Truth
The Practical Meaning of Christianity
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, April 29, 1999
Christianity
The faith of the early Christians could be classified as protective magic. The bishops taught that believers, as favourites of their almighty Father in heaven, were protected from the common ills of life. Who could object to being taken care of by a power that is wiser and kinder than man—a heavenly father?
It is a comforting thought which becomes more comforting the harder the times. At any moment of weakness or peril, the benign father will reach out to strengthen you morally or rescue you from danger. Mere mortals would seem absurdly independent or even churlish to refuse any such help. The seductiveness of this faith is why it has lasted so long and has been so hard to overcome. But is it true? Having put our trust in such a power, suppose, just when we were desperate for help, we were to find that it was an illusion.
A moment free of the blinkers of “belief”, a moment of thought, shows it is an illusion. It is not true! Saying that God loves mankind is mankind’s conceit. To believe in a sentient creator and one which loves mankind, we have to wonder how He can allow our loved ones to be killed in floods or earthquakes, or road accidents, or disease. Three children were killed when their school bus went over a cliff—the nine badly injured survivors were rescued from a precarious position halfway down the precipice. The headmaster of the school said, “Thank God it wasn’t worse!” A poor black woman scrambles around the rubble of her New Orleans hut, saying to the cameraman, “Thank God! Thank God, I’m alive!” Thousands were not, and myriads were homeless, but they thank God for it. A couple on holiday, whose three years old daughter was abducted, attended daily the local church to pray to God for her return. An almighty and omniscient God knows everything, and could have stopped it, but did not. The abduction was His will. How then is praying going to help?
No human being has ever been taken care of by a superior power or snatched by it from danger or death. To believe it is an infantile delusion. When people are saved, they are mostly saved by other human beings who often risk their own lives to do it. When people need spiritual comfort it mostly comes from other people being compassionate. Occasionally people are saved or strengthened by good luck or are strengthened by a spontaneous vision of the beauty of Nature. They might mistake this for the help of a god or guardian angel but it is more convincingly explained by the laws of statistics.
The Son of God told his followers that, because their heavenly Father fed the fowls of the air, He would take better care of them. Jesus also taught that the heavenly Father would give everything to them that ask. Early Christians were inclined to take this advice literally which is presumably how it was intended, give up work and trust to begging for a living. Paul the apostle had to warn them not to. For all he too advocated prayer, he did not believe praying—rather than a pay packet—would buy a single crust or pay the rent.
Today, though there are over a billion Christians, few trust to God and prayer to stay alive. Many well educated ones have even accepted that there is more chance of learning something useful by studying physics or microbiology than by praying or studying the bible. Nevertheless, they bring their children up, as they were, to believe Christian fantasies.
Putting Faith to the Test
Can anyone show that they have had a good thing by asking their Father in heaven for it? Children might believe it, though usually the gift came from a thoughtful parent or kind aunt, not from God. Though asking a heavenly father has been a fixation for hundreds of years, relatives and friends usually do the giving, not God! Ah, but God made the friend give it, Christians will say, immediately insulting their loved ones and expunging spontaneous human kindness from Nature.
Have Christians had any immunity from danger that others have not had? Do they live in defiance of the laws of Nature? Are Christians treated by the forces of the universe differently from the way others are? Are they blessed with any gift that is not shared by others? Do these questions require any reply? The laws of Nature apply to everyone equally within the bounds of the normal distribution. Christians are subject to these same laws of Nature and the same normal distribution.
They cannot either defy those laws or act independently of them. A Christian who leaps from a cliff has no more or less chance of surviving the fall than an infidel. Some bizarre sects believe otherwise, but most Christians, suffering sickness, do not trust to prayer but send for a doctor. The truth is that Christians appeal no more to belief to solve practical problems than does an atheist. They do not appeal to their faith to pass an exam but to the effectiveness of study. They do not appeal to prayer to bake a soufflé but to practical experience of cooking one. Why? Prayer does not work, practice does.
