It's true

Many of you have heard that I left the Church recently. Yes, it's true. I'm sure a number of you are curious as to why. I'm strapped for time right now, but I thought I'd include a copy of an email that I sent to a friend a couple weeks ago:

Hey Phil,
I know that was probably a shock for you but I needed to be honest. I
made the decision on July 12 after a long process.
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First of all, I need to tell you that I did not decide to reject
Christianity for some painful experience in the church. Nor was it the
desire to rebel, "live a life of sin," or escape the shackles of
religion. Also, don't say, "he must not have ever been a real
Christian then," because I truly believed and followed the teachings
attributed to Jesus and Paul. I made this decision based purely on
reason and my understandings of history, science, and Christianity
itself. This was by no means an easy process and has been quite
painful at times.

I grew up in a Christian home and accepted Jesus as a young child. My
first doubts regarding Christianity occurred in high school biology
class, where we learned about evolution. Like most young Christians,
but like Paul teaches us to do, I tried to discount this science as
well as I could, though this doubt remained in the back of my mind.

And as I took college courses in biology, geology, psychology I began
to see scientific truths that I couldn't deny, even though they didn't
agree with what I was taught in the bible an church. I began to wonder
if any of my religious experiences could be explained solely in terms
of God and the Holy Spirit, and I began to see that everything I've
seen and felt could have a natural cause. But it wasn't until I began
to examine the bible itself that I began to experience substantial
doubts.

Of course I'd struggled with the typical philosophical questions like,
"would a loving God really send people to hell?" I did my best to
answer them in as Calvinistic manner as possible, thinking that God
has reasons for everything, and we can't understand it all. But I
never really got the statement that "God doesn't need anything but he
designed us to give him glory."

Anyhow, during Mayday Aaron was preaching about Jesus' regard (or
disregard) for the law. One moment we see Jesus telling his disciples
that he didn't come to abolish the law and that it's still important,
and the next we see him defending his disciples and downplaying the
law when they are picking seeds in the fields (a crime punishable by
death). Wait, I thought Jesus perfectly upheld and fulfilled the law,
yet he disregarded it and even seemed to hate it. Furthermore, the
prophet Isaiah said that God "has no pleasure in the blood of bulls
and lambs and goats." I was sick of people attempting to downplay such
passages and say God has no pleasure in these things "compared to this
or that." The language in the passage couldn't be stronger. In fact,
he calls these things evil. So I asked myself, "did God or man write
the book of Leviticus?" The next morning I opened to Jeremiah and read
through 7:21-23: Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: "Add
your burnt offerings to your sacrifices, and eat the flesh. For in the
day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, I did not speak to
your fathers or command them concerning burnt offerings and
sacrifices. But this command I gave them: 'Obey my voice, and I will
be your God, and you shall be my people. And walk in all the way that
I command you, that it may be well with you.'

Well, I was shocked and I realized that either the book of Leviticus
or Jeremiah was untrue. God wouldn't give us a law and then deny that
he had done it (unless we completely misunderstand God). At that time
I was inclined to the side of Jeremiah, since Jesus seemed to regard
the prophets above the laws. Perhaps the passage in Isaiah which
speaks of trampling God's temple and polluting it with bloody
sacrifices evoked Jesus' outrage at the people in the temple who were
selling animals to be sacrificed.

This led me to the realization that ANY book of the bible could be
false, despite always being taught that the bible was harmonious and
contained no real contradictions. People were deluding themselves and
twisting logic in order to hold onto this archaic belief, and I wanted
to look at the Bible objectively and dig in to find what was true and
what was false. But this was what finally gave me leeway to begin
criticizing the bible and seeing all of the faults and contradictions
I had tried to ignore or justify for so long. I finally decided to
look at Christianity from an objective, logical point of view to see
if I could believe it, rather than using (and twisting) reason in
order to back up a conclusion I had already arrived at. I knew that
people from every other successful religion were able to do that! What
made Christianity more true?

How could I know that my religion was the right one? Through pure
reason? That wouldn't work, since Paul himself said that the things of
God are foolishness to the wisdom of men. How about my experiences? We
as humans are amazingly adept at manufacturing memories and creating
images in our mind in order to believe we're having a religious
experience. Some of the strongest "religious experiences" I've had
were at secular rock concerts, where the sound and lights and beauty
of the music overwhelmed my senses. How about the success of the
religion? Popularity doesn't make something true, as we all know. The
ability of a religion to win converts and keep them could speak to its
crafters' genius and the methods of mind control it employs (look up
"meme" on Wikipedia.org).

How about history and archaeology? This is where the Bible really gets
into trouble. For instance, there's no archaeological evidence of a
massive Jewish empire during the time that David and Solomon were
supposed to rule. Historically, Judaism can be seen as a natural
progression from earlier, polytheistic religions into a monotheistic
one as other religious were experiencing the same trends. In fact, we
see elements of all sorts of previous religions in the bible, from
animal sacrifices, to the progression in life after death from "sheol"
to "heaven and hell" and the transition of Satan from being God's evil
henchman and accuser of men to the beast/dragon/devil/prince of
darkness and God's main opponent. This duality (God vs. Devil), which
was a new idea in the New Testament, seems to have been introduced by
Zoroastrianism, a persian religion that evolved in to Christianity's
main competitor in Rome. And furthermore, we have no reliable
historical evidence that the Jesus of the bible even existed!
Josephus' testimony? A clear forgery, despite what the apologists
would have us think.

Then there was the issue of prophecy. Jesus was supposed to have
fulfilled all sorts of prophecies from the old testament. First of
all, many of these "prophecies" didn't appear as prophecies or were
explicitly regarding different people or places. The gospel of Matthew
even made the blunder of misinterpreting the prophecy about Jesus on
the donkey riding into Jerusalem. Matthew has him riding on two
donkeys because he seemingly misunderstood "he rides on a donkey, even
the foal of a donkey" (sorry, this is a paraphrase... you can look it
up) to mean "he rides on a donkey and its foal" so Jesus awkwardly
rides into Jerusalem somehow straddling two donkeys!

No matter how hard they try, biblical apologists fail to convince the
rational mind as they attempt to reconcile passages that clearly
contradict each other. I finally came to the point where I decided
that it wasn't wise to believe something simply for the sake that I
wanted to believe something. When I say I seek the truth, I really
mean it, and this is more important to me in life than being
comfortable and having everything decided for me by a religion. A
religion that can't even agree with itself whether we can go to heaven
if we don't give all our money away. Paul doesn't even seem to know
Jesus' teachings (which makes sense, since many scholars believe he
wrote his letters before the gospels were written). He seemed ignorant
of the idea that Jesus was born of a virgin (and he even said that he
was born of man, the seed of David).

Anyway, this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are countless other
reasons, and many sources on the internet for information like I
mentioned. Simply google "bible atrocities" for an overview of
genocides supposedly endorsed by a loving God, or "biblical
contradictions" to see some hardly reconcilable idiosyncrasies. Also,
religioustolerance.org offers an overview of the bible from a
historical viewpoint and exchristian.net has a huge archive of
"anti-testimonies" of former christians. Most of these stories bear
striking resemblances to mine. This site also has links to a number of
other sites related to a skeptical or atheistic view of Christianity
and other religions.

Well, there's my explanation. I know it's long but I could write a
book about it. I hope this communicates my though process. Like I
said, I really enjoyed the time I spent making music with you, and
I'll definitely miss that. Take care.

Sincerely,
Chris

Anyway, I'll be posting more as time goes on and my summer school lets up a bit.


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