Testament," for several excellent examples. Just one example is the supposed prophecy of the virgin birth of the Christ. Isaiah 7.14-17 actually says in Hebrew, "Behold, the young woman will conceive"; it does NOT say "a virgin will conceive." Hebrew has a word that specifically means "virgin;" it is used in many places in the Bible, but not here. The writer of Matthew was using a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, which used the Greek word parthena and can refer to a virgin, but does not necessarily do so. Virgin births were very common in Greek stories of heroes.
But there is much more. The child Isaiah prophesied about was supposed to live in the 700's BCE!!!: "...and before the boy is old enough to know the difference between right and wrong, the land . . . will be laid waste by the king of Assyria" (7.14-17). That happened in 732 and 722-21 BCE. The birth of the child was supposed to be a sign for King Ahaz in the 700's. Thus, there is NO WAY Isaiah was referring to some far off virgin birth of a spiritual messiah. There is no prophecy of a virgin birth of the messiah anywhere in Jewish scripture! Christians usually do not bother to read the rest of that passage in Isaiah. They too often do not bother to read the OT in context or learn Jewish history at all, and that is why they are easy prey for preachers and evangelists (who were once easy prey for others, etc. ad infinitum).
Matthew and Luke give different genealogies for Jesus. Which one (if either) is right? Some Christians have tried to explain this away by saying one of the genealogies is of Mary, but that is a lame attempt ant it does NOT follow what the Bible itself says. Matthew says Joseph's father was Jacob; Luke says Joseph's father was Heli. And those are not the only problems: 1) They conflict with each other on whether Joseph (Jesus' "father") descended from David through Solomon or Nathan, 2) Luke 3.35 follows the Septuagint and contains an extra name conflicting with the list in the Hebrew Genesis, and 3) the genealogies would not matter anyway if Joseph was not really Jesus' father (i.e. Virgin birth). The genealogies may well be a hold-over from before the virgin-birth stories were invented. Since the Messiah was to be a descendant of David, the some early groups thought they had to "prove" the genetic link. To "prove" such a genetic link, evidently they were willing to make stuff up. If the gospels are giving false information about the simple kinds of details which should be easier to believe, why should we ever believe the stuff that SOUNDS fantastic, mythical, irrational, or contrary to nature and common experience?
The Gospels contradict each other in many details about what happened after Jesus' resurrection. See my paper The Resurrection: Discrepancies and Evaluation for details. Especially note the disagreement on whether post-resurrection events took place in Galilee or Jerusalem; this is a glaring problem, revealing that the compilers of the orthodox New Testament were gathering myths, legends, and hearsay, not reliable, factual history. There are also inconsistencies regarding who went to the tomb, to whom Jesus appeared and in what order, whether he appeared in Galilee or Jerusalem (over 100 miles apart), how long he stayed on the earth, and more. Given additional problems of logic (mentioned in the paper cited above) and the fact that some early Christians considered the resurrection a spiritual, not a physical event, the whole literal resurrection and ascension story appears far too fishy to believe on mere faith.
The Bible constantly uses special numbers like 3s, 7s, 12s, 40s, and their multiples in its stories. These numbers were important in ancient astrology and show up in myths from many cultures. The overabundant use of these numbers greatly detracts from the Bible's credibility, and gives the appearance of myth, legend, and symbolism rather than history. If you are not aware of just how often these numbers are used, get a concordance some time and look them up, or just see my paper The Use of Special Numbers in the Bible for more details, including a nearly exhaustive list of occurrences of these numbers in the Bible. This can be a truly astounding point, if you look at it patiently. Again, other peoples of the ancient world also used these same numbers in their most significant myths.
Do you really think people remembered all those detailed conversations they recorded in the Bible, or did they likely make some things up? Think about it? A huge amount of text is devoted to quotations and conversations that the writers did not witness.
