Truth
Some Faults of the Christian Religion
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, July 25, 1999
The Objections to Religion
Religion is a social phenomenon not a divine one. Teachers with novel convictions start religions, but they have little influence upon the institutions that follow them. When any remarkable person gets a following, before long some of them declare the saint’s pronouncements as the absolute truth and appoint themselves as its key.
As the key to the master’s work, they interpret it and add to it until it becomes irrelevant to the newer generations of followers who only know the institution and not the master. It is the religious institutions that enormously influence people, not the founder. Since their business is to expound a supposed unchanging truth, revealed once for all in utter perfection, they become opponents of intellectual and moral change, and therefore profoundly conservative.
The churches never opposed Roman slavery and opposed the abolition of modern slavery as long as they dared, and they still oppose almost every movement toward economic justice. The Pope officially condemned Socialism. The churches in Germany said it would be contrary to the teaching of Christianity to deprive the deposed nobility of their palaces.
In science, the church opposed Galileo and Darwin. In the days of its greatest power it went further in its opposition to scholarship. Pope Gregory the Great wrote to a bishop a letter beginning:
A report has reached us which we cannot mention without a blush, that thou expoundest grammar to certain friends.
The Pope had his way and scholarship sank further out of sight. Acquiring knowledge is no part of Christian duty, because Christ, in the gospels, tells us to become as little children, and little children are necessarily untutored. The church once contended that knowledge is in itself sinful, though it no longer does. The acquisition of knowledge is what is dangerous, because it might lead to questioning the Christian dogma—the pride of intellect!
Most of the teaching of Christ recorded in the gospels is not the basis of the ethics of Christians today. Do Christians give all their goods to the poor? Do they forgive adultery? Do they love their neighbours? Some monks attempted to teach the doctrine of poverty, but the Pope condemned them and declared them heretics. What merciful influence has “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” had on the Inquisition, the Witch Trials and the Ku Klux Klan?
The Buddha was an enlightened atheist. On his deathbed, he laughed at his disciples for supposing that he was immortal. But the Buddhist priesthood—as it existed in Tibet—has been obscurantist, tyrannous and cruel in the highest degree. That all this is pardoned today in the interests of vilifying Chinese colonialism does not alter its historical truth.
There is no reason to suppose any religion true, and religious precepts are mainly ancient and primitive and perpetuate standards that sensitive people today find abhorrant. Increasingly Christians today think it does not matter whether Christianity is true or not, in the historical sense. The important question is whether it works—whether it changes a believer’s behaviour. If it does, the effects of Christianity may seem good to Christians.
But why should anyone believe a proposition, independently of the question of its imprimatur. No one can be really scientifically honest if they imagine it is a duty to believe something unquestioningly. Is it honest to say that a religion works without knowing whether it is true?
Yet, Christians will not give up their pretence that the foundation myths of their religion are not only myths but history—they are true. A perfectly rational and contemporarily justifiable hypothesis explaining the gospel stories can be formulated but no Christian will even consider it. The refusal to consider rational explanations and evidence produces hostility to evidence and causes believers to close their minds to anything that does not suit their prejudices. That is the basis of fundamentalism and creationism.
Sources of Intolerance
The intolerance that spread over the world with the advent of Christianity is due to the Jewish belief in righteousness and in the exclusive reality of the Jewish God. The Christians inherited these curious beliefs from the sect of Jews from which they came, the Essenes, who felt they had to be righteous when the end of the present world came and because the Jewish God had promised that Jews would run the new world order.
These ideas in turn came from the threat that some Jews saw in the encroaching Greek culture called Hellenization. The Jews, in prophetic books written in the Hellenistic times but purporting to be much earlier, in Assyrian and Babylonian times to disguise their real meaning, invented emphasis upon personal righteousness and the idea that it is wicked to tolerate any religion except the Jewish one.
The Church made much of the persecution of Christians by the Roman State before the time of Constantine. This persecution was slight and intermittent and not for religious reasons but legal and political ones. From the age of Constantine to the end of the seventeenth century, Christians were far more fiercely persecuted by other Christians than they ever were by the Roman emperors. Romans and Greeks were tolerant. It is the Jews who were intolerant of Hellenization.
