I'm not angry with you

A friend I've not spoken with in many years recently asked why all the hatred in my comments on Facebook. Since we were pals a quarter century ago he's become an Anglican priest, and I've become an unbeliever, an atheist. I have no hatred or animosity toward individual Christians. Those who hear "hate" in my comments don't know me. I'm not attacking them, personally. I am attacking the ideas, ideas which are so familiar to them it can be hard to see themselves separate from those ideas. Because I've been developing this short essay lately, I'll explain some of my thinking here for the record. This is not personal. It's not an attack on my reader. I want you to remember that as you read, this is not an attack on you. It is totally about ideas and their effects.

And, I love you. So let's begin.

The Bible is largely a work of fiction in the same sense that the Chronicles of Narnia or the Harry Potter stories are, and perhaps more so than the Iliad or Odyssey. If I told you now there was a school for wizards in the north of England somewhere and it was in a parallel reality operating all around us, you would confidently, and correctly, say that I clearly was not in agreement with reality. Or if I told you I wanted to share my faith in Zeus, you would discount everything I had to tell you.

It's so easy for a Christian to see the ancient Greek or Roman pantheons as mythology, or the other modern religions as worship and dedication to false gods, and yet so hard to see that exactly the same statement applies to Christianity.

The old testament, in its history of Israel, is almost entirely fabricated. This is a real problem for Christianity, since the OT is where the Christian God begins to be revealed. The new testament fares no better, either. There is not one real piece of historical evidence outside of the bible itself that Jesus existed at the time he is supposed to have existed. The earliest dates of the NT gospels, even given by believers, can only place the writings to about 40 years after the Ascension. No historians of the day report about goings on in Israel that would support the NT writings. AND the reports of such things as Jesus' virgin birth are copycat stories that have a deep tradition in that part of the world going back at least hundreds of year earlier.

But the Christian experience also fails to deliver on its own promises. Hardly a month goes by now that one does not hear of babies or children dying, and/or parents being put in prison, for relying on prayer alone for healing, and being tragically and painfully disappointed. How is this, if "the prayer of a righteous man availeth much", if Jesus meant what he said that those who followed him would do greater works than he did, because he went to his father? I think every major televangelist in the US has been thoroughly debunked, and I don't think a single one is to be found who is not crooked and deceptive in order to maintain the illusion. "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain", but in fact that is the entire show.

There is no reality to the biblical god.

That god does not exist.

Christian faith is respectable only because it is such a long-standing and widely-held delusion. But it is only a delusion. And to believe in that god, and his son Jesus, is indeed just as misdirected as believing in the existence of Hogwarts or Asgard or Hades and the River Styx.

About a decade ago I saw this for the first time. I didn't see it as clearly then as I do now, and three and a half decades of faith and earnest, whole-hearted following after God had me so conditioned I was unable at first to let it go without caveat and trepidation.

I did not get this from any church. I got this from reading outside the church. And please don't tell me that's where I went wrong. For starters, if Christian truth can't contain truth from other sources, it isn't ultimate truth. That's a bit like saying "Don't study quantum or string theory because Newton's laws of motion fall apart there, and we know Newton's laws are true." Except it's a bad analogy, because Newton's laws work very well in a specific set of conditions, and the Christian faith fails under any set of conditions. The Christian faith presumes the existence of God, and while I have not searched anything like the whole universe and cannot say with unassailable certainty that a god does not exist anywhere, I can say with certainty that the God described by the bible does not exist.

I am not angry with God. Why should I be. Being angry with God is like being angry with Voldemort. But I am angry that so many people live constrained in ridiculous ways by absolute rules created hundreds and thousands of years ago by scientifically ignorant people and those now in positions of power are more interested in retaining their power and control than acknowledging the need to adjust our rules for living in accordance with our increased knowledge as a species.

Being an atheist doesn't make a person immoral. And I don't want anyone to "convert to atheism" so they can do evil. No, atheism is simply the name for where one finds oneself when one can no longer believe in any of the handful of remaining gods still active. Even a Christian is atheist concerning the Hindu, Viking, Greek, or Roman gods. Or the animist deities of parts of Africa and Asia. And I'm tired of the knots Christians tie themselves in to find answers for everything in modern life in a book whose pages were penned for Constantine.

I don't expect to convince the reader, though I do hope I can inspire you to think again. It's scary to have long- and/or deeply-held beliefs questioned. Scarier still it is to find those beliefs are not worth holding. I deconverted almost overnight when I realized the true nature and reliability of evolutionary theory, when I realized there is no way to effectively harmonize Genesis 1 and 2 with the abundance of evidence we have for the history of life on earth. And if god is unable to get that story right, he's not worthy of being trusted about ANYTHING else, especially about matters for which there is no evidence and that must be accepted solely on faith. But it needn't be evolution. It could just as well be the OT chronology of the Exodus, or the Flood story, or the supposed life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. It could be lots of other stories; evolution just happened to be the one that turned the lights on for me.

So my comments are intended to provoke a little bit of a reaction in you, my reader. I hope to send them into a glitch in the matrix, to create or feed a bit of cognitive dissonance. Faith is a vector normal (perpendicular) to the plane of reality, so it is an easy place to hide, and difficult to dislodge. But I wish you were out here with me. It's better here, truly. And you have nothing to lose but illusion.