When I was a Christian, I tried hard to make the religion something I could sincerely believe. I ultimately failed. Like most intelligent Christians I know, I began my efforts by focusing on philosophical arguments for God’s existence, rather than the specific details of the religion. I was driven to do this in part because I had religious experiences that provided evidence for my belief in God. When I came across problematic aspects of the religion, I put a lot of effort into re-interpreting doctrines of the religion, and passages in the Bible, to try to make the clearly unacceptable parts seem less bad. Here, I aim to explain why my efforts failed, and why no one should accept Christianity.
It is difficult to think outside the bounds of theories we endorse, and even harder to see outside the bounds of views we love, and that help define us. Something has to cut through it all for us to see clearly. So I plan to speak simply, and, when necessary, harshly. What I do promise is that however harsh my words are, they are honest. I gave up a community I loved more than anything because I thought respecting the truth required me to. I know it’s hard. I know it hurts. I also know it’s necessary if you really care about the truth. It can’t be found in Christianity, so we’ll need to search elsewhere.
Theism Doesn’t Support Christianity
A number of philosophical arguments provide evidence for God’s existence. There are questions about where the universe comes from, why the universe makes sense, and why the laws of physics allow for life, where the hypothesis that a rational mind was behind the creation and/or order of the universe is a viable option, possibly even the best one. It is possible to rationally believe that the philosophical considerations support theism. Decades after abandoning religion, I still think that God exists, and so I take no issue with those who endorse these arguments. Christians often think that these arguments also provide support for the rest of their beliefs. They do not.
Christianity makes a number of specific claims about God’s nature, and about God’s interactions with human beings. It claims that God had a specific relationship to the Jewish people, including establishing agreements with them about how they were to act. It claims that numerous stories about God’s interactions with the Jewish people during their history are real, historical events. It claims that God was embodied in the person of Jesus, whose death offered the opportunity of salvation to human beings. It makes claims about the afterlife, about how God judges people in determining their place in the afterlife, and about how God wants us to live now. The philosophical arguments for God’s existence don’t include reasons to believe any of these things about God’s nature, or God’s relationship to human beings.
The philosophical arguments for God’s existence are compatible, to a certain extent, with any number of religious views. The arguments would, at best, therefore render Christianity possibly true, insofar as the arguments are compatible with God having a nature described by the religion. Christianity would then be one possibility among many, and would need to find additional support before it could find much comfort in evidence that some sort of God existed. But unfortunately for Christianity, the arguments for theism don’t fit with the details of the religion.
One reason for this is that the arguments are often best thought of as providing evidence for a perfect being. A creator doesn’t suffice as an explanation for the existence or nature of the universe if God’s existence also requires explanation. The most common view in the history of philosophy has been that God’s nature requires God’s existence, and that this allows God to serve as a stopping point in the process of explanation. God is typically viewed by philosophical theists as a being that could not have failed to exist. While it’s not the only possible reason, the most common explanation for why God would have to exist is that God is perfect, and that the nature of perfection includes the necessity of existence. As we will discuss in detail later, the god of the Christian religion is far from perfect. For now, it is worth pointing out some other problems with the view that the god of the philosophers is compatible with Christian teachings.
The arguments for God’s existence tend to focus on the idea that God is the creator of a universe whose plan, at least in part, is to allow for life to exist, and for intelligent life to be able to understand the universe in which we exist. This is compatible with a variety of views about God’s role in the lives of the beings in the universe. A God who doesn’t interact with the world would be one possibility, and would explain why God’s existence isn’t immediately known by all. However, Christianity claims that God does interact with people. While this is also compatible in itself, partiality in God’s interaction is hard to square with the sort of being the philosophical arguments support. If engagement with God is part of God’s plan, then God has a reason to carry out that engagement in a way that allows all people access to that relationship. But God is depicted in the Bible as specifically partial to the Jewish people.