Greek and Romans were happy to assume that other people’s gods were Greek gods called by foreign names. Herodotus, the Greek historian, makes no recommendation that foreigners who do not worship the Greek god, Zeus, should suffer eternal punishment and be killed so that their punishment can begin immediately. This attitude is typically Christian.
The modern Christian commends their faith as tolerant and sensible, ignoring the fact that they persecuted the rationalists and freethinkers that instituted tolerance and liberalism into modern society in opposition to Christianity. Modern Christians do not now believe all the theological nonsense they believed when enlightened freethinkers declared America independent. They ought to be ashamed of these traditional beliefs, but they do not know anything of Christian history, and call anyone who reminds them of it devils. Christian doctrine has been more enlightened in the last 200 years, but not initially by Christians.
The Soul and Immortality
The Christian emphasis on the individual soul has influenced every subsequent sect and cult whether Christian, New Age or Pagan. The soul is the religious manifestation of what psychiatrists today call “learned helplessness”.
When oppressed people are frustrated in their political ends at every turn, they will learn helplessness. They cease to try to achieve their objectives, abandon their hopes and instead make a virtue out of enduring discomfort. The stoical endurance of oppression and torture is defined as being good—God will reward them for being personally holy, even though they were unable to achieve anything in life. Being holy was a reflexion of social impotence.
Jews under the Romans felt like this and their learned helplessness was forced upon them by several major defeats by their enemies, the Romans, over about a century. The most militant Jews, the Essenes, felt this most strongly, learned to be helpless and started a new gentile religion in the Roman empire—Christianity. The earliest gentile Christians took the stoic resignation of their Essene teachers as the epitome of Christian virtue and it was established as the Christian trademark. It was to lead to all the stories of Christian martyrdom—most of which were untrue. The martyrs were Jewish.
Social virtue was excluded from Christian ethics. Christians never tried to correct the faults of Roman society either by protest when out of power or by resolve when they were in power. Contributions to social progress did not enter into the Christian consciousness. Justinian was a most corrupt emperor but did reform Roman law. He was called “the Great” however because he built churches. Did any saint in the calendar get canonized for reforming the treasury or the law or the judiciary?
Christians thought of personal virtue as preferable to social virtue, and personal sin as more heinous than social sins. An adulterer is more wicked than a corrupt politician or businessman. The most virtuous people were those who retired from the world.
The body is a person’s social and public part, and the soul their private part. So, by valuing the soul and not the body, Christianity was eschewing the public good for the personal good. Christianity made people more egotistic and introspective than nature made them.
If the saints suffered and died, how were they to be rewarded by God? That is where the concept of the immortal soul comes in. It was to enjoy endless bliss or endless woe according to whether the soul was a Christian one or not. The concept remains with us in this scientific age for exactly the reason it had at the beginning. People—Christians or otherwise—still want their personal virtue rewarded after death.
Anyone who died immediately after a priest had sprinkled water upon them while uttering magic words, discovered eternal bliss. Anyone struck dead by a lightning bolt hitting their upturned club while they cursed their bad form for driving their golf ball out of bounds, would find themselves in eternal torment, even though they had led a long and virtuous life. Christians might no longer accept this but it was for long the orthodox doctrine.
Or consider a man who finds a cure for AIDS because his homosexual lover died of the disease, leaving his grief stricken partner with the will to cure the disease. Another man was a strict Catholic whose wife was obliged to bear him a child a year, but he boozed and beat them all mercilessly in his drunken rages. The first man is a mortal sinner while the second will be heralded by the choirs of heaven. No Christian can demur.
Moslems believing themselves to be fighting a holy war will blow themselves up as human bombs imagining they will go straight into the arms of a black-eyed houri. At least it is their own choice, Christians used to be worse. The Spaniards in Mexico and Peru used to baptize Indian infants and then immediately dash their brains out. It was all right because the baptized innocents went straight to heaven. That’s the indisputable consequence of insane Christian theology.
Christianity and Sex
The natural drives that take people outside their egos are sex, parenthood and tribalism or making local rather than universal associations. The worst feature of the Christian religion is its attitude toward sex—a morbid and unnatural attitude. The founders of Christianity thought they were soon going to heaven and as they thought sex was dirty, they rejected it for the purity needed to enter heaven unsullied. Without understanding the reasons the later church continued the tradition and villified sex.