There is not a Christian in the world who will put the faith of Jesus to the test and drink a glass of deadly poison with impunity. If people should happen to volunteer for the test, there is not a civilized government that would let them do it. The pious volunteers would be certified mad and restrained, quite rightly, because no one can defy the laws of Nature and get away with it.
Christian Joy
Christians are constantly telling how happy their religion makes them, how happy they feel since they found Jesus. It must be true. There is no reason to disbelieve them. What then has Jesus done for them, that they should be so happy? They will answer that they have been saved, that their souls have been rescued from destruction. Some of us might wonder why they needed to be saved or why their souls were in any danger of destruction, but consider what it means to the Christian in terms of happiness. Christians are happy on their own individual account alone. They rejoice in their own good fortune. They are pleased to think that they are out of the reckoning for hell fire.
Christians are obsessed with their souls. All of them are determined at any price to save their own souls and, it seems nothing else is so important. This is not surprising. They believe that by saving it they will die then be resurrected to live forever in bliss. If they do not save it they will die and stay dead or worse, might be resurrected to live forever agonized in a pit of burning sulphur. So for Christians the condition of their souls, especially after they have died, is paramount.
The Christian’s happiness is a purely selfish feeling. In their exultation is no thought of another’s condition, of another’s lot. If some are saved, others are lost, for all do not accept the Christian faith, all do not find Jesus. In fact the Christian depends upon others not being saved to be happy. What joy would their be for them if everyone was automatically saved. Christians can only be happy while knowing that others are in peril. They can exult over their own salvation because others are going to destruction.
Who can credit such beliefs? Their concentration on their individual souls can have no other result than to make them selfish. While anyone is thinking about their own soul it follows that they are not thinking about anything else. Truly saintly people do not think about themselves or their souls but how they can help the condition of the world and the creatures that live in it.
Among those creatures are their fellow human beings. For one to be happy while knowing that a brother or sister is lost shows a hard, selfish, cruel heart. It is a fiendish happiness, a devilish joy. The loving heart is happiest in the joy of those it loves. It is happy in seeing others happy, but there could be no joy for it to be saved while those it loved were lost.
Christianity is a heartless religion, a cruel faith, a selfish scheme, and it is for those who care about being saved because others are lost. Seeking personal salvation can only mean accepting God’s crutl punishment of others.
A Dishonest Religion
The Christian might protest that the soul is saved precisely by unselfish actions. But the Christian that says that is being dishonest—holding double standards—or is ignorant of Christianity. Paul the apostle insisted that the soul was saved of the person that merely believed in the resurrected Christ. What Paul said would be unimportant if Christianity was founded on the teaching of Jesus who they called the Christ. It is not. It is based on Paul’s teaching.
Christians talk constantly of how good Jesus was, yet the only condition placed on salvation is not goodness but simply that they believe. It is the easiest way possible to save a soul—and build a following! It requires minimal effort and no brains which is why Christianity has remained popular, especially among the simple and unsophisticated, for two thousand years. It follows that Christians only pay lip service to righteousness. We cannot even be surprised that many Christians in history have been wicked. Even the church in history was wicked. Perhaps it still is!
Christianity is institutionalized fraud. It pretends to save people’s souls. Naturally its workers, variously called priests, vicars, ministers, fathers, bishops and so on, have to be fed and the gullible congregations are invited to feed them. They do this willingly—a small price to pay for eternal peace.
Does the church save people from a hell hereafter? How are we to know whether it does or not? The church has made this promise to save us for long enough, but it has never had to show that it can actually saves souls. It has not shown us a single soul that it has saved, nor can it say for a fact that a single soul has been saved. Where is the soul that has escaped the fate of hell through the efficacy of faith in Jesus? If this is not confidence trickery, it is hard to know what is.
Is it not time that the church showed that it can do what it claims to do? Either the church should let us see what it is selling or it should admit it is bankrupt. It could begin by proving that we have a soul and that it needs saving. Anything less than this is deception, is imposition, is false pretence.