All through the Middle Ages, people could be put to death for questioning the Bible (that is how great the Church was!), but especially during the Enlightenment of the 1700's much truth about this collection of writings began to be discovered. For example, tradition had ascribed the first 5 books to Moses, but even Jews of early modern times began to question and eventually easily prove that the Torah could not have been written by Moses. *See Richard Elliott Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible? for a short history of Biblical scholarship and some excellent explanations, and see my paper "Old Testament Chronological and Historical Problems: Late Authorship, Not Mosaic. " Among many other reasons for rejecting Moses' authorship, the texts have many anachronisms that could not have been written until just a few hundred years BCE. Another small but important bit of evidence for late authorship of the Torah is the fact that the author(s) could not even name the Egyptian Pharaoh during the legendary Exodus. The first pharaoh mentioned by name is Shishak (c. 945-924 BCE). New Testament scholarship has also come a long way. For example, some "Pauline" epistles are now believed to be falsely ascribed to the Apostle Paul. See Burton Mack's Who Wrote the New Testament?, among other sources.
To summarize this rather long "point", the Bible is in NO way a reliable source. People usually believe it because they want to, or because they are told they should, or because they are afraid not to.
14. Perhaps the central claim of orthodox Christianity is that Jesus was the messiah foretold by the Jewish prophets, but this is also one of the most historically absurd claims. The Jewish prophets in the Bible called for a renewed, earthly Jewish kingdom and the restoration of the line of David upon the earthly throne -- a political, worldly king (see my paper Prophecies of the Messiah for a detailed explanation). They also thought all the nations would come to Jerusalem to offer animal sacrifices at the temple, to bring riches to the city, and to worship Yahweh. None of that happened, or can ever happen. Jesus certainly never became king of the Jews, and Christians do not believe in the sacrificial system anymore, so how could the prophecies ever be fulfilled? Christians try to say Jesus fulfills the prophecies of the restoration of the sacrifice system by becoming the ultimate sacrifice -- but that is NOT what the prophets foretold (for example, Is 19.21, Is 56.6-7, Is 60.1-22, Jer 33.18, Ezekiel 36-48). And anyone can demonstrate that Jesus is not the king of the Jews or Israel. All you have to do is go to Israel and ask the prime minister who the king is, and he will tell you there is no king. The Christian claim is like someone claiming King Arthur is the true king of England, "spiritually."
15. During the Greco-Roman era, it was relatively common for groups to write stories or "prophecies" or other literature and falsely attribute the writing to a hero, ancestor, prophet, or spiritual leader. I have already mentioned Daniel, but there were many others. For example, early Christians had a document called the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, a Jewish pseudepigraphon into which they basically inserted a bunch of "prophecies" about Jesus and claimed that the prophecies were made by the 12 sons of Jacob almost 2000 years before Jesus. In other words, it was a fraud. Other examples of such pseudipigraphal and/or apocryphal works are the following Jewish and Christian texts: I and II Esdras, Tobit, the Wisdom of Solomon, the Wisdom of Jesus Ben Sirach, Baruch, Letter to Jeremiah, some additions to Daniel (Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon), Prayer of Manasseh, III and IV Maccabees, I and II Enoch (quoted by Jude in the New Testament), Ascension of Isaiah (more Christian "prophesies" of Jesus falsely attributed to Isaiah), II Baruch, Psalms of Solomon, Pseudo-Phocylides, and the Sybilline Oracles. At least in the cases of Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and Ascension of Isaiah, we basically have proof that early Jews and Christians were in the business of making up stories and attributing them to certain authors. In other words, people were inventing religion. And that's not all. Other early Christian (esp. Gnostic) writings included a Prayer of the Apostle Paul, Gospel of Truth, Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Mary, Gospel of Philip, Apocryphon of John, Gospel of the Egyptians, Acts of Peter and the Twelve, Thunder, Perfect Mind, Letter of Peter to Philip, Testimony of Truth, Eugnostos the Blessed, and much more (most of these were just discovered at Nag Hammadi, Egypt in the 1940's). And this is only what we know about! Who knows how much other literature was destroyed. As you can see, people at that time were writing a tremendous amount of religious literature and passing it off as authoritative. In summary, NO early Christian writings are truly reliable or verifiably authentic. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are in many respects just fictitious as any other early Christian writing, only they were written from what became the "orthodox" viewpoint and were thus kept by the "orthodox" church while other writings were discarded. People do not really know that the orthodox texts are more authentic/true than the others; the only reason some people claim to know, is that they believe the orthodox tradition. When "holy" texts and the power to read are in the hands of only a few people, many of them priests, it is much easier for priests to manipulate the public; and such was the case for hundreds of years.