The church tries to render concupiscence innocuous by confining it within the bounds of matrimony. By making marriage indissoluble, and by stamping out all knowledge of the art of love, the church determined that the only form of sex it permitted would give little pleasure and a great deal of pain. The opposition to birth control has the same motive—if a woman has a child a year until she dies worn out, it is not to be supposed that she will derive much pleasure from her married life, therefore birth control must be discouraged.
Christianity claims to have improved the status of women, a monstrous lie. Women cannot enjoy a tolerable position in society where it is considered of the utmost importance that they should not infringe a rigid sexual code. From the time of the Essenes, monks regarded the woman as the temptress. They thought of her as the inspirer of impure lusts. The teaching of the church has been, and still is, that virginity is best, but that for those who find this impossible marriage is permissible.
It is better to marry than to burn.S Paul
Family affection was decried by Christ himself and the bulk of his followers. He says he has come to set a man at variance against his father, the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and that anyone that loves their father and mother more than him is not worthy (Mt 10:35-37). The church treats the Mother of Christ with reverence, but Jesus is shown as disdaining his mother (Jn 2:4). The reasons were the same. The Essenes were preparing for a jihad and family ties were too restrictive for holy soldiers—God’s Elect.
The Christian aversion to tribalism is from the same root cause but in the wider empire led to the opposite effect. The Essenes were proudly nationalistic and opposed to Helleniziation. But such partizanship was bad enough in Palestine. It could not be tolerated in the wider Roman world. So, the gentile bishops rejected it and adopted a universalism that was absent in the Essene understanding of God’s purpose.
Three Impulses
The three drives served by religion are fear, conceit and hatred. Religion aims to give an air of respectability to these drives, which otherwise cause human misery. Since it permits men to indulge these passions without restraint, where they might control them but for its sanction, religion is evil.
Humanity always has felt hatred and fear and always will. The best that can be done with them is to direct them into harmless channels. A Christian theologian might say that their treatment by the church is analogous to its treatment of the sex impulse. If humanity must inevitably feel hatred, it is better to direct this hatred against those who are harmful, and this is precisely what the church does by its conception of righteousness.
Good or righteousness is whatever we approve of. In the Acts of the Apostles, the Apostles declare (Acts 15:28), “For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us”. Since the Holy Ghost is a figment, they meant it seemed good to them. Earlier, righteousness meant what Yehouah approved of, but humans called prophets passed on the message. It flatters Jews and Christians to suppose the universe is controlled by a God who shares their tastes and prejudices.
What is “unrighteousness”? It is behaviour disliked by those in your club. By calling it unrighteousness and setting up laws to control it, the club can justifiably punish those it dislikes while enhancing its own self-esteem in its action, the club being righteous by definition. Righteousness allows persecution by cloaking it as justice. Mob rule works in the same way but the “rule” is more primitive. Righteousness is a justification of herd antipathy to others.
The church’s conception of righteousness is not the best possible. Righteousness is what the church approves, and unrighteousness is what it disapproves. Individual certainty as to God’s tastes and opinions ought not to be made the basis of any institution.
The most important source of religion is fear. Anything that causes alarm is apt to turn people’s thoughts to God. Battle, misfortune, and pestilence all tend to make people religious.
Lastly, religion appeals to human self-esteem. Christianity elevates humanity from insignificance. The Creator of the universe gives them the compliment of being interested in them. He is pleased with them when they behave well and displeased when they behave badly. It is a better compliment when he awards us everlasting happiness in heaven. Shame about the sinners, but serves ’em right!
To Christians, Moslems, and Jews the most fundamental question involved in the truth of religion is the existence of God, but the word “God” has become diluted from its original clearly supernatural meaning. Now no one is sure what people mean when they say they believe in God.
Christians say a God who is both good and omnipotent created the world. Before He created the world He foresaw all the pain and misery that it would contain. If God knew in advance the sins of which man would be guilty, God was responsible for the consequences of those sins when He created man. He therefore has to be blamed for it. And in Isaiah, He admits it!