Would you buy a used car from a man who refused to let you see it? The priest is a man who claims to deal in the affairs of another world for which he demands pay in this world, but he does not show that he carries out his part of the agreement. Men have been paying the priest for thousands of years, for doing what it is impossible to prove has been, or can be, done. Can anything more stupid than this be imagined?
Christians sometimes try a prudent argument:
Perhaps there is no hell, but if there is, the cost of not believing is so great, it is safer to believe.
It assumes either there is a hell or there is not, that Christianity is the only religion on option. What if Islam is the true religion and Mohammed the true prophet as the Moslems believe? If so, the Christians are infidels and are headed for hell fire despite their misguided piety.
Buddhism is a far older religion than Christianity. What if that is right? Do Christians worry that they might be reincarnated as a sheep because they falsely worship a lamb, or a blood corpuscle because they spent their whole lives drinking hypothetical blood? It is certain that Christians never give such questions a thought. They are so utterly indoctrinated, they are incapable of considering any other possibility.
The business of saving peoples’ souls is a cheat, a fraud. Every priest and minister who preaches that mankind can be saved from hell hereafter by believing in Jesus, or anybody else, is preaching what they are unable to prove, and doing it for the money. The church is cheating people, defrauding them, practising upon their ignorance, their superstition, their fear. Religion, as far as it relates to any other life than this, has no foundation. Its God—no one knows anything about. Its heaven and hell—no one has ever seen, nor does anyone know where they are. The only thing that the church has saved so far is itself. The whole business is caboodle.
The Joys of Hell
What are people to be saved from? The eternal fires of hell. Possibly nothing inflicts more intense pain than fire. Yet the Christian vision of the punishment of sinners is eternal incineration—they are burnt excruciatingly forevermore.
To conceive of everlasting torture by fire, is so perverted and sadistic, it is hard to believe that Christians want to tell their children about it. There is a limit to the endurance of pain. Intense pain is impossible to endure for more than a short time. Exhaustion and unconsciousness relieve the agony when it can no longer be borne. If God was the creator, he deliberately made this so, to prevent intolerable suffering. So, if God has made a place called hell, He has deliberately removed the protection He has given His animal creations on earth. If hell exists, God is a wicked sadist.
How does God judge that we should go to hell? Medieval churchmen decided that certain single acts of wrongdoing—in their judgement—meant hell fire, and to begin the process they burnt the person on earth. So can a single deed in our lives cause our despatch to hell? What then of those people who began as sinners but repented? Was their repentance of no consequence? People often try to assuage the guilt of wrongdoing by doing right. Does God judge us on this balance? How fine is the balance? The concept of hell and its eternal fires seems too severe a punishment for any arbitrary decision. It is illogical. It is untrue.
Christians say confession is good for the soul. Is it? A court of law takes an opposite view. Accused people are not free to incriminate themselves by confession alone. Corroborating evidence is needed because courts know that people can have motives for confessing other than guilt. Why does the Catholic church place so much emphasis on confession? Why does it demand that, in the name of God and the threat of hell fire, we should expose our indiscretions? It pretends it wants to save us but, in truth, it wants to enslave us. It has the entertaining side effect of giving voyeuristic pleasure to the priest. In short, confessing is good for the church.
What is the source of the anxiety of Christians for their souls? The answer is that they mistake their souls for guilt. The churches, especially the Roman church, is well aware of this and cultivate it assiduously. Everyone feels guilt. It comes of living with other human beings and having to tailor our behaviour to do so amicably. Our parents teach us how to behave introducing guilt into our lives and the priesthood exploits it. It is time people realized this.
Christians say we should call Jesus lord and master. The priesthood tells us that this is to prevent us from becoming too arrogant. We must humble ourselves before the humblest man who ever lived—if he is a man—Christians always tell us he is a god. This deference to a lord and master is really yet another sad anachronism of Christianity. Mankind struggled for long to be free of lords and masters yet, because Christianity retains the verbiage of earlier times, they still have to prostrate themselves as if to an Eastern potentate. It is not surprising for the Eastern potentate is the model for God. He no longer exists even in Byzantium but the priests still manipulate his image from behind the altar like the Wizard of Oz.