In defense of Judaism (or possibly not), this is depicted as an arbitrary preference of Yahweh. In the Old Testament, it is said that God loves the Jewish people for no apparent reason, and that God therefore speaks to them and not to others. This acknowledges that it is odd that God doesn’t just tell everyone of his existence. Acknowledging this and explaining it are different, though. The idea that God is randomly partial due to inexplicable emotional bonds makes little sense if God is perfect. Inexplicable partiality is weird, but acting on it is immoral. Impartiality of reasons is a core part of morality. If you are going to treat some people better or worse than others, you need to be able to provide a relevant justification for doing so. Arbitrary preference is not a morally legitimate reason, and so random partiality is wrong. God should be expected to follow this basic moral truth.
Far worse than partiality in relationships, though, is partiality in matters of eternal judgment. According to Christianity, access to Heaven requires acceptance of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. This acceptance is unavailable to the majority of people in human history. It is unavailable to those who existed before Jesus died. It is unavailable to those who never heard of Jesus before they died. It is also largely unavailable to most people in societies where acceptance of Jesus as savior would have been, or even currently is, unimaginable for the vast majority of actual citizens. According to Christianity, God chose to create the universe in such a way that at least on one random planet, the vast majority of intelligent beings who ever existed cannot be saved. On this view, most humans are prohibited access to eternal bliss for reasons that can’t seriously be taken as blameworthy. This is deeply immoral. It certainly isn’t compatible with a perfect being in charge of all of creation. The arguments for God’s existence cannot be rationally combined with preferential treatment of God when it comes to human beings. So, the arguments for the existence of a perfect God, far from being reasons to accept Christianity, serve as reasons to reject it. The God philosophers have argued for, and the being named Yahweh in the Bible, are incompatible. You can have one or the other, but not both.
Religious Experience Doesn’t Support Christianity
I have had numerous religious experiences in my life. They have taken various forms. My first such experience happened at Bible Camp when I was 16. I was in a room where a large number of fellow teens decided to embrace Christianity. While they did, I had a sense of the presence of God in the room. It was an intense sense of the presence of something external to myself, who was acting in others around me. I had a few other experiences of this sort after that; so called “mountain-top” experiences of awe in the presence of a greater being. In addition, I regularly had a sense of God’s presence with me. I felt him watching over and protecting me. More importantly, I felt him acting within me. I saw changes to my character and personality as a result of prayer and sincere pursuit of understanding and having a relationship with God that seemed to come from the outside. The experiences seemed like psychological surgery, healing me from the pain of my life, and connecting me to something greater that matters.
Religious experience is hard to understand for those who haven’t had any. One of the most distinctive features of those experiences is the externality of the source. Even those who have sought to replicate religious experiences in experimental settings have found that activating the part of the brain involved in a sense of externality is needed to make those experiences seem legitimate. Skeptics see this as a reason to dismiss those experiences. I don’t. If you have to activate the parts of the brain involved in thinking something is real and external to adequately replicate these experiences, that seems to me to be reason to think the experiences most people have are legitimate. At the very least, it’s reason to think that those who have them have every reason to think of them as real.
Because I had most of these experiences as part of my life as a Christian, I thought of them as supporting my religion. Eventually, though, I realized that this was a mistake. Experiences of connection to some higher reality as an external force acting in the world occur in a wide variety of religions. Many intelligent Christians who realize this adopt a more ecumenical view of religion. Some claim that many religions provide a route to God. They still seem to hold onto their own religion, though. I don’t understand this. Suppose that God allows many routes to experiences of connection to a higher reality. Suppose God allows this to happen to a wide range of people across the world, and doesn’t care about the accuracy of their other beliefs as a basis for doing so. Wouldn’t this suggest that those beliefs are simply irrelevant? Wouldn’t it show that the claims of specific religions must be subjected to independent rational evaluation, rather than to automatic acceptance based on faith? These sorts of considerations removed my main religion-specific reasons for being a Christian.