Nevertheless, Christians try to absolve Him of the guilt arguing that suffering in the world is a purification for sin and a good thing. Suffering is not due to sin. Sin does not cause rivers to overflow their banks or volcanoes to erupt. Do sick children deserve what they are suffering? To believe they do, must be an abrogation of all feelings of mercy and compassion. Anyone who believes that all is for the best in this suffering world has to find constant excuses for pain and misery. They must be as cruel as their God.
Surely, the omnipotent God, operating through all eternity, could have done a better job—and a permanent one? Christians think, like their founders, the Essenes, that the world will end and be substituted by a better place, free of sin. Christians perhaps think this is eternal life but science indicates the earth will not always remain habitable and the human race will die out.
Even if the earth is miraculously saved for the Christian believers living in it by then, the second law of thermodynamics indicates the universe is running down, and that ultimately nothing will exist anywhere. Doubtless, when that time comes, God will wind up the machinery again, but meanwhile the Christian inhabitants of the eternal kingdom will be getting a chill and feeling lonely. Is this bliss or simply ignorance?
So far as science goes, the universe will grow then decline to a condition of heat death. If this is God’s purpose, it is a remarkably pointless one.
Comment from sntjohnny
I happened to discover that your site located at
http://www.askwhy.co.uk/truth/150ObjectionsChristianity.php#objections
is mostly plagiarized from Bertrand Russell’s essay, “Has Religion made Useful Contributions to Civilization?” I’m sure this is an oversite—you surely meant to give credit to your primary source. As an author of several books, I hope you agree that giving credit where credit is due and avoiding charges of plagiarism is in your best interest. I hope to see a change made to your page in the near future.
A thought policeman, eh? Have you nothing useful to do? As far as I recall, the page is an edited—my updated—version of Russell’s essay, and you would find, if you cared to look, the description of the page is this—“A consideration of some problems with Christianity first considered by Bertrand Russell.” Those who appoint themselves as unofficial guardians of the word should check the pages they suspect most carefully before bandying suggestions of plagiarism, and, as guardians of words, they might also learn how to spell them first. The word is “oversight”. Still, perhaps it is a hobby that keeps you feeling devout, off strong liquor and out of church, so maybe it does some good.
I did care to look actually. If you had given such credit I wouldn’t of said anything. I gave you the link to your site, and you could of looked yourself. I did you a favor. You THOUGHT you cited your source. Such citation is missing. Nor did I find it on the page it was linked to. If its there, I missed it, and you can show me where it is quite easily. Or even better, add the reference.
Thought police? No, of course not. Any person that wants to accuse the Christian community of lying and then passes off someone else’s work as their own truly needs to ponder the speck and the log, I would say.
You can relax. I thought Mr Russell’s works fairly simple-minded anyway. No danger to a theist there, I’m afraid. You will be giving credit where credit is due, I trust.
You plainly did not look. What I said is there is there. However, it is nice to see your real motivation. You are the dishonest one, like all of your type. If you think “Mr Russell” simple minded, you confirm your own idiocy. “Wouldn’t of” by the way is “wouldn’t have”. You are not even literate, showing you cannot have even read your own bible, so can hardly criticize others over their usage of literacy. Try reading the pages, then find fault, if you wish.
My original email to you had a very simple point that made no mention at all of your belief system, or my own. You have since turned it into such, all the while trying to turn this into an “us vs them” and dwelling on typing errors or whatever. I admit that I didn’t have to add in the last email that Mr. Russell is simple-minded, but then, it was just crying out. I will go further and say that he is an idiot. I will give him credit for some salient points, but not many.
But how about you put up and shut up? I provided the precise link to the page in question. I have downloaded it and the table of contents page for future reference, as well. Thanks to modern technology it is very easy to scan both for any mention of instances of a word, or a phrase. Neither the page in question or the table of contents includes sentence you say is there. Perhaps you meant to? But you didn’t.
I freely admit that I could of overlooked the sentence. The two important places such a reference would belong—the page itself or the table of contents page—have no such citations. Perhaps YOU should check your page before claiming innocence. Don’t you think? If it was an honest mistake, that’s just fine.
