The Antichristian Phenomenon

In the previous article I made references to this site: http://www.everystudent.com/, which brings forth new and modern “arguments” for the existence of god, and why is Jesus the only way for eternal happiness.

This second part is centered on two main aspects: the nature of the Christian faith and the incredible and grotesque lie in the context of Christianity- “free will”.

This article in particular caught my attention: http://www.everystudent.com/wires/twokinds.html

For me, this says it all about the TRUE nature of the Christians and their “faith”. So, it is not about being happy, altruistic, finding peace in your heart, adhering to a lifestyle that would give you joy. It is exactly the opposite. It is about forcing yourself to believe something and to adhere to some rules that don’t have any meaning to you, struggling daily with natural urges that you try to deny and blame on “the Devil”, a ville oppression against your own mind and spirit, and, most of all, a speculative and opportunistic  way of living.

You heard right: Christianity is the most egoistic, opportunistic and oppressive of beliefs. It has nothing to do with “compassion, love, altruism”. The true essence of Christianity is as follows: give up your own beliefs, your own free thought, your own mind and  bodily urges in order to adhere to a belief system, to some external rules and thinking ways, written in an ancient book. Why? Because it is SAFER ! Because you don’t want to risk going to hell or whatever after you die.

In my opinion, this is the worse case of weakness and of fear of taking responsibility for your actions. Ever since Pascal brought into discussion his (in)famous wager, it has since been used by Christians as a POWERFUL and INDESTRUCTIBLE argument for believing in their god.

Of course, the infantile nature of this argument is so evident that it is more like a source of humor and comedy, than an argument of any kind. The Christians have the incredible courage to say that (even if they were to accept the obvious- that there is no proof for the biblical claims) there is a 50% chance for their god to be existent and that it is a safer bet to accept him in order to avoid eternal punishment. What the Christians forget (or maybe don’t know, since many like to live in ignorance, as a requirement of their christ) are the other thousands of religions that have the same roots and similar myths, just like Christianity. And many also appeared way before the bible did. So why is this Jehowa more special than other gods? The real chance for the Christian god to exist (if we were to accept this wager) is actually somewhere around 0.001%.

Another outraging thing about this way of thinking is that Christians claim that “if there is no god, they have really lost nothing”. And here is where I ask: what about those countless and worthless hours of worship,  the fact that you denied what you loved the most, that you let go of your true convictions in order to become the slave of some nebulous beliefs and of a system demanded by an idol, non-existent god ? That sounds pretty much like ruining your spiritual integrity, and still you say that you have nothing to lose.

Anyway, back to my point: the Christian moral system and faith, although it may look shiny and polished on the outside (to some, at least) is no more than a rotten carrion on the inside. A terminal disease for your mind, not a cure. You are actually forcing yourself to engage in acts that have no meaning to you. The so-called good deeds are really nothing but shallow, heartless acts, done out of fear.

Such is the true nature of Christianity.

Now, about the second part, the free-will. References: http://www.everystudent.com/journeys/yesno.html

Well, this was really (initially) a desperate attempt to explain the fact that people engage in harming acts, even though they were supposedly created in a perfect world, by a perfect creator. Even worse, a noble and vital aspect in a person’s development- free will- that is being in control of your mind in order to follow your own path and build your own system in life, is systematically turned into a weapon that inflicts guilt. Because our evil free-will, we keep bringing plagues upon this world. It is because our free-will, because we do not let the Great Nonexistent govern us and because we want to follow our OWN belief-system in life, that natural disaster, wasting diseases, famine, deaths etc happen. If someone is dying painfully from a terrible disease, remember that WE are responsible for it, because we use our free will to refuse to subscribe to jesus.

That’s how Christianity works, and that’s what free-will is in Christian teachings- the greatest source of evil.

Of course, these theologians still want us to think that god is reasonable, he is a democratic ruler, not some tyrant who rules with an iron fist, but a permissive god who lets us choose if we want to follow him or not, to believe in him, or not. Yet, immediately afterward, they offer another example, of what will happen to those who do not follow god- that is they will burn…in HELL !!!! This makes Stalin, for example,  look like a very sympathetic figure indeed. He didn’t force anyone to adhere to the misery creating fantasy of a system that he brought. You could have easily chosen to be a dizident those days. Of course, you might have also very well ended up in the Gulag, along with your whole family as a result of this. The Christian god is no different than this. How can anyone have the nerve to talk about you being allowed free will, as long as there is a gun pointed towards your head ?