Accepting widespread religious experience doesn’t justify specific religious beliefs, it undermines them by showing that the beliefs don’t seem to matter. Moreover, orthodoxy isn’t just a neutral, acceptable thing to those who embrace the legitimacy of religious experience. Accepting a particular religion requires accepting beliefs that others don’t need to have, and whose acceptance might hinder others, in their route to God. If all religions, and sometimes a total lack of religion, can be legitimate routes to God, this doesn’t mean there is truth in all of them, it means the accuracy of belief is totally irrelevant. Religious experiences, even those occurring within religious contexts, don’t support those religions. Without this support, the specific claims of each religion need to be considered on their own.
The exclusivity of salvation is deeply problematic once this is acknowledged. If all sorts of religion can connect us to God, then it seems that religious belief doesn’t really matter to God. Christianity claims that it does. The exclusivism of Christianity is a huge mark against it for those who accept the legitimacy of religious experience in general. The diversity of legitimate experiences is best explained by the irrelevance of religious truth to fellowship with God. It therefore fails to provide support for religious claims in general, and provides evidence against any claims of exclusivity of religious truth, such as the ones made by Christians.
Yahweh is Evil
I’m now going to start my objections to things in the Bible. I know there are several attempts to defend the things I refer to, and any number of potential objections. Here, I will take the passages I discuss to mean basically what they say, in the versions of the Bible I have read. I’ll discuss what I think of the various attempts to defend these passages later on. To differentiate between God as supported by philosophical considerations, and the being called “God” in Christianity, I will use the name given in the Bible, “Yahweh,” to refer to the Christian God, and the more neutral name, “God,” to refer to a being compatible with philosophical considerations. There is one simple reason to believe that God is not Yahweh, and that reason is that Yahweh is evil.
I think this should be clear to anyone who has read the Old Testament. Here is a short and very partial list of some of Yahweh’s worst crimes, outside of one story I’ll save for last.
- He kicks humans out of paradise for wanting to understand morality
- He torments Abraham with the prospect of murdering the son he promised him
- He kills almost the entire human race in a giant flood
- He orders the Israelites to slaughter entire cities, including women and children
- He punishes those killers for not also slaughtering the livestock
- He allows Satan to torment Job to win a bet
- He mocks Job with a “might makes right” defense when Job complains
These are all really bad. The story of Job is so horrifying, I don’t know how people read it and still don’t see Yahweh’s evil nature. I think the peak of Yahweh’s evil, though, comes out in the story of Lot.
Lot is considered by Yahweh to be the only good person in his city. Yahweh plans to destroy his city due to the sinful nature of the rest of them. Lot convinces Yahweh to let the city continue to exist if he can find one other good man in it. Yahweh agrees. An omniscient being changing his mind or needing further evidence is odd, but for now that’s less important than his behavior. Yahweh sends angels down while Lot is supposed to have time to find the other good men. Lot lets the angels stay with him, thinking they are men from another city. The men of his city come to Lot and insist that he send out the angels to be raped. Lot, the supposedly good man, instead offers his own daughters to be raped. The men reject the offer, and want the angels instead. At this point, having decided that this group of rapists somehow negates his promise to Lot, Yahweh decides to just destroy the city. He tells Lot to leave with his family, and not to look back.
Lot takes his family and runs away. His wife turns back to look. She takes a second to glance at her home, and everyone she’s ever known and loved outside of her husband and daughters. Yahweh turns her into salt for doing so. He murders Lot’s wife for giving a second of thought for those Yahweh is about to have violently murdered. He then has the angels firebomb the city, killing everyone in flames. He burns an entire city of people, including babies, to death, while taking a second to murder Lot’s wife as an aside. Lot, who is supposed to father a generation of people, is then left in the mountains with his daughters. His daughters get him drunk on consecutive nights, and rape him, so that he can have children, and create those generations of descendants.
This story is a nightmare. A dad who is perfectly happy letting his daughters get raped is isolated as a paragon of moral virtue. Yahweh murders an entire city of people, and the “good” guy’s wife. Apparently, the inability to find good men means that women, kids, and even babies should die in a hail of fire from the sky. Lot is then subject to incestuous rape to maintain his status as the progenerator of a people. This is all horrifying. Yahweh slaughters babies, burns people to death, praises parents happy to let their kids be raped, and feels rage-fueled righteousness in the process. These are all deeply evil acts.
There are lots of problems with Yahweh as God. He clearly originally views himself as one god among many. He seems to try to win petty disputes by showing he’s powerful. He seems impatient, vindictive, and cruel. But, really, his casual willingness to engage in and order the total slaughter of cities, and even virtually the entire world, including all children and babies, is so very, very far beyond tolerable that there can be no defense of it. Yahweh is no better than any God of War in any myths in history, and in many ways, is far worse. Thank God he isn’t real.
Yahweh’s Laws are Immoral
One might think God had reasons that we just cannot see to engage in these actions. I find such a view very hard to believe. It’s not impossible, though, that God’s reasons for acting are beyond us. The extreme evil these acts seem to demonstrate is hard to grasp. What is much harder to explain in this way, though, are the laws Yahweh lays down. Yahweh tells us to treat one another in ways that are clearly wrong. The reasons we have for acting in the way we do should be compatible with the moral requirements we have to one another. If they are from God, they should be perfect. The laws of the Old Testament are not.
Before looking at large problems with these laws, I want to forestall a line of response I often hear. Many Christians seem to think that their religion doesn’t require accepting these laws. Christianity provides new guidelines for how to live. Christian ethics are, I will agree, superior to those of the Old Testament. Nonetheless, Christians are committed to the view that those laws were handed down by God, and reflect guidelines for a way of living that God could find morally acceptable. This means that if those laws are fundamentally immoral, then God could instruct people he loves above all others to treat one another immorally. This is both clearly unacceptable in itself, and clearly incompatible with the view that Yahweh could be the sort of god Christians typically claim to believe in today.
There are a number of specific laws that are clearly objectionable. Simply weird laws are all over the place. Mixing almost any two things is seen as wrong for some reason. Growing different vegetables near each other requires forfeiting all of the crops. You’re not supposed to plow fields with different animals together. You’re not supposed to wear clothes of multiple fibers. There are also laws about menstruating, having wet dreams, or pooping too close to camps. Odd laws, of course, may have historically relevant but currently unclear reasons. The number of them makes this hard to accept, but by themselves they pose only a minor problem. Far more serious ones are also easy to find, though.
Perhaps most obvious among the problems with Old Testament laws is the acceptance of slavery. We now know that enslaving others is wrong. At the time, most civilizations practiced it. It’s not surprising that the Hebrew people did as well. The idea that God would permit it, though, is difficult to believe. God knows slavery is wrong. Moreover, there was a unique opportunity for this knowledge to be embraced by the Hebrew people. Fresh from years of being enslaved themselves, they would be prime candidates for understanding why no one should be enslaved. Instead of condemning slavery, laws at best recommend remembering this, and not being too brutal. Beat slaves only 39 times, for example. Here was a great opportunity to move humanity forward by promoting a moral truth thousands of years earlier than we would figure it out, and it’s missed. That’s a large mistake for a perfect, loving being to make.
Another consistent problem with the laws is their clear and extreme misogyny. Fathers are allowed to sell their own daughters into slavery. In addition, prohibitions against all sorts of sexual behavior, against speaking up or dressing inappropriately in church, against failing to do as their husband wishes, and the like, are all condemned. Women are expected to marry the brothers of their husbands if the husband dies, without any say in the matter. At least one time, when the new guy pulled out during sex, he also gets killed on the spot. By far the most appalling law in the Old Testament, though, has to do with rape victims. A distinction is drawn between women who are raped in the countryside and ones raped in the city. A woman who isn’t engaged and is raped in the countryside is required to marry her rapist, and the rapist to pay the father to marry his rape victim. An engaged woman who is raped in the city, though, is to be put to death along with her rapist because she didn’t cry out loudly enough. The death penalty for being raped is one of the most evil things one could imagine.
This connects to the biggest problem with the laws of the Old Testament, that they have no respect at all for proportionality of punishment. It’s a basic principle of justice that a punishment should be proportional to the crime committed. A shocking percentage of laws Yahweh lays down, though, have stoning people to death in a public display, or other forms of capital punishment, as required for those acts. Here’s a list of a few law violations that have that consequence in addition to being an engaged rape victim:
- Cursing your parents
- Lying about being a virgin
- Engaging in homosexual acts as a man
- Committing adultery
- Numerous other sex acts
- Working on the sabbath
- Goring someone while being an ox
- Many, many other things
No moral being could think these punishments were acceptable. In fact, even the Jewish people quickly ignored them, and rarely practiced capital punishment. The supposed chosen people, who Yahweh supposedly gave the moral code to, knew the code was evil, and chose not to follow it. This isn’t a sign in favor of Yahweh; it’s a sign that he chose truly horrible guidance for his people. In addition, one of the most impressive moral stances Jesus took was rejecting this appalling moral code and its punishments. He refused to allow a woman to be stoned for adultery (let alone for being raped in the wrong place). He thought people should be forgiving, loving, and merciful. It’s a tragedy for all those wrongfully and severely harmed and judged by Hebrew law that Yahweh was so much worse than Jesus.
Jesus’ Eschatology was Wrong
For those who are more concerned with errors in the New Testament, there are plenty. Minor inconsistencies about the time of Jesus’ birth, how many times the cock crowed before his death, and the like, are among them. I’ll focus on a far more important one here. Jesus said a number of interesting things, and had a fascinating moral vision for human behavior. Some of what he says about morality is very insightful, and the Sermon on the Mount is fascinating in how demanding its moral stance is. But Jesus was clearly very wrong about important issues that shaped his overall moral views. Primarily, he was clearly obsessed with the idea that the world was about to end. He frequently refers to the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. He says that it will surely come before that generation passes. He continually refers to this to explain the immediate need for change, and for abandoning other responsibilities. He tells one prospective follower to leave his family immediately, even though his father just died. The aspiring disciple wants to bury his father, and, presumably, be there for his family. Waiting for this is deemed unacceptable by Jesus.
Christians often mention that Jesus says that no one knows the exact time. It’s odd that claiming that Jesus doesn’t know things is comforting for those who claim Jesus is God in human form. But the fact that no one knows the exact day except the Father doesn’t just open up any far future day. Generations don’t last 2,000 years. Something that might take a couple of millennia doesn’t require people abandoning responsibilities to their dead fathers. Jesus clearly thought the end was imminent. He was wrong. Since much of his life, and his teaching, rested on this claim, it seriously undermines the legitimacy of his claim to be divine.
The Resurrection Story Makes No Sense
The resurrection of Jesus is central to Christianity. Jesus supposedly rose from the dead, and told his disciples to spread news of his resurrection across the world. Salvation depended on the acceptance of Jesus’ sacrifice, so news of it had to be spread as quickly as possible to save as many people as possible. This is particularly true in light of the supposed immediacy of the end times. So, what did Jesus do to ensure that the word would spread? He hung out with his buddies for 40 days fishing before rising up to heaven. Despite being around for more than a month, Jesus was never seen by anyone who wasn’t a friend or a disciple who knew him before he died. The lack of independent observers makes the evidence for his resurrection miniscule as it is. But the overall picture renders it wholly unbelievable.
Jesus had the most important news in human history to spread, and he spent his life proclaiming the immediate coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. He was known by various political figures in Rome, like Pilate. He could have gone to them, shown them the wounds, gotten records of his crucifixion and death together, and spread the word to the leaders of Rome. Rome had a massive empire at the time. Proof of his resurrection would have spread rapidly through the world. But instead, he left it to a small group of guys to get the word out. He didn’t even bother to go to the nearest town and get lots of everyday people to vouch for him. Given the importance of the message, this lack of independent evidence makes less than no sense. It is positive evidence that Jesus was never resurrected.