However, since you title the page in question “Pious Lies” it would seem to me that you would want to be above reproach. Your refusal to admit error would suggest that you really did want to pass off Russell’s work as your own, and that this was not an honest mistake. Frankly, that doesn’t bother me either. But it does tell me what sort of man I’m dealing with. And if your site ever comes up in one of my debates with a skeptic I will be greatly pleased to present to that person this correspondence and the two files that I have saved to my computer. I shouldn’t say “greatly pleased”. I should say, thrilled.
Of course this all goes away if you just swallow your pride, admit you failed to make the reference, and go to the effort to include it. I’m prepared without hesitation to swallow MY pride if you can show it to be on the pages in question. If you have it buried somewhere else, then we get to both walk away “right”.
I notice you are an effective wielder of ad hominem. I’ve always wondered: WHY is it that when discussing a matter of fact “skeptics” will always leap to the personal attack? Do they train you for that? Or is such intellectual laziness an evolutionary inherited trait? Lesser minds would be knocked off the point by such a tactic, but when one realizes that only lesser minds resort to it it is generally easy to dismiss out of hand. Peace, if you dare.
You wrote yet again betraying the fact that you are a couple of cents short of the full nickel. That being the case, there is nothing more to be done. It is quite impossible to make people see who are determined not to. That is how Christians are, but since, as you say, this is a simple matter of fact, you surprise me with your cheek. There is no opinion about this, or argument. I answered your point immediately, giving chapter and verse but you are too stubborn or blind or stupid to look. What I have said is on the page, exactly where I said, so find it. I said what the description of the page said and that is what it does say. I repeated it again in my last post, and you persist in your absurd attack. If there is any lesser mind here, it is plain which it is. I conclude from this, and such things as that you call Russell an idiot, that you are the idiot. Now, if you had read the pages you would realise that this is an inference not an ad hominem argument as you seem to think. Your refusal to check the page description is your choice, but save me from all your self-satisfaction and smugness based, as it is on pure obstinacy. You even say in the middle of all this, “I freely admit that I could of overlooked the sentence”. In that case do me a favour and go look for it.
However, since you title the page in question “Pious Lies” it would seem to me that you would want to be above reproach.
There are no deliberate lies on my pages, and even if there were, they would not be “pious” ones, but I do not claim omniscience as you do, so there might be errors and I have always been glad to acknowledge them when they are pointed out and demonstrated. You make an assertion and cannot even be bothered to verify my refutation of it. Christians do not need to verify anything because they know everything—they think! Anyway, save me from any more of this dreary nonsense. Find something useful to do.
No one made you respond, sir. The fact is that it is not there, and I look forward to the inevitable moment when someone uses material from your page and I can reveal you as a scoundrel. You didn’t really say where it was. You just said it was there. If I could of found it, I wouldn’t have bothered to write you at all. In fact, there is no evidence from our conversations that you yourself bothered to examine the page for yourself. Where is the “chapter and verse”? You never provided such except to say that it is in the page’s description. And where might that be if not on the page itself or the content page linked off of it?
Incidentally, I never said I was a Christian. This was an inference of your own, revealing your own bias and interjecting invective in what is really just a straight matter of fact. You may have been put off a bit by my “cheek” but I wasn’t shocked at all at your response.
How would your publishers feel about your refusal to cite on your page the sources of your content? Don’t worry, I have no intention to discredit you in such a legal fashion. You’ve discredited yourself.
I said put up or shut up. You just continued the fountain of blather. Why don’t you show yourself more of a man than me and provide the so called “chapter and verse”, or if you desire at last to forfeit your integrity, simply ignore this email.
No one makes you type a reply. Ah… but can’t let a dig go unanswered, can you? No sir. No, sir. Peace. sntjohnny.
It’s there, Johnny! Poor Johnny!
From Sarah
Hi, I noticed you were giving Johnny some stick for not finding a credit you’ve put in that essay somewhere. I did look, using Ctrl+F and putting in Bertrand, yet found nothing. Is it not possible you have it wrong?
No! You and Johnny are making the same false assumption. The text is this, shown precisely:
<meta NAME=“DESCRIPTION” CONTENT=“A consideration of some problems with Christianity first considered by Bertrand Russell.”>
From Wednesday 4 July 2007, the meta description is copied into visibility as the “Abstract”. The anguish of the thought police can now cease and they may sleep softly and with no disquiet.