16. The Greek philosopher Empedocles claimed the ability to impart cures for sickness and old age, to control the wind and rain, and to raise men from the dead. The Greek philosopher Pythagoras was once seen in two different cities at the same time, allegedly. Appolonius of Tyana was an ascetic wandering teacher, wise man, and miracle-worker of the 1st century Roman world. He allegedly had a miraculous birth, gathered a circle of disciples, knew the past and the future, and performed miracles such as healing a demoniacal boy, a lame man, a blind man, and a paralytic. He was put on trial and disappeared. He is an example of a "divine man," a theios aner of the Greco-Roman world. The deification of heroes, rulers, and charismatic men was common in ancient times. Julius Caesar, Augustus, and many Roman emperors rose up into heaven and became gods upon their deaths, according to the Romans. According to Greeks, Herakles (Roman "Hercules") and Dionysus were both born from the union of Zeus with human women, like Jesus was born to Yahweh and Mary. Oracles, prophecies, dreams, divination, healings, miracles, magic, astrology, and astral religion were all common. Many of the stories of Jesus fit in with all the rest of such beliefs in the ancient world and are not verifiably more authentic than any of these other stories. (See also the "Ascension of Other Gods/Heroes/Saviors" section at http://sites.google.com/site/investigatingchristianity/home/resurrection#ascension.)
17. ***Honestly, If 2 men from a rebel group in Iraq were to come to your house tomorrow and tell you that they had a leader named Ali, who was born to a virgin teenager, performed numerous awesome miracles like healing the sick, casting demons out of people, even walking on water, and that he was killed by the U.S. government but came back from the dead 2 days later out in the desert and appeared miraculously to a few of his favorite followers and once even to 500 Iraqi disciples at the same time, but only to them and not to Iraqi leaders or U.S. agents, and that he then went up in a cloud into the sky, promising to return soon and commanding his followers to teach the world his message, would you believe these 2 men?
What if they told you that if you did not believe their story, you could not live forever in their paradise and you would be condemned by their God, who is the only real God, to burn in fire for your wickedness and disbelief? What if they promised that if you did believe it and followed their rules, you would go to a paradise in the sky when you died? They cannot prove Ali rose from the dead but they promise you that his body is nowhere to be found. The U.S. government says it is just a foolish, superstitious Iraqi cult stirring up trouble. The Iraqi cult members tell you Ali's spirit is always with them, and they even claim some miracles are still happening. Would you believe it?
Better yet, what if not even these people themselves, but the second or third generation of self-proclaimed followers of these people conveyed this message to you, claiming that it was all written down by the witnesses and their disciples? Say you notice their writings do not perfectly agree on precisely what happened after Ali's resurrection. And what if Ali's followers had disputes about his teachings, disputes settled only when one group kicked the others out by force and burned their writings? Would you believe their story?
I doubt it. And if you would not believe that, you should not be a Christian. But I bet if the movement became popular enough, most would begin to join the bandwagon--even if 2,000 years went by and Ali still had not come back yet!
18. Credulity and Superstition: How many people in the U.S. have seen Elvis since his death? Elvis is alive!! Long live the king! How many people have seen UFO's? How many people have claimed that they were abducted by aliens? How many people have claimed to see the Virgin Mary? How many thousands of people have successfully remembered the details of their past lives? Do statues of Mary really cry? Do Hindu statues really drink milk? How did Mormonism grow so fast in the United States if it was not true? How did Islam spread so fast after 632 CE and Muslims take the "holy" land, the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia Minor from the "more righteous" "truth-believing" Christians? How easily were the people of colonial Salem swept into the frenzy of the witch trials? How many people in the U.S. call psychic hot-lines? Why did the Holy Spirit not warn sincere Christian people that Jim Baker was a crook, or that Jimmy Swaggart was sleeping around, or about all the fraudulent, money-grabbing faith-healers and evangelists? How many Catholic children have been sexually abused by priests without the "Holy Spirit" even warning anyone that it was happening? People will believe just about anything, especially 1) if they are uneducated or undereducated, or 2) if the belief is part of their cultural heritage, or 3) if they are desperate for something to hope in. And that is today; credulity and superstition were much worse in ancient times when Christianity was invented.
