So You Think You Know Christianity (and Islam before the Prophet)

So You Think You Know Christianity (and Islam before the Prophet)

We casually refer to those who attend worship at a place called a "church" Christians, and their religion as Christianity. Not much to argue about there.

What about the origins of Christianity, recorded to some extent in the Bible, and followed to some extent by Muslims (for whom the Bible was the word of God before the writing of the Qur’an)? It only makes sense that those who lived closest to the lifetime of Jesus of Nazareth, especially those who were contemporaries, such as the Apostles, would know the most about the origins of Christianity.

What we know today as Christianity and its Bible are more accurately a product of the Church of Rome, written or revised in the Fourth Century CE, not long before Roman emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as the official religion of Rome (aka the Eastern Roman Empire, or the Byzantine empire). The Apostles and St. Paul played significant parts in what became known as the Bible, but only so far as what they wrote conformed to what the church wanted the world to know.

Even the Bible books by the Apostles were written between 90 and 110 years (some say even more) after the death of Jesus on the cross. Think about your experience with elderly people, especially about how accurate their memories are. You probably don’t know people who have written anything at that age, let alone books that are followed to the letter by followers who believe they are transcribed words from God.
Religious books produced at the time of Jesus or shortly after his death (not necessarily on a cross, it turns out) differ markedly from the story passed along to us from the hallowed halls of head offices of Christian churches. In fact, the cross was not adopted as a Christian symbol for more than two centuries after Jesus. Before the change the accepted symbol was a fish, though some evidence exists that the cross (similar to the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet--thau, made in the shape of a cross--note the significance of that as "this is a far as you need to go, the Cross) was used by Christians who were persecuted by the Romans as a way to identify themselves to each other.

Religious books that were written shortly after the life of Jesus were widely read and believed by Followers of Jesus in the Holy Land. The fact that the Church of Rome (based in Greece and Rome) conducted what amounts to a genocide against the Followers of Jesus in the Holy Land after 150 CE is immaterial to this story. Except to note that followers of Jesus in the Holy Land did not have the same "history" of their religion as the Church of Rome, and they paid for that with their lives in most cases. They were exterminated by Rome, their greatest competitor.

Their holy books were, for the most part, not components of the Bible of today, as compiled by the church in the Fourth Century. They were too varied and heretical.

For example, Followers of Jesus--those who lived in the land that Jesus called home--believed there were two, 12, even as many as 30 gods, as recorded in their holy books. They did not believe in one God, all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful. They did not necessarily even believe that one God created the world and everything else they knew. (Beyond the creation story in Genesis, Judaism dwells very little on beginnings as well.)

The death of Christ had nothing to do with salvation. The concept that "He died for your sins" never appears in those early books. Indeed, some believed that Jesus didn’t die on a cross at all. History records that Mary of Magdala lived in France for a while. Some even say she had children there, with Jesus as the father. Enough evidence exists in France today to support at least the Mary part of that claim. She may have fled to France to escape the Roman church, who wanted her dead as she was one of the leaders of the Followers of Jesus and women leading religious groups was forbidden by male-dominated Rome.

Some Christians adhere to the Bible as the only book worth reading and believing, just as Muslims believe that of their holiest book, the Qur’an. Is the Bible really no more accurate as a source for Christian doctrine than our daily newspapers today? That is, was the Bible edited and rewritten to say what its publisher wanted people to read and believe?

History records that some religious books were rewritten by Christian scholars at the time the Bible was first assembled, in the Fourth Century. The original books were destroyed. In fact, history records that the Church of Rome scoured the empire searching for the original versions of the books it adapted and rewrote, as well as books that did not conform to their new Bible, to have them destroyed. Some believe that the burning of the library at Alexandria--the greatest library of the ancient world--was set by Roman Christians because it held too many books written by the Followers of Jesus.

The ancient scrolls known as the Nag Hammadi, the name of the Egyptian city where the scrolls were discovered in 1945, bear witness to the deceptions carried out by the Church of Rome in order to formulate and consolidate its religion in the Fourth Century.

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared "God is dead" in several of his books. He didn’t mean that a real God had died. He meant that the fictitious God perpetrated by religions had been revealed as unreal. In other words, the more educated people become, the more they realize the fiction of religion, and the more they will search for a true religion.

While untold numbers of people argue over whether God must exist because they have faith he does, or maybe not, almost no one pays attention to what a real God must be like, in accordance with science that even the most atheistic scientists can’t debate.

Most of those who have experienced God are quiet about it. They know it may not be good for their health to make declarations that go against the teachings of a great religion.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents who want to know when to teach their children the truth about life, instead of leaving much of the life education of their children to street chatter.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

God Is A Fraud

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of hiscreation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, whois but a reflection of human frailty.
-Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955)

In my search for God over the past several decades I have concluded that evidence exists all over our planet that the deity people have tried to teach me about is a fraud.

I have also concluded that people who believe in their God do so fervently. Even those who have doubts will firm their beliefs up quickly if someone presents a formidable argument that God is a myth invented by needy people and hucksters who want to make money off gullible believers. Nothing confirms the belief in God by doubters more than finding someone who bad mouths the God they aren't sure about.

Two problems present themselves forcibly to my mind that suggest that God--the God of religions, whichever one that may be-- is nothing more than a convenient invention. First is that those who most strenuously preach the rules of their religion--those who dictate what is sin and what is not--tend to be sinners against their own rules when the facade is torn away. The hypocrisy of the legislators of sin being devout sinners under the skin repels me.

