I'm an atheist. I was raised religious and still have numerous Christian theists in my life.
The Bible is the best argument against Christianity.
At every turn, and in a myriad of contexts, whether to dunk and prove a point, or to insert a conflicting argument that will actually make a religious person think, knowing the Bible has been of great personal value to me. I'll make some posts in the coming weeks to discuss some of the points below that I'd like to share more deeply on. This post is trying to make the case that the Bible is the weak spot in the Christian armor. Theists wriggle when you make them explain their own book.
The whole text is daunting. It is supposed to be. The Bible is confusing, disjointed, sometimes scary, violent, and obscene, other times mind numbingly boring. Unapproachable by rank and file Christians without "help interpreting." Christians of all faiths cherry pick parts to justify their beliefs. "Bible study" is the vehicle that each denomination uses to teach and justify their specific beliefs.
But, whether you are early in deconversion, halfway there, or fully awake, you can look to the Bible and find tons of evidence against any of Christianity being real, grounded in fact, or believable at all. Taken as a whole, and not cherry picking verses, the Bible can be understood, in it's context.
I challenge any believer or non believer to read the entire Bible, using any realistic, scholarly translation. When something doesn't fit or doesn't make sense, research it. It blows my mind how shaky the Bible is while reading any book completely, especially remembering that this is the justification for the entire religion.
Start at the beginning, really studying it, and you will realize modern Christians do like 10% of what "God commanded" in the OT. They offhandedly disregard the rest as old Jewish nonsense and simultaneously use the 10% they do hold on to justify hating anyone that loves someone that's not approved. I'm not in favor of letting people get away with that. Want to quote Leviticus to justify homophobia? Explain why wearing mixed fabrics, eating shellfish, and getting Jesus tattoos.
The OT is crazy all the way through. If I started listing all the things the OT condones that are objectively immoral by modern standards, it would be its own (very long) post.
Even better, look at the NT. If you are already deconverted, and have people around you that still believe, this is bread and butter. Many of the tactics Christians use to dismiss valid arguments about the OT won't work on the NT.
Some of my favorites from the NT (feel free to comment with any of your favorites I may have missed):
-
The gospels were written long after Jesus would have lived by people that lived after Jesus died (not the apostles that they're named after). They were written in a language no apostle would have spoken (Greek instead of Aramaic).
-
The apostles don't match each other on critical points of the Christ story. Read from crucifixion through the tomb to resurrection in each of the 4 gospels and you will see what I mean. Try to make a list of "facts" from each and compare. Why are they wildly different?
-
Paul: 13 of the 27 books of the NT (nearly half) are attributed to Paul but even Christian scholars have to admit that at least 3, and probably 6 of those 13 are written by someone else claiming to be Paul. The Bible has Jesus dying 33 CE. The writings of Paul are 15 years to 34 years later. Paul's writings are the foundations of most of modern Christian thinking. Christians gloss over the shaky historicity of Paul's writings. These books were written specifically to create a religion from the cult that had sprung up around them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_epistles#Authenticity
-
Revelation: Oft quoted and preached on to instill fear in the audience. Christians completely misunderstand this book in context. First, Revelation is written somewhere 81-96 CE, ~50 years past the crucifixion. The author, John of Patmos, is not an apostle either. Just done guy in exile, named John. It matches a literary style common at the time where apocalypse was the theme. It is a deeply symbolic work and is clearly about the Roman empire, and the writers problems with it, if you give it any serious study. Revelation is not, and cannot be a prophecy for many reasons, the biggest being over kill. Logically read, the earth is totally devastated 3 or 4 times over. By the middle of the book everyone on earth would already be dead. Revelation 6 has the Sun going black and the stars falling from the sky to the earth, by chapter 8 the sea is poison. 22 chapters total and there is enough destruction to kill us all at least 3 or 4 times before the halfway point. Read up on apocalyptic literature of the time. It is all intended to be code so that the author can condemn and talk shit about his enemies in a way that won't get him killed in court (John of Patmos, the author, is already in enough trouble with Rome at the writing to be living in exile, and yet the work is shit talking against Rome). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalyptic_literature
Thanks for reading. However, I don't ever want to be confidently incorrect. Please tell me if you disagree with anything and I'd love to hear what others think is important, relevant to this topic. Expand please. Teach me something.
Wow! I said "teach me something" and you delivered. Thank you. I didn't know any of this and want to dig in now. Have a good reference for me to start with on the subject of Lucretius?
Honestly the best resource is to read his poem.
This is a very digestible modern translation.
If you want a book more about the context of the work and its rediscovery, The Swerve did win a Pulitzer.
But most summary discussion of Leucretius is focused on the Epicurean philosophy and its attitudes on death and hedonism, and gloss over or even don't mention things like that it's the only extant work from antiquity to explicitly describe natural selection:
Or nearly nailed Mendelian trait inheritance:
They got a number of things wrong as well, but it's a pretty remarkable work and worth reading through if you have any interest in the history of scientific theory and thought. It's pretty wild we still learn Aristotle in school (largely the result of the church favoring Plato and Aristotle's embracing of intelligent design) when the Epicureans had such a better picture in retrospect.
Holy shit. That's crazy! It sounds like that they had evolution figured out more than halfway, thousands of years before Darwin. I'm reading more now but others won't and I admit ignorance here. What happened that kept this idea from continuing to grow?
Yeah, it's pretty wild. I had no idea the theory was that explicit that long ago until digging into this myself, and one of the biggest hurdles in even seriously discussing the more nuanced stuff and the connection of these philosophical ideas with later Christian sects declared heretical is getting past the almost instinctual rejection of the notion that this was understood back then.
They didn't have the science or experimental evidence to back it up, but luckily the quotes from the material are detailed enough that it's pretty clear they had a great grasp on the theory itself.
As for what happened to prevent its growth, the answer is religion, and in large part Christianity.
Even at the time, the idea of naturalism/evolution over intelligent design was a minority view with most people favoring Plato's intelligent design in Timaeus or their respective religious creation myth. With the rise of Neoplatonism in the 2nd century CE, Epicureanism fell further in popularity.
Then after the Roman empire became Christian, differing opinions became much more dangerous. In fact the only surviving copy of this poem was being eaten by worms in a monastery when the secretary of the Pope bribed a monk to liberate it back to his pre-Renaissance book club.
You can see early church authors call out Lucretius and Epicurus by name when they dismiss their ideas, such as Lacanthus from the 3rd century CE, here dismissing the idea things randomly came together without design from atoms:
So if the godly Christian writers are making such compelling arguments against those nearly atheistic philosophers, and heresy is a bad thing to be kept away from the people that it might lead them astray...well those books and ideas need to be shut away.
The hostility towards them was around even in Jesus's day among Jews. In the late 1st century CE the Talmud had a quote from a Rabbi Elezar saying "why do we study the Torah? To know how to answer the Epicurean." And over the years the word for Epicurean even ends up becoming the word for 'atheist.'
So you just had a time when it wasn't clear what was true and what was false. And rather than keeping both around (like weeds and wheat when you don't know which is which) people were self-assured that they knew Leucretius was wrong and that their intelligent design ideas were right, and effectively uprooted it from history. Just ever so barely failing to erase it completely.
But yeah, I often think about how the world might look if ideas like light being made up of tiny indivisible parts moving quickly (what Einstein won his Nobel proving) or evolution had been continuously considered for 2,000 years instead of shuttered up and forgotten for 1,600 years until being rediscovered in just the past few centuries.
I suspected it was Christianity that killed it, using the power of Rome. There have been similar knowledge purges in other religions/cultures also. Pretty frequent. It's this general idea that makes me resent religions and the religious. It was when I started to realize how much religion held society back from progress, and how much it stifled individual freedoms and personal agency that I began to get a bit bitter against it.
I really enjoyed everything you wrote on this post. I'd invite you to make some posts of your own in this community too. I always want to learn more and you sound like you've gone down some rabbit holes.