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Four Colossal Blunders
BY THE MEN WHO MADE THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION
That they are blunders follows from Catholics and mainline Protestants agreeing, as they do, that the following are the unalterable truths of the Christian religion:
- There is, ever has been, and ever will be only ONE God, defined as The Holy Trinity, Father-Son (Jesus Christ)-Holy Spirit/Ghost – THREE, yet ONE – ONE yet THREE.
- God knows everything that ever has happened or ever will happen, and some think, could have happened, but did not.
- God is all powerful and can do anything not logically impossible.
- God does not change.
- God is a loving, just, merciful and forgiving Father, who cares for us, watches over us, hears our prayers and sometimes grants them.
- The Old and the New Testaments are the complete truth in all their parts because the writers were protected from error by God.
Everything that follows is based on these claims.
1 The first and worst blunder was to define God so that it had to be true, that even before the beginning; he created human beings without their consent, knowing he would send more than half of them to suffer forever in hell.
This alone destroys the whole story; nothing more needs to be proved, unless you can see damning any to suffer forever as consistent with a God of love, mercy, and forgiveness.
St. Augustine (354—430 CE) had the good sense to see that God’s condemnation of all for Adam and Eve’s sin made God look unjust, so he came up with the idea that it was man’s fault because God gave all people everywhere — free will; which enables them to know right from wrong and to choose what is right.
But even if there were such a thing as free will, and there is plenty of evidence there is not, under the moral code of this atheist, the loving and merciful thing for God to do before he created, would have been to leave those bound for eternal suffering in their innocent nothingness. God could have done that. Wouldn’t that have been even more loving and merciful?
Pope Francis sees damnation-forever as shameful. In May 2013, he said: “The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone!” Someone in the audience, utterly shocked, asked: ‘Father, the atheists?’ The Pope answered: “Even the atheists. Everyone!”
2 The second blunder was to make Jesus God – absolutely one with God, ever and always. This bit of God-making took more than 300 years before it became known as a fundamental truth of the faith.
This was a terrible mistake because it forever made Jesus responsible for all the atrocities committed by God, or at his orders, as detailed in the Old Testament. Remember, both Catholics and Protestants say it is “without error in all its parts”.
Why did it take so long to come to the conclusion that Jesus was God? And why did it require the Roman Emperor Constantine, to make it happen? He was fed up with the bickering going on among the competing sects of Christians. He summoned a special council to meet at Nicaea and demanded they reach a settlement. There, Constantine oversaw and approved the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity. He didn’t care how they settled it; all he wanted was harmony in his empire.
3 Having Jesus require belief to be saved …or else!
And He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned.” (Mark 16:15-16)
This command destroys all the good in the Sermon on the Mount about care and concern for others and, above all, forgiveness — even to those who abuse you!
It makes Jesus even morally worse than as depicted in the Old Testament; there he merely killed you and it was over. In this teaching, pure hate is legitimized because if gentle Jesus sees you as so vile his hatred cannot be slaked with anything but suffering forever, this sets us all free to hate with a vengeance – as we surely do.
Jesus requires “belief” and “love” for God in order to be saved. Where is the moral issue in believing or loving? They are results which may or may not come naturally, no decision is involved. Belief, rather than treating all people and animals as we would want to be treated? Can you believe or love on command?
4 Denying for many years as they still do today, the confirmed findings of science. What a blunder to exactly specify, based on Bronze Age scripture, what the truth is. The theologians have no idea what may yet be revealed by galloping science. They were brought down before in their cocksureness, when science proved the earth is round, rotates at high speed, goes around the sun, and is not at the center of everything – and much more. What a dangerous thing to do!
Today, they are fighting a losing battle against the settled science of evolution. Pope John Paul II saw the grave danger in this to the Church. In October 1996, he said: “In fact it is remarkable that [evolution] has had progressively greater influence on the spirit of researchers, following a series of discoveries in different scholarly disciplines. The convergence in the results of these independent studies—which was neither planned nor sought—constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.”
Also today they ferociously fight, as they always must, the growing scientific evidence that our feeling of ‘free will’ is just as much as an illusion as the feeling that the earth is standing still. They cannot give ground on this because if you sin for reasons beyond your control, you are not guilty and have no need of a Savior and, most assuredly no need of church!
Dr. Robert Sapolsky, eminent neuro-scientist at Stanford University, says in his recent book, BEHAVE, that in the 100 years between 1920 and 2020, it is expected that nearly 100,000 scientific papers on the subject of the causes of human behavior will have been filed, and that almost 89% will be in the twenty years from 2000 to 2020, so incredible has been the progress due to revolutionary new technologies. Stay tuned, new science papers are being filed almost daily.
Dr. Sapolsky joins the great majority of neuro-scientists from around the world who believe the scientific evidence already proves that ‘free will’ is an illusion. What evidence caused them to conclude that?