Excessive, Complex Reinterpretation is Untenable
When confronted with the sorts of problems I mention here, many Christians will claim that the content of the Bible has been misunderstood in important ways. It’s impressive and amazing how much time people have dedicated to writing fascinating defenses of the content of the Bible. I think this is to the credit of Christians. When Yahweh does and says things that seem obviously evil, people try to make it seem less evil. When the Bible says things that are obviously false, people try to find ways to think of it that are less crazy. People who care about morality and truth are obviously at work here.
That said, their efforts clearly fail. I can’t get into the vast array of defenses in the history of Christian apologetics. Fortunately, I don’t have to. Here is the one overriding reason to be sure they don’t succeed: there are just too many of them. When something comes up that seems to contradict a theory, there are a few possible options. First, you could just accept the bad consequences. Second, you could reject the theory. Third, you could explain why the theory doesn’t actually entail the apparently crazy claim. To their credit, for each individual claim, smart, decent Christians tend to take the third option. But the more you have to modify, or redescribe, what your view actually is, the less probable your view becomes. This is at least one important point of Occam’s Razor. One reason we should prefer simple theories is that inventing reasons to accept crazy sounding consequences makes views increasingly unlikely. In conjunction, as the number of additions grows, the probability that the theory that needed them is true shrinks towards zero.
I’ve mentioned several problems that seem to strike at the core of the religion, but there are far more less central problems I could add. There are at least scores, and probably hundreds of things that are important parts of Christianity’s view of God’s nature, of Jesus’ status as the living embodiment of God, and of the nature of salvation, that I could have mentioned. Anyone who wants to can find long lists on Google in seconds. The most respectable Christians I know try to go as far in rejecting these things as possible. A sort of a-religious ecumenicalism is the view they are often pushed to, much like I was. This should be a sign to them. You don’t have to work endlessly to make the truth sound like something that isn’t ridiculous. At some point in the process of trying to figure out how your beliefs are true, the rational thing to do is to stop and reconsider whether or not they actually are.
According to Bayes’ Theorem, we should adjust our beliefs from our existing ones in the face of new evidence in ways that respect our prior probabilities. If something is very likely to be true prior to acquiring the new evidence, the new evidence matters less. If we didn’t have good reasons to think something before acquiring the new evidence, we should be more impressed by it, and we should certainly change our minds in the presence of a large amount of counter-evidence. I think many Christians approach evidence against Christianity as if they had good evidence for Christianity to begin with. If that were true, then trying to find ways to explain why they don’t accept the counter-evidence from Biblical error would be rational for a fairly long time. As far as I can tell, though, Christians drastically misevaluate the strength of their priors. The benefits of their beliefs in their own lives, and any religious experiences they have had, are compatible with the falsity of their religion. The arguments for God’s existence are as well. In fact, both positively suggest their religion is wrong. The priors for beliefs specific to Christianity are incredibly low. The idea that God embodied himself in a single human at a random point in human history, and made eternal salvation contingent on accepting the sacrifice of that human, is pretty weird. It would need vast amounts of evidence in its favor to overcome this low prior probability. It’s a large understatement to say that this evidence is lacking.
Christianity provided a lot of value to my life when I was younger. It has provided a lot of value to many other people’s lives. I understand the longing to hold onto that, and I hesitate to undermine the value that can be obtained from the fellowship of shared belief. But I think the truth matters more. In addition, I think the truth is better. If God doesn’t care what you believe, then individual growth, and communal fellowship in seeking to become better, don’t have doxastic limitations. We can all find in one another beings to join with, and to find joy with. We can stop fighting over things that distract us from what matters. We can realize that religious doctrine in particular does not matter. We can focus on those things that made religion valuable, and find ways to rediscover them in a world where false doctrines don’t interfere. Christianity is false. Spread the good news.
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