The purpose of 20 Reasons was to list all of the misery-producing traits of Christianity in one place, and I was pleased with the result when the pamphlet appeared in , but over the years I gradually realized that the topic deserved much more extensive treatment. With the election of Trump with his evangelical true-believer base , the project took on more urgency, and now with the onset of the pandemic and consequent self-isolation, I finally have the time and motivation to finish the book.
The following is the first draft of Chapter 11, one of the new chapters. Christianity has an exceedingly narrow, legalistic view of morality. Christians have certainly taken that principle to heart: they at least pretend to obey the dictates of the Bible and their priests, popes, and preachers , while acting as if anything not specifically prohibited — no matter how sleazy, unethical, or outright monstrous — is perfectly fine, precisely because it is not prohibited by what they consider the only moral code: that expounded in the Bible.
The words of Jesus in Matthew sum up Christian morality: follow the law as prescribed in the Bible. But what a law! Here are the most prominent prohibitions in the Bible, the Ten Commandments. This very common list is an abbreviated version of the commands in Exodus Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. Thou shalt not make any graven image.
Honor thy father and mother. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. This is a rather minimal set of moral precepts. The first three commandments, presumably considered the most important by their author, speak only to the pettiness of that author. The fourth seems reasonable except that it implies wasting time on religious rites.
The fifth also seems reasonable, but does it really merit being a fundamental part of a brief moral code? I find too many holes in macro-evolutionary theory although there is clearly evolution within species, etc.
However, I have many friends who take all of this figuratively and they are more faithful to Jesus Christ than some of my fundamentalist friends.
So if N. Wright or C. The real test of whether or not you really know Jesus Christ is if you love the brethren—1 John—and walk in Matthew It is pronouncing their freedom. Yet, many of them view believers as the ones held captive and see themselves as the ones who are free—free to think for themselves. But we know that human reason is thoroughly corrupted by sin. No amount of self-diagnosis will help us see the true depths of our corruption. We can see the imperfections within us, but the Law imprinted on our hearts is not enough to condemn us.
It takes an outside source to point out to all of us that we are corrupt to our core. So, what can we do? After the groundwork of the Law has been laid and has done its thing, then the Gospel needs to be proclaimed in all its fullness. In our calling to be lights to the darkened world of the skeptics, it is important that we recall the words of Luther, who states that it is not by our own strength or reason that we come to Jesus or believe in Him.
While we indeed want to see the fruit of faith blossom and grow in the lives of the skeptics we encounter, we need to realize that it is a faith born of the Spirit, not by our strength, nor by the reasoning of the skeptic. Although the decades may come and go, students, parents, and teachers can take peace knowing a relationship with God is eternal and not Prophets, priests, kings, and more are all inspired by the work of Before having a faith conversation, it's important to prepare what you will say by developing an understanding of Islam with Dr.
A crowd of prelates followed him to the grave. A brilliant star is said to have shone miraculously over his pillar; the general voice of mankind pronounced him to be the highest model of a Christian saint; and several other anchorites [Christian hermits] imitated or emulated his penances.
Given that the Bible nowhere condemns torture and sometimes prescribes shockingly cruel penalties such as burning alive , and that Christians so wholeheartedly approved of self-torture, it's not surprising that they thought little of inflicting appallingly cruel treatment upon others. At the height of Christianity's power and influence, hundreds of thousands of "witches" were brutally tortured and burned alive under the auspices of ecclesiastical witch finders, and the Inquisition visited similarly cruel treatment upon those accused of heresy.
Henry Charles Lea records:. Two hundred wretches crowded the filthy gaol and it was requisite to forbid the rest of the Conversos [Jews intimidated into converting to Christianity] from leaving the city [Jaen, Spain] without a license. With Diego's assistance [Diego de Algeciras, a petty criminal and kept perjurer] and the free use of torture, on both accused and witnesses, it was not difficult to obtain whatever evidence was desired.
The notary of the tribunal, Antonio de Barcena, was especially successful in this. On one occasion, he locked a young girl of fifteen in a room, stripped her naked and scourged her until she consented to bear testimony against her mother. A prisoner was carried in a chair to the auto da fe with his feet burnt to the bone; he and his wife were burnt alive. The cells in which the unfortunates were confined in heavy chains were narrow, dark, humid, filthy and overrun with vermin, while their sequestrated property was squandered by the officials, so that they nearly starved in prison while their helpless children starved outside.
While the torture and murder of heretics and "witches" is now largely a thing of the past, Christians can still be remarkably cruel. But this should not be surprising coming from Christians, members of a religion that teaches that eternal torture is not only justified , but that the "saved" will enjoy seeing the torture of others.
As St. Thomas Aquinas put it:. In order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful and that they may give to God more copious thanks for it, they are permitted perfectly to behold the sufferings of the damned. The saints will rejoice in the punishment of the damned. Thus the vision of heaven of Christianity's greatest theologian is a vision of the sadistic enjoyment of endless torture.
For over a millennium Christianity arrested the development of science and scientific thinking. In Christendom, from the time of Augustine until the Renaissance, systematic investigation of the natural world was restricted to theological investigation—the interpretation of biblical passages, the gleaning of clues from the lives of the saints, etc.
The results of this are well known: scientific knowledge advanced hardly an inch in the over years from the rise of orthodox Christianity in the fourth century to the s, and the populace was mired in the deepest squalor and ignorance, living in dire fear of the supernatural—believing in paranormal explanations for the most ordinary natural events. This ignorance had tragic results: it made the populace more than ready to accept witchcraft as an explanation for everything from illness to thunderstorms, and hundreds of thousands of women paid for that ignorance with their lives.
One of the commonest charges against witches was that they had raised hailstorms or other weather disturbances to cause misfortune to their neighbors. In an era when supernatural explanations were readily accepted, such charges held weight—and countless innocent people died horrible deaths as a result.
Another result was that the fearful populace remained very dependent upon Christianity and its clerical wise men for protection against the supernatural evils which they believed surrounded and constantly menaced them. For men and women of the Middle Ages, the walls veritably crawled with demons and witches; and their only protection from those evils was the church. When scientific investigation into the natural world resumed in the Renaissance—after a year-plus hiatus—organized Christianity did everything it could to stamp it out.
The cases of Copernicus and Galileo are particularly relevant here, because when the Catholic Church banned the Copernican theory that the Earth revolves around the sun and banned Galileo from teaching it, it did not consider the evidence for that theory: it was enough that it contradicted scripture.
Given that the Copernican theory directly contradicted the Word of God, the Catholic hierarchy reasoned that it must be false. Protestants shared this view. John Calvin rhetorically asked, "Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?
More lately, the Catholic Church and the more liberal Protestant congregations have realized that fighting against science is a losing battle, and they've taken to claiming that there is no contradiction between science and religion. This is disingenuous at best. As long as Christian sects continue to claim as fact—without offering a shred of evidence beyond the anecdotal—that physically impossible events occurred or are still occurring , the conflict between science and religion will remain.
That many churchmen and many scientists seem content to let this conflict lie doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Today, however, the conflict between religion and science is largely being played out in the area of public school biology education, with Christian fundamentalists demanding that their creation myth be taught in place of or along with the theory of evolution in the public schools. Their tactics rely heavily on public misunderstanding of science.
They nitpick the fossil record for its gaps hardly surprising given that we inhabit a geologically and meteorologically very active planet , while offering absurd interpretations of their own which we're supposed to accept at face value—such as that dinosaur fossils were placed in the earth by Satan to confuse humankind, or that Noah took baby dinosaurs on the ark.
They also attempt to take advantage of public ignorance of the nature of scientific theories. In popular use, "theory" is employed as a synonym for "hypothesis," "conjecture," or even "wild guess," that is, it signifies an idea with no special merit or backing. The use of the term in science is quite different. There, "theory" refers to a well-developed, logically consistent explanation of a phenomenon, and an explanation that is consistent with observed facts.
This is very different than a wild guess. But fundamentalists deliberately confuse the two uses of the term in an attempt to make their religious myth appear as valid as a well-supported scientific theory. They also attempt to confuse the issue by claiming that those nonspecialists who accept the theory of evolution have no more reason to do so than they have in accepting their religious creation myth, or even that those who accept evolution do so on "faith. Thanks to scientific investigation, human knowledge has advanced to the point where no one can know more than a tiny fraction of the whole.
Even the most knowledgeable scientists often know little beyond their specialty areas. But because of the structure of science, they and everyone else can feel reasonably secure in accepting the theories developed by scientists in other disciplines as the best possible current explanations of the areas of nature those disciplines cover.
They and we can feel secure doing this because of the structure of science, and more particularly, because of the scientific method. That method basically consists of gathering as much information about a phenomenon both in nature and in the laboratory as possible, then developing explanations for it hypotheses , and then testing the hypotheses to see how well they explain the observed facts, and whether or not any of those observed facts are inconsistent with the hypotheses.
