seriously.  Most people are not interested in this truth if it means getting up off the comfort couch and summoning enough courage to make the major revision in their thinking that it would require. And why should they bother? It’s easy to keep on going through the motions. Families will stay intact. Others won’t distance themselves. The apple cart doesn’t upset. Just because it’s not true doesn’t mean we can’t pretend.

And most will. Most will find a way to bend reality to suit their preferred beliefs rather than change their beliefs in service to truth.

But for some of us, that’s not living.

Why did I leave Christianity? Because it just doesn’t make sense in numerous particulars (see sidebar), and I choose to be dedicated to truth and reality, as best I can perceive it. God’s pagan-like behaviors in the Old Testament are just the tip of the iceberg of problems inherent to the religion. It takes books to cover them. To pretend to myself or others that I can embrace what cannot possibly be true (as I will show) would violate my integrity. I choose to be who I really am, because I consider authenticity to be a major prerequisite to a happy and fulfilling life.

Oddly, many Christians are under the impression that if it weren't for their God, no one would know the difference between right and wrong and that a godless world would mean chaos. That, of course, is nonsense, yet many Christians think of anybody who gets out of it as a "backslider" rather than someone moving beyond it for something better. The rest of us would argue that a godless world would be less chaotic with everyone simply living by what is good and decent. Recall the John Lennon song: “Imagine there's no Heaven / It's easy if you try / No hell below us / Above us only sky / Imagine all the people / Living for today. / ...And no religion too / Imagine all the people / Living life in peace.”  The Golden Rule, which long preceded the Bible, is self evident.

It does annoy me that Christians typically see a non-theist as someone who dumps God in order to “do anything he wants.” I have never seen or heard of anybody who gave up religion in order to be bad. I think most of us who abandon it do so because we seek a better purpose in life, greater fulfillment, something more authentic, more reasoned and reasonable, a more mature basis for our morality and ethics. We see “rewards and punishments” as more suitable for the immature, such as children. So this essay, while by its nature might seem negative, is really about moving beyond the distraction of superstition, beyond the road block of religion, to a more honest, and thus more fulfilling paradigm of life. (One doesn’t necessarily have to become an atheist to dump all the religious baggage; see how to do it while still believing in God, in my article “Would you still like him, if his name was Bubba?”)

A being from nowhere?

Given the vastness of the universe [that’s a great link to check out, by the way], I think the statistical likelihood of of other life forms, including higher life forms, is great. Much slimmer is the likelihood of a singular, supreme being above all else—so singular and so great as to pre-exist the universe itself and speak it into existence. (If there were such a being who made everything, then who made that being?)

But who knows? Maybe there is such a being. Without some sort of extraordinary and reliable revelation, we can only guess as to the existence of a supreme being.

So I leave open the possibility of a supreme being, remote as it may be. But there is one thing of which I can be absolutely certain: there is no biblical-style god—because the attributes ascribed to him in the ancient text are utterly contradictory. You cannot be a supernatural deity who is the very essence of love, wisdom and power, while at the same time ordering people to conduct the rampages described above. You cannot have the absolute, unlimited power, wisdom and ability to implement a perfect system, and then tell people to buy slaves and kill other people’s pets! Nor could you carve into stone—literally and with your own finger—the concept that women are the property of men, as ensconced in the Ten Commandments themselves and throughout the Bible.

Even if I conceded the dubious argument that God “had to deal with the people in their time and according to their culture” (which no intelligent person would concede, because it’s nonsensical on several levels), I would suggest that any high-schooler could have edited the Ten Commandments so as not to support the ownership of women, even while refraining from dispensing new light on the concept, if that was the odd intent. Did the supreme being of the universe prove to be less talented than a high school student when drafting the most important communique ever given by God to humans? How could this be? If we are to believe the fantastic assertions of this religion, shouldn't the deity's revelations be greater—not less—than the ability of regular people?

Doesn't it make more sense that a human wrote the ancient text in the first place? To this very day, bad people slaughter others all the time, and justify it by asserting God told them to do it. Happens all the time. From the ancients to today’s militant Muslims and Christians and fundamentalist neo-conservative Republicans. Those who refuse to believe that's what happened in the writing of the Old Testament (and therefore believe a God of pure love really did those wicked things), need to dust off that old brain they say God gave them!

But believers can't concede that point, because if they admit that part of the Bible isn't literally true, then they can't credibly use the Bible to support all the other more fantastical parts of the religion—like the promise we won't really die, so long as an appropriate sacrifice is made to God. To protect their beliefs from rational scrutiny, believers have no choice but to shamelessly besmirch the name of God by suggesting he actually, literally engaged in slavery, genocide and pettiness exactly as described—just like the behaviors of all the other petty, jealous and vindictive gods of the day. It's a Catch 22. They have to stick to the inerrancy talking point, no matter what.

One could go on. And many have—read them!

The thing about gods...

Regardless of whether or not gods exist, humans will make them up. It's a fact of history. Since the beginning of time, humans labeled things they didn't yet understand as "miracles" and attributed them to ghosts, angels, demons, gods—they simply made them up as they went. Somebody had to be in charge of everything that happened, it seemed, so whatever we weren't in charge of, the gods were. Thunder and lightning, plagues of all sorts, sunshine—all of it was attributed to various supernatural beings. Creating the gods wasn’t so very far-fetched for those days when there existed no notion of microscopic organisms that cause disease, nor any concept of the scientific phenomena that cause weather patterns which create storms. How do you explain thunder to your child, if it’s not the sound of some great, angry creature in the sky?

Given the fact that humans will just make up gods, anyone claiming today that one of them actually exists will have quite a burden of proof. They'll need more evidence than "I just feel it," or "this deity must be real because he says so." After all, the very nature of what we're asked to believe about the gods is enormously fantastical! Live for trillions of years? To be deemed authentic, any revelation (sacred text) will need to stand—clearly and unequivocally—head and shoulders above anything humans themselves could produce on their own. Does the biblical text stand head and shoulders above anything humans could produce? We’ll come back to that.

Gods, gods and more gods

Christianity rose to prominence as one of the numerous so-called “mystery religions” of its day, and there was little unique about it. Christianity was not the first, for example, to have a virgin birth (many had them), nor the first to have a resurrection. These similar gods of old, and the religions associated with them, were always in competition, each trying to outdo the others, as in "my god is better than your god." Typically there had to be at least two gods: one in charge of everything good and the other in charge of everything bad, having nearly equal powers (think God & Satan, for example). Humans were typically required to flatter and appease these gods, even the "good" ones, or risk disastrous reprisals. The good gods didn’t behave nicely because it was simply their nature; they had to be begged, flattered, even worshipped.

So sacrifices were offered to appease the gods, including the good ones, typically blood sacrifices. And the ante kept being raised... First it was animal sacrifices, then human sacrifices. Then Christianity produced the half-man/half-god sacrifice. This seems a little odd to non-believers because Christianity presents a scenario in which a god offers part of himself to be sacrificed to himself—to appease himself! Christians would word it less starkly, but that's the essence of it.

Even if it really was your own fault, and you really did “sin,” does that punishment seem fitting? Say you stole a watch when you were fifteen, on purpose. Is this god more palatable now that you actually did proactively sin? Your trillions of years of agony are now more understandable?

The behavior of the biblical God is essentially the same as that of the other gods (which Christians agree were silly and false), and frankly worse! Numerous other religions and philosophies espouse far less violent god-scenarios. I mean, to each his own, but we can hardly blame others for seeing more "evidence" of a kinder, gentler god than the one of Christianity. The Jains, for example, take the preciousness of life and peace to the opposite extreme. And look at Gandhi’s secular concept of non-violence, in comparison to the madness of Christianity's admittedly jealous, warmongering God. It should not be surprising that many do not see the god of Christianity as standing any taller than the others when it comes to god behaviors—which hardly serves to demonstrate the religion’s authenticity.

Theists and non-theists

People who believe in the supernatural, and the existence of such a super-being in particular, are called "theists," from the Greek word for god, "theos." People who don't are called non-theists, or "a-theists." The fact that I see no evidence of such a being means I'm not a theist, but essentially an “a-theist.” I see no evidence of a supernatural deity speaking galaxies into existence or communicating with humans,

Christianity...

by Larry Hallock

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