In conclusion, free will and Christianity are two aspects that can never be put in the same room. For us irreligious people,  free will is the boosting engine for our own mental progress. In Christianity, free will is the root of all evil.

Anyway, that’s all for today. I don’t know if there will be any third part to this. I’ll keep on writing more articles independent from this “under siege thing”.

PS: Myth on the same step with the law of gravitation ? HAHAHAHAHA

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I have been reading many debates between irreligious and religious people concerning the argument of intelligent design. These debates, from what i have seen, are endless, because neither side has the sufficient arguments in order to finish off the other. And so, these debates go on, but with the religious side always having a moral advantage, because of the incapability of the others to disproof their claims. Before i start explaining further, it should be noted that when i’m referring to “religious” i mean the supporters of the three dominant religions: christianity, islamism and judaism. Since i live in a christian environment, i shall use the word “christianity” as a key-word for all three religions.

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In the previous installment of this series I ended at the destruction of Sodom. The rest of Genesis contains some stories about the descendants of Abraham down to Jacob, father of twelve sons who would later become the fathers of the twelve Israeli tribes living in Egypt that would later find themselves enslaved: Prepair for the book of Exodus.

However, before we enter Moses, I’d like to write out some general conclusions I have made from reading Genesis. These mainly concern the biblical god (”God”). Although Christians often portray him as an altruist, the god I’ve read about is definitely not. He appoints Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as his servants and demands they act like it if they want the Lord to help them. We’ll see the same kind of egoism in Exodus, but that’s for later. The thing I was annoyed with the most in Genesis is that right in the first book it is made clear that one is not to question the Lord. The stories of the Flood and Abraham almost sacrificing his son illustrate this very well. Noach and Abraham never stop to think about the motives of this authority figure. Questioning authority is a cornerstone in skeptical freethinking. I will also note that God will make damn sure that he gets his fix of destruction while still upholding a forgiving and good-willed façade. God: “I will not utterly destroy a city if just ONE of its inhabitants is innocent of crimes I will not disclose! … Quick, Job, get out so I can destroy the city!”

Enter Moses
I’m sure you’ve heard the story. The pharao has commanded all first-borns to be killed, but Moses’ mother hides her baby in a basket along the bank of the Nile. The pharao’s daughter takes little Moses in and so he is able to grow up. After killing an Egyptian for beating a Hebrew he flees to Midian where he is taken in by Reuel/Jethro and is given Zipporah, one of Jethro’s daughters, as his wife. Some time passes before god has satisfied his sadistic needs and decided it’s time to free “his people” - meaning those unlucky enough to have born in one of the Israeli tribes, having to undergo genital mutilation after birth - and Moses is appointed his side-kick. Moses fears he lacks charismatic skills and God agrees and commends Aaron to join his brother Moses. Moses, his wife Zipporah and his children travel to Egypt. Along the way, the famous foreskin incident takes place, in which Moses is saved from God’s wrath by his son’s foreskin.

Exodus 4:24-26
At a lodging place on the way, the LORD met {Moses} and was about to kill him. But Zipporah took a flint knife, cut off her son’s foreskin and touched {Moses’} feet with it. “Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me,” she said. So the LORD let him alone.

Magic and God’s sick hunger for death
Instead of sitting down and talking like adults, Moses and Aaron are sent by God to show off some magic in the hopes of impressing the pharaoh. It becomes clear freeing the Israeli slaves is not the main objective for God: He simply feel likes showing of his mad skillz (Exodus 6:3-4). And so the show begins. God starts off with his weak staff-into-snake routine the pharaoh’s sorcerers (yes, that’s what it says!) are able to replicate. The water-into-blood routine was likewise equalled by the pharaoh’s magicians. The same happens for the plague of frogs. Finally God brought something new into his act, and transformed the dust into gnats through his proxies Moses and Aaron. Still, the pharaoh didn’t let the Israeli people go. Flies ensued and boils that plagued men and cattle alike. The pharaoh began to understand he was no match for God, but God made sure he could continue his sadistic act until the very end by preventing the pharaoh let the people go (Exodus 9:12).