Those hypotheses that are inconsistent with observed facts are discarded or modified, while those that are consistent are retained, and those that survive repeated testing are often labeled "theories," as in "the theory of relativity" and "the theory of evolution.
This is the reason that nonspecialists are justified in accepting scientific theories outside their disciplines as the best current explanations of observed phenomena: those who developed the theories were following standard scientific practice and reasoning—and if they deviate from that, other scientists will quickly call them to task.
No matter how much fundamentalists might protest to the contrary, there is a world of difference between "faith" in scientific theories produced using the scientific method, and subject to near-continual testing and scrutiny and faith in the entirely unsupported myths recorded years ago by slave-holding goat herders.
Nearly years ago Martin Luther, in his Table Talk , stated: "Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has. For centuries, Christianity has had an exceptionally unhealthy fixation on sex, to the exclusion of almost everything else except power, money, and the infliction of cruelty. This stems from the numerous "thou shalt nots" relating to sex in the Bible.
That the Ten Commandments contain a commandment forbidding the coveting of one's neighbor's wife, but do not even mention slavery, torture, or cruelty—which were abundantly common in the time the Commandments were written— speaks volumes about their writer's preoccupation with sex and women as property.
Today, judging from the pronouncements of many Christian leaders, one would think that "morality" consists solely of what one does in one's bedroom. The Catholic Church is the prime example here, with its moral pronouncements rarely going beyond the matters of birth control and abortion and with its moral emphasis seemingly entirely on those matters. Also note that the official Catholic view of sex—that it's for the purpose of procreation only—reduces human sexual relations to those of brood animals.
For more than a century the Catholic Church has also been the driving force behind efforts to prohibit access to birth control devices and information—to everyone, not just Catholics. The Catholic Church, however, is far from alone in its sick obsession with sex. The current Christian hate campaign against homosexuals is another prominent manifestation of this perverse preoccupation. Even at this writing, condemnation of "sodomites" from church pulpits is still very, very common—with Christian clergymen wringing their hands as they piously proclaim that their words of hate have nothing to do with gay bashings and the murder of gays.
In addition to the misery produced by authoritarian Christian intrusions into the sex lives of non-Christians, Christianity produces great misery among its own adherents through its insistence that sex except the very narrow variety it sanctions is evil, against God's law. Christianity proscribes sex between unmarried people, sex outside of marriage, homosexual relations, bestiality, [3] and even "impure" sexual thoughts.
Indulging in such things can and will, in the conventional Christian view, lead straight to hell. Given that human beings are by nature highly sexual beings, and that their urges very often do not fit into the only officially sanctioned Christian form of sexuality monogamous, heterosexual marriage , it's inevitable that those who attempt to follow Christian "morality" in this area are often miserable, as their strongest urges run smack dab into the wall of religious belief.
This is inevitable in Christian adolescents and unmarried young people in that the only "pure" way for them to behave is celibately—in the strict Christian view, even masturbation is prohibited. Even after Christian young people receive a license from church and state to have sex, they often discover that the sexual release promised by marriage is not all that it's cracked up to be.
One gathers that in marriages between those who have followed Christian rules up until marriage—that is, no sex at all—sexual ineptitude and lack of fulfillment are all too common. Even when Christian married people do have good sexual relations, the problems do not end. Sexual attractions ebb and flow, and new attractions inevitably arise.
In conventional Christian relationships, one is not allowed to act on these new attractions. One is often not even permitted to admit that such attractions exist.
As Sten Linnander puts it, "with traditional [Christian] morality, you have to choose between being unfaithful to yourself or to another. The dilemma is even worse for gay teens and young people in that Christianity never offers them release from their unrequited urges. They are simply condemned to lifelong celibacy. If they indulge their natural desires, they become "sodomites" subject not only to Earthly persecution due to Christian-inspired laws , but to being roasted alive forever in the pit.
Given the internalized homophobia Christian teachings inspire, not to mention the very real discrimination gay people face, it's not surprising that a great many homosexually oriented Christians choose to live a lie.
In most cases, this leads to lifelong personal torture, but it can have even more tragic results. Applewhite grew up in the South in a repressive Christian fundamentalist family. Horrified by his homosexual urges, he began to think of sexuality itself as evil, and eventually underwent castration to curb his sexual urges. Christianity not only reduces, for all practical purposes, the question of morality to that of sexual behavior, but by listing its prohibitions, it encourages an "everything not prohibited is permitted" mentality.
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