It is entirely understandable that probably most readers of this newspaper will reject all of this. It is too jarring and goes against everything you have been taught from childhood by parents and others whom you respect.
Even so, your near descendants in increasing numbers do believe it—and they will decide the fate of the Christian Religion.
Last December The Pew Research Center, found that among adults born after 1980, belief that Jesus was born of a virgin, declined 18% in just three years! That follows a 2014 study showing that US adults claiming some religion declined by 8% in seven years, while those claiming no religion grew by 42%.
These young people are increasingly unlikely to accept that eternal suffering is loving-just-merciful and, certainly not, forgiving!
They are unlikely to continue in the blunder of believing men and ancient documents over the stunning world, which science has already revealed, and continues to reveal every day.
And they are unlikely to accept what men say about a “Revelation” when they see that after 2000 years, some seventy percent of all humanity do not believe in Jesus; and hundreds of millions have never even heard of him!
The young are more likely to think that a caring God would have revealed to each and every person, in language each would understand, exactly what he required of us.
They are likely to see that had he done so there would have been no need for a priesthood, so full of cocksure certainties that for centuries they murdered each other and millions of innocents. Why? Over molehills they made into mountains.
There will be a downside too. They will have to give up what every person on this earth wants:
- to a life after death,
- to have an all-powerful Father, who watches and cares for us full time, who hears and answers our prayers — but if he doesn’t, it’s OK, because he has a better plan,
- to reunite forever with those we have loved and lost,
- the assurance of an eternity of happiness.
But more—and at increasing rates—see that just because we want it “it ain’t necessarily so”. And maybe, they will come to believe, as I do at 89, that we really would not want an eternal life; that after a billion or so years, we would all eventually yearn for peace—as it was before we were born, remember? What is so really awful about that?
And the young are surely not likely to believe that these outrageous facts—all reported in the Bible which both Protestants and Catholic theologians say, is without error:
Cursing all the descendants of Adam and Eve with Original Sin to punish what Adam and Eve did – they think like that in North Korea.
- Requiring true and honest belief in Jesus while under the promise—from God!—of an eternity in hell if they don’t believe.
- Requiring true and honest love for Jesus while under the promise—from God!—of an eternity in hell if they don’t love him.
- A Father allowing his innocent Son—really, himself—to come to earth to suffer a horrible death as the only way God—really, himself—could find to forgive mankind for the sin they did not commit!
They might wonder why must we love and respect such a God. A God so conceited that he requires constant assurance of his greatness—exhausting the language of exaggeration—and our worthlessness as worms?
Men and women have spent, and are now spending, countless thousands of man-years trying to tell God how great he is, and how worthless we are. We cannot even come to Jesus on our own: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.” (John 6:44)
Does the creator of this measureless universe really require such abject slavishness or even desire it? If he does, what is admirable about it?
They might wonder why they must, to come to Jesus, hate their “father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself.” What about God’s Ten Commandments, one of which is to “Honor thy father and mother”?
Why this conflicting advice from God? Never mind what the spin-doctors say, why did he speak so as to confuse people? He even said so: “With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.” (Mark 4:33-34)
Well, of course God did not do all this. All of these atrocities, contradictions, petty outbursts of murderous rage are the work of men; first, in tales around the fire, ultimately written by hand, changed and changed again to suit the beliefs of the community of which the writer was a member.
Can human beings actually love a vicious God? Love him even more than father, mother, sister, brother? How could we ever know our love is real under such a threat?
It is good to be free from this evil and man-made Christian theology. First and foremost, over half of all humanity has not gone, and will not go, to hell to suffer forever! Not you or any of those you love.
When you do the right thing, it will be because you think it is right. You and the world will know it was not done under threat of punishment or promise of reward
You will no longer have to deny the tested discoveries of science just because they conflict with a document written thousands of years ago, or what the priest/ministers say today.
You will be free of the suffocating demands and control of a pretending class of priest/ministers who are trained in all the ways to thwart anything that stands in the way of what they say is the truth.
You will be free to draw your own conclusions about—everything! Including if you like it, to follow the best rule, just below, for a good life I have ever seen. Far better I hope you will agree, than the primitive Ten Commandments which say not a word against genocide, slavery, drugs, or parents who fail to care for their children—but will not have any graven images!
The simple rule to which I refer was written by Robert G. Ingersoll, probably about 150 years ago:
JUSTICE IS THE ONLY WORSHIP
LOVE IS THE ONLY PRIEST
IGNORANCE IS THE ONLY SLAVERY
HAPPINESS IS THE ONLY GOOD
THE TIME TO BE HAPPY IS NOW
THE PLACE TO BE HAPPY IS HERE
THE WAY TO BE HAPPY IS TO MAKE OTHERS SO.