19. I cannot believe that there is a god so hot-headed that he would send people to an eternal fire 1 (see endnote 1), especially just for not believing a story. A loving god would not play such games with fragile lives either, and would not condemn someone for not believing he exists, especially when the person would believe if only the god would show that he is real. And as best as I know, a person does not choose to believe or not to believe something is real. You either believe it, or you do not. Doubt is the same way; it is not something you try to do. I used to know lots of Christians who were upset that they could not keep themselves from having doubts. When I stopped believing, I did not try to stop; it just happened. The more I studied history and ancient religion, the more I studied the Bible, the less I believed it and the more holes I found, even though I was trying to be the best Christian I could be. I had wanted to be a minister and I set out to gain understanding. I had honest questions; I pursued answers; I found answers; I realized I did not believe it anymore. If there were a god who would send me to eternal fire for that, such a god would be unjust in the extreme. Hell is a religious scare tactic to get people into the Church and then keep them from questioning authority. Fear has been one of Christianity's greatest tools, and I groan inwardly when I think of how many little children and teenagers on any given Sunday are being frightened into faith. Plenty of people will never question the Bible out of fear of hell. What a loving God they serve?
20. What kind of god is unable to forgive sins or mistakes without the shedding of blood? The Bible teaches that "without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness" (Heb 9:22). It teaches that Yahweh required animal blood to appease his anger, and that his son became the final sacrifice once for all. Such a god, if he existed, would have a serious anger management problem. I forgive people all the time for doing things I do not like, and I do not demand any blood. Am I then more forgiving than the Christian god? Yes. And what have I done that is so horrible that blood should be shed? I have been a gentle, loving person since I was a teenager. Better question: What have YOU done that is so bad that God needed to torture an innocent person and see blood and death in order to decide to forgive you for your mistakes? What if we all acted like the Christian god of the Bible and demanded blood sacrifice anytime someone did something we did not like? Some Christians say God does this because he is so "righteous," but they are merely making blind excuses for the inexcusable in order to try to hold onto their tradition. The excuses are absurd, and I do not buy them anymore. You do not need to demand death and bloodshed to be righteous. A god who would lovingly counsel those who err would be much more righteous; yet not only does the Christian god fail to show up and lovingly, personally counsel those who make mistakes (like a real father would), Christians can only point to an ancient story-book to tell others what their god thinks, because he does not even speak for himself. The idea of blood sacrifice comes out of the distant past when fearful, unknowledgeable men tried to appease invisible gods by offering them food, drink, and blood. The Hebrews borrowed the idea from their neighbors, and Christianity just modified the Hebrew idea with a touching story of self-sacrifice. Moreover, the Hebrew law demanding blood sacrifice was not really given by a god to Moses on a mountain after a great and miraculous Exodus from Egypt anyway; it was written by priests well after the supposed time of Moses (see my paper Old Testament Chronological and Historical Problems).
21. Everyone should question the validity of substitutional sacrifice (a) for moral reasons, (b) for its value and appropriateness in changing people's behavior, (c) for its effectiveness in appeasing god's alleged wrath and persuading him to forgive.
(a) In Texas, the law allows the death sentence for certain crimes. What if the Texas judge who sentenced these murderers decided to pardon everyone on death row, but to satisfy their death sentence the judge killed his innocent oldest child instead? What would we think of that judge?
(b) What would we think if most of the criminals continued to act as they had before? The vast majority of Christians I have met certainly are not more moral or righteous than I am; a great many are far less moral. There are obviously other, less violent means of changing people's negative behavior. Buddhists seem to me to be very moral; and plenty of Hindus, Muslims, atheists and others live honorable lives. If there are better ways to change behavior than killing someone, why would a supposedly loving, merciful God demand bloodshed? Was it only to appease his wild anger?
(c) The sacrifice really did not soothe the New Testament god's anger all that much. (1) If you do not believe the story, he will allegedly fry your soul in burning sulfer (Mk 16.16; 1 Jn 2.22-23; Rev 21.8). (2) Even if you do believe the story, but continue to live in "sin," he will allegedly fry you anyway, i.e. if you lie, or slander someone, or get drunk, or have sex with someone you are not married to (1 Jn 2.4, 3.6-10; 1 Cor 6.9-10; Rev 21.8). The vast majority of all the humans who ever lived fit into one of these categories, most of them probably simple, hard-working, long-suffering people.
22. Someone long ago asked me this, "If Jesus was God and he knew it, and he knew he was all-powerful and would rise again from the dead anyway, how hard would it have been to sacrifice himself? How hard would it be for a God to let his "word" (?) become a man and die, if he knew the whole time it was merely a temporary moment of suffering and that he was really immortal and would be back in full strength in no time?"
23. A Jewish man named Jesus was "supposedly" (according to the church) "fully God and fully man," yet suffered and was tempted in every way "as we are." But this doctrine is nonsense (unless we too are fully God and fully human). If he knew he was divine, then he knew he was not really a man but rather God-with-a-body (unless men are divine). If he knew he was divine and "born of a virgin," then he did not know what it was really like not to be divine, unless he was not always divine. Knowing his own divinity would have been an advantage that most people do not seem to have. And if he did not know he was divine, then he was not fully God, if (as most Christians say) God knows all things (see also Mark 13.32, "No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."). James 1.13 says "God cannot be tempted," but Heb 4.15 says Jesus was "tempted in every way, just as we are - yet was without sin," even though John 14.9 says anyone who saw Jesus saw the Father. So was he un-temptable God, or a temptable man? If a God spoke to him as a father to a son, then he did not suffer the same way we suffer; if he could heal the sick and walk on water and raise the dead, then he did not suffer the same way we suffer; if he knew he would rise from the dead after a couple of days and would rule the universe, then he did not suffer as we suffer. In the superstitious minds of plenty of ancient Greeks and Romans, great men could become gods, and assuming Jesus existed, he was only one more example of a leader deified by those who lived after him.
[And back to Hebrews 4.15, how did the writer of this verse know Jesus was sinless anyway? Did he watch Jesus every moment? Answer: he did not know, it is just a doctrine made up by the church.] These are not realistic concepts.
24. Christianity promotes the belief that there is a duality of spirit vs. matter, and some modern Christians are even fond of saying that spirit is outside of space and time. I see no reason to believe that people have a soul or spirit that is not physical, or that is not made of the same energy that makes up everything else. If spirit exists, it has to be made of the same energy/substance that makes up matter, or else spirit could have no interaction with matter at all. For there to be interaction between two things, they must have something in common, or one could not touch, move, influence, affect, sense, or in any way be aware of the other. If matter cannot affect spirit, Christians should not say that material sins affect a person's spirit.
If spiritual beings can see, or feel, or think, you might as well say they are physical beings, because seeing, feeling, and thinking or all physical. Remotely ancient people did not know that, so they thought that anything you could not see was not physical, like thoughts and breath and air. And they thought that the invisible breath is what makes us alive AND conscious. Thus, "spirit" comes from Latin spiritus (breathing, breath, breeze). We see it in our word reSPIRation. The Romans had another word animus which we also translate as "spirit." Animus is from anima (wind, breath). We see it in our word ANIMA-L, a breathing thing. The Greek word anemos also meant wind.
We call "soul" what the Hebrews called nephesh (something that breathes) from their word naphash (to breathe). The ancient Hebrews believed that man was dirt which God had shaped and breathed the air of life into:
Man = dirt + wind/breath/air
Also when you see the word "spirit" in the English Old Testament, it is really the Hebrew word ruwach, which meant "wind" and by association "breath." In fact, even every time you read the word "wind" in the English version of the Old Testament, it is really the exact same Hebrew word, ruwach!! The ancient Hebrews made NO linguistic distinctions at all between the wind that blows locusts (Ex. 10.13), and clouds (1 Kg. 18.45), and dust (Ps. 18.42), or the wind that we breathe, and the wind that they thought was responsible for thoughts and emotions like jealousy (Num. 5.30), wisdom (Ex. 28.3), anguish (Ex. 6.9), anger (Ecc. 7.9), a troubled mind (Job 21.4). All of these things, they thought, were done by the mysterious wind force, invisible air. And they thought air was "non-physical" because they could not see it.
In the New Testament, there are 2 important words: psuche (or psyche) and pneuma. The English translated psyche as soul, and pneuma as spirit. Psyche is Greek for "breath", from the Greek verb psycho (to breathe, blow air). We see it in our word "psychology", because the Greeks over time decided that our air/breath was also responsible for our thinking ability (like the ancient Hebrews). Pneuma means "a blowing, a breeze, wind, blast, breath, odor" and comes from Greek pneo (to blow, breathe). In fact, the Greek word for your lungs was pneumon. We see it in our word pneumonia.
We now know that air is made of the same stuff as our bodies and everything else. We also know that air itself, our breath, is not of itself the thing that allows us to think and feel emotions. Our mind is a physical thing; emotions and thinking are physical, chemical processes. That is why if you take a certain drug, it will change your thinking process. If thinking is a spiritual, non-physical process, then why do physical chemicals affect your thoughts or even destroy them? Depressed people can take a pill to change their mood, their temperament. That is why ancient people thought marijuana and magic mushrooms were "the flesh of the gods," and that is why alcohol is called "distilled spirits!!" That is why our thinking starts to deteriorate at the same time as our brain starts to deteriorate in old age. If you start poking holes in your brain, do you think your thoughts will go on as normal because they are really spiritual? Dogs, cats, monkeys, and other animals have thoughts and emotions too, even if they are not quite as complex because of genetic differences in their DNA. Yet Christians do not usually say that animals have souls (and many Christians are in denial of their nature as animals and of their mortality -- except when they cry at funerals even though they supposedly believe the person is with God). Our bodies/brains can sense light and objects because everything is made from the same energy in the form of atoms and sub-atomic particles. If our mind were not made of matter, it would have no way to sense or contact physical things.
So I see, as did the writer of Ecclesiates (in the Bible), that in some respects there is little difference between humans and other animals.
Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless. (Ecclesiastes 3.19)
I believe what nature shows me, that we decay when we die. Nature gives me no evidence that I am permanent, only that the ultimate energy I am made of is permanent, in one form or another. I am not saying mortality is necessarily easy to accept, but it makes it much harder to accept when we are presented shaky promises of eternal life either in the sky or in some fantastic unseen dimension.
The idea that spirit is outside of space and time is absurd, and the Bible does not even teach that to begin with. To exist is to occupy space-time. Without time, also, there could be no thinking, for you could not have one thought before or after another -- so such a God or spirit could not think or compare thoughts, or even be known or sensed or thought about. And without time, you could not live forever, because there would be no duration. Without space-time, number would not exist, so their could not be multiple spirit beings; you would not be able to distinguish between one thing and another, or (more accurately worded) one part of a whole from another part. For example, if there were no space-time in heaven, you could not say you were separate from God, since the word "separate" necessarily implies differentiation, which is space-time. "Separation" is a relative word; a thing is said to be separate "from" another thing. And there is no such thing as complete separation anyway; for example, I say my head is separate from my foot, but that does not mean that my head and foot are not connected. All things are connected in space-time. Without space-time, there can be no change. Without change there can be no thought or desire. Without change we cannot talk about life. To live, know, love, think -- all imply change, differentiation between multiple entities and events, i.e. space-time. If you exist, you are, or are in, space-time. If there were such a thing as a spiritual world, it would still have space-time.
25. There are serious problems with the Biblical ideas of heaven and hell. Ancient people believed God, or the Gods, lived up in the sky. In Hebrew (the Old Testament), the word for sky is shamayim; in Greek (the New Testament) the word is ouranos. People did not have two different words for sky and heaven; they were the same place. So when English Bibles translate shamayim and ouranos sometimes as sky and sometimes as heaven, they mislead modern readers into thinking there was a difference. In the Bible, the sky/heaven (shamayim or ouranos) is a place:
where god lives
where the angels live
where the sun, moon, and stars move around
where rain, thunder, and lightning come from
where the clouds are
where birds fly.