The second problem I have with the concepts of God that many people hold is the contradiction and hypocrisy of the believers. The hypocrisy part is similar to the legislators of sin being sinners themselves, only this latter example involves the practitioners of the religion rather than it leaders. They simply don't follow the rules they supposedly subscribe to.

Contradictions abound in the monotheistic religions. God is a vengeful God, but he wants us to be peaceful. God is a peaceful God until he wants his followers to go to war and to die if necessary to defend the faith. Defend it from what is never spoken, never asked, never answered, because faith cannot be killed unless every last believer is annihilated.

Some say that God punishes sinners for every sinful act they commit. The same believers will claim that their own particular sins are forgiven because Jesus (or some other prophet) died that their sins may be forgiven. Convenient.

Some actually believe (and can quote Revelations as evidence) that they can sin abundantly for their whole lives, then repent and be saved on their deathbeds and still be admitted into heaven.
Even the concept of heaven is absurdly contradictory. To Christians heaven is a place of eternal bliss, usually only available to devout and pure Christians, and sometimes their beloved pets.

The Christian heaven is as boring as I could imagine, surely a kind of hell itself where every bit of intellectual strength I have gained throughout my life will be lost through atrophy because the inmates have nothing to think about.

The Muslim heaven must be populated by an uncountable number of prostitutes because Muslim suicide bombers are promised 72 of them each when they reach the Pearly Gates. Female bombers, by the way, are greeted by male prostitutes. Islam is not consistent about whether these prostitutes are created by Allah just in time for the arrival of a new bomber or whether they were once occupants of terra firma.

Judaism spends so little time on the concept of heaven that many Jews are not clear about what heaven is. Jews are supposed to focus on being good on earth and leave important stuff like the afterlife to God. This would seem to work except for the fact that Jewish intellectuals and students spend countless hours debating how to interpret the words of their holy books. How can everyone follow what is debated so ferociously?

The point here, as stated in Einstein's quote, is that people have invented their respective God with human characteristics. Step back from that a moment and consider the absurdity. Believers agree that God is perfect, but present evidence in holy books that God has as many failures and foibles as any foolish human.

Atheists have disavowed anything to do with God or the religions that invented God. Yet it's not God they don't believe exists, but the contradictory, hypocritical and nonsensical God that devout believers believe in. What atheists don't believe exists is the God that religions have invented.

Interestingly, my personal experience and that of many others I have spoken to on the subject suggests that atheists tend to live more wholesome and beneficial lives than religionists who believe the atheists are sinners.

Every religion has some good in it. Every devout believer also has some good. The evidence for these conclusions is easy to see if we remove our prejudicial spectacles.

What most people who claim to believe in God seem to miss is the evidence for God that exists all around them. That kind of evidence would stand up in a court of law if the challenge were to show evidence beyond doubt.

Now you would like me to deliver that evidence into your waiting hands.

Open your eyes. Open your ears. Resensitize your taste, touch and smell.

Begin to pay real attention to real events that can't be proven by science but for which an abundance of evidence exists. Some of it in book form. Just look for it. Believing or concluding anything from a position of ignorance doesn't make sense.

Learn about life, especially in its finest detail. The more you learn about life, especially how systems relate to each other within one larger system (a human body, a plant or anything in the physical world) the more you must ask yourself if this all could have happened by accident.

Godless evolutionists claim that everything that happens can be explained by laws of nature. Not a single one of them will attempt to explain why those laws exist or how they happen to fit together so immaculately well. There is no more reason for natural laws to exist than for matter and energy to exist. Natural laws don't prove anything, they only explain phenomena.

Every single thing that we know exists continues to exist even when it transforms. That is, energy can become mass or can change to another form of energy, but it never disappears. Your body will transform when it dies. No physical part of it will disappear, ever.

Are you thinking about this? Do you have a personality? Can anything you know about the physics of the human body explain either the ability to think rationally or the existence of personality? Only by stretching reality into the realm of mythology or fantasy.

One natural law is conservation. Just as mass and energy can never disappear (nor can dark matter or dark energy, so far as anyone knows), so too the personality that became you cannot disappear just because your body wears out and transforms.

No one can even say for certain that your thoughts happen within your brain, though some electrical activity certainly happens there when you think. Electricity travels around the outside of an electrical wire, not through it. Nature has an energy travelling beside (outside of) mass, not inside of it.

Is it impossible to imagine that the personality that is you exists beyond the limits of your skin and clothing? Have you not felt sometimes that someone was staring at you from behind. Can you not sometimes feel the presence of someone in a room? Have you ever expected someone to call you, then the phone rings and that person speaks? Nothing in natural law can explain those phenomena that most people have experienced.

It's hard to imagine that your personality may be defined 100 percent within the confines of your body, and its activity can be accounted for by the actions of your muscles, nerves and brain.
If you want to find God, don't look in a book or listen to someone tell you their version of God.

You can find God yourself. Just don't look to someone who stands to make a profit by convincing you of something to explain God to you. That's a conflict of interest.

Look and learn. The more you learn, the more God will reveal himself to you.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book for adults to learn how they came to have the personalities they have and to help parents and teachers teach children what they need to develop fully in all ways.
Learn more at http://billallin.com