So, Christians regard Jesus as their lord and master. Do they therefore obey his commands? Do they give everything they have to the poor? Do they regard the latter day Pharisees, the priests, as hypocrites? Do they turn the other cheek? Indeed why are they Christians at all? Didn’t Jesus say he was sent for the children of Israel alone? If they are men, they should be circumcised and join the religion of their lord and master.
Maybe this is why the church does not enforce the precepts of Jesus. The members would finish up as Jews or opt for something easier than either religion. Jesus said his followers should be perfect but what is perfect about disciples who ignore the precepts of their lord and master.
Queer Beliefs
Consider just a few of the queer beliefs of the Christians.
- God is in three parts but it is really only one—the Trinity.
- Jesus’s mother was a virgin and he was the only begotten son of his infinite father, God.
- Jesus died but was resurrected into the self same body that a day before had been dead.
- Jesus and his disciples had the power to perform miracles by breaking the laws of Nature.
People who do not believe these are not saved and go into hell where they are burnt eternally. People who believe it go into a balmy place called heaven where they can live in bliss for eternity. God has personally supervised the recording of this information in a book called the bible so that everyone can learn how to be saved and avoid being burnt forever. Christians say they are so concerned in case anyone should be burnt forever that they want to make us all believe these beliefs.
Yet these are queer beliefs. They defy reason. Could any intelligent person believe such queer things? Doubtless many Christians are not intelligent—not everyone can be. Ignorant Christians belief because they are scared and know no better and the Christian priesthood are delighted about that. Many Christians however are intelligent and are educated, including most priests. Why then do they believe the queer things that Christianity depends upon?
The conclusion can only be that they are dishonest. They know full well that it is all nonsense but have their own motives for pretending to believe it. How can anyone respect the honesty of people who seem to believe what an intelligent person thinks is absurd? It is impossible to reconcile faith in Christian superstitions with both intelligence and honesty.
The whole of our direct experience in life disproves Christian doctrine. Nobody has ever been resurrected from death. Modern science, from its careful study of Nature is finding ways of resuscitating people from the edge of death, but no one has ever been definitely dead for over a day and been resurrected—except Jesus.
That is the proof, the Christian will say. But for any sceptic to accept such proof, it would have to be scrupulously documented—and since it is such a singular miracle, surely we can expect that it was. It was not, even though the book in which it was recorded, the bible, was effectively the work of God himself. An intelligent person has real cause to deny the Christian claims.
Why do Christians accept them? Why do they profess a faith that is absurd and foolish and that has no foundation in fact or philosophy? The answer can only be that they hope to gain something from it.
For the officials of the religion, the motive is obvious. They get a good living for work which is far from hard. For evangelical, charismatic preachers, the motive is again the income they can get for putting on entertainments that impress and gull the simple. For ordinary lay Christians, the motive remains the same. They make valuable contacts by attending church and because the saved are smug about having avoided the fires of hell they like to stick together as a brotherhood, a fellowship or a communion, as they like to call it.
It becomes a network of dishonesty in which people agree to help each other contrary to objective merit. It is like the Old School Tie, the Freemasons and the military—they always help their own.
Creeds are out of date. For people to believe only what their parents believed makes education useless, evolution pointless and existence static. Is life to be merely repeated unchanged? Creeds are unchanging, static, pointless and useless. They fetter the mind and enslave the heart. Truth springs from the mind and love from the heart. When a dissenter challenges a creed and is burnt at the stake, love and truth are burnt too.
A creed keeps the mind from inquiry. Inquiry means asking questions. Questions imply doubt, and doubt is the death of faith. People obliged to believe fixed doctrines are not free to ask questions. When spouters of the creed find a truth contradicting dogma, they strangle truth to preserve dogma.
That is the character of Christianity. Reject it! Search for truth fearlessly! No authority that strangles truth can be obeyed. If people believed in improving the world, in helping people, in accepting that we are subjects not lords of Nature, gamekeepers not poachers, then they would have a sensible creed, a modern creed.