The ancient people, including Jews and Christians and the Bible, believed in a 3-tiered universe: 1) the heavens above, 2) the stationary earth below (a flat circle/disk or a flat square), 3) sheol/ hades/ hell/ tartarus beneath.
Now we know that this is incorrect. But instead of giving up belief in heaven and hell, people simply began to imagine them as existing in some invisible dimension instead of "above" or "beneath" the earth. But that is not the way the Bible teaches it. In Acts, Jesus is depicted as rising into the sky until a cloud hid him from view (Acts 1.9-11). And in Revelation 1.7 a Christian writer says, "Look he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him..." Such descriptions are clues that the ascension and other stories are made up. It would be pointless for Jesus to have gone up into the sky; nothing is up there but air. And if heaven were in some other dimension, Jesus could have simply disappeared into that other dimension. The fact that the Christian story depicts him going up into the air to heaven simply betrays their ancient world view that heaven was the upper sky; and this is one of the many clues that the story is a fabrication.
The Bible teaches that just as the sky/heaven is above the earth, so is hell below/within the earth. Consider the following:
Mt 11.23: "You will go down to Hades." (also Lk 10.15)
Mt 12.40: "For as Jonah was 3 days and 3 nights in the belly of the sea creature, so the son of man will be 3 days and 3 nights in the heart of the earth."
1Pt 3.18-20: "He was put to death in the body but made alive by the spirit, through whom also he went and preached to the spirits in prison who disobeyed long ago..."
Php 2.10: "at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth"
Eph 4.9-10: "What does 'he ascended' mean except that he also descended to the lower parts of the earth? He who descended is the very one who ascended far above all the heavens in order to fill all things."
2Pt 2.4: "God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but sent them to Tartarus, putting them into gloomy dungeons to be held for judgement." (Tartarus is the lowest region of the underworld in Greek mythology.)
Rev 5.3: "no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth"
Rev 5.13: "every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea"
The early Christians and their Bible along with other ancient people thought hell was under the ground, the earth was stationary and flat, and God was up in the sky. It has only been in the last 400 years (since Copernicus, d.1543, and Galileo, d.1642, whose theory the Church at first condemned) that science has slowly driven (or begun to drive) erroneous ancient and BIBLICAL cosmology from people's minds.
To my conservative Christian friends: Are these enough reasons for me to doubt? Again, I never tried to doubt; I could not help it. If my questioning is honest, and I sincerely seek the truth, why do you believe God would disown me simply for that? Does God not repect sincerity and honesty? If any personal higher power exists, it is my sincere wish to know and love him/her/it, as I wish to love all.
Are these questions sufficient to cause doubt in your mind? Or do you have adequate answers?
Send me and e-mail and tell me what you think.
Endnotes
1 Concerning hell and who goes there: Speaking of Jesus' name, the Bible says "there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we may be saved" (Acts 4.12). The Bible quotes Jesus as saying, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father but through me" (Jn 14.6); "Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned" (Mk 16.16); "Whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only son" (John 3.18). What kind of condemnation awaits those who don't believe the story? Fire that lasts indefinitely ("fire of aeons" in Greek, usually translated eternal fire), "where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched" (Mk 9.43-48--see also Mt 13.40-42,13.49-50,18.8-9,25.41-46; Lk 3.16-17,13.28; Jn 15.6; Rev 21.8). "The cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars--their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfer. This is the second death" (Rev 21.8). Notice how those who don't believe are considered just as bad as the worst criminals.
2 By the way, the Jewish idea of the bodily resurrection shows up in full force only after the Jews had contact with the Persians (539-300 BCE), whose religion, Zoroastrianism, taught that doctrine. In other words, they likely borrowed the idea. Even in the first century CE, the Jewish Sadducees still didn't believe in the resurrection, because they knew it was not originally part of their religion and had not been mentioned by "Moses" (i.e. earlier Jewish literature).