And so God enjoyed himself greatly, raining hail down on Egypt. “Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his officials so that I may perform these miraculous signs of mine among them that you may tell your children and grandchildren how I dealt harshly with the Egyptians and how I performed my signs among them, and that you may know that I am the LORD.” God says in Exodus 10:1-2. The heavenly maniac hasn’t performed his biggest act yet, and among the locusts and darkness he makes sure the pharaoh doesn’t spoil it (Exodus 10:20, 10:27, 11:10). Having made sure it would get this far, God now feels it is time to bring out the fireworks, and kills off all the innocent people who happened to have been the first to leave the womb. God breaks his spell of the pharaoh’s mind and the Israelites are free to go.

God had one more trick up his sleeve, however. By making sure the pharaoh decides to hunt after the Israelites (Exodus 14:4), he can perform one more miracle for the world - a last violent encore to add to the slaughter already committed. He made sure the Israelites didn’t choose the shortest path to the promised land; hell, there wouldn’t be a sea to split along that way! And so, even after the Egyptian slaughter, god’s hunger for death was finally stilled when he drowned the Egyptians after making sure the Israelites were able to traverse the Red Sea.

And returning to my opening paragraph, Exodus accounts again for the fact that God is not altruist at all. As if the gratification of his hunger wasn’t enough, the price for freeing the Hebrew slaves from Egypt was high: God demanded all the firstborn male that would see the light of life thereafter, men and cattle alike, to be his property. This means sacrifice, people. But not to worry, God will make sure you’re kids are fine - for the right price, tha tis. “Redeem with a lamb every firstborn donkey, but if you do not redeem it, break its neck. Redeem every firstborn among your sons.” (Exodus 13:13)

Next up in Reading the Bible Part 3: Commandments and laws

So here it is: The first part to my reading quest. In this article I will comment on Genesis chapters 1-19. All chapters from 11-50 deal with the familiy history of Adam’s direct descendants. Some of these are important characters in biblical mythology, such as Noach and Abraham. Others seem not so much important, and it’s certainly possible that I will jump to the book of Exodus in the next edition of “Reading the Bible”, as the later chapters (for as far as I have read) do not have much interesting to add.

The first chapters of Genesis deal with well-known biblical stories: The creation, the garden of Eden and the tree of knowledge, Noach’s Ark and the flood, Abraham’s deal with God and the destruction of Sodom.

Creation
It was interesting to read the creation story, because it illustrates the pritimive knowledge (or rather: ideas) of the universe the ancient people, among who was the author of Genesis, had. The sky, “heaven”, is portrayed as a half sphere that is placed on top of the earth and which divides the waters of our planet and the waters above the heavens - yes indeed, apparently there is water in space, not a vacuum. In the half sphere that is heaven, God puts up some lamps and among them one big one to rule the day, and a smaller one to rule the night. Not only shows this that the nature of stars wasn’t undestood, but also that there wasn’t a clear distinction between stars and moons. After God has some plants and trees pop up, he creates the animals. In Biblical taxonomy, the main categories are: Birds, fish, wild animals, livestock and creatures that crawl. After all that, God creates man and woman.

In the second book of Genesis, man seems to be created before all flora, and definitely before the wild anmimals and birds. However, I’m not going into every contradiction because I’d never get through the Bible before I turn thirty. I just want to say that I think the accusation that the two creation accounts in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are contradictory is justified.

Eden
Skipping ahead a bit, we’ll get our first share of talking animals: a snake, who seduces Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge. This actually constitutes the first big issue I have with christianity: the negative attitude to knowledge. Incarnations of this meme can be found throughout history, from Galileo Galilei to the modern day creationism crap. God would rather have wanted us to stay ignorant of the world, imprisoned in a garden. Eating from the tree of knowledge constitutes the aspiration to becoming gods - and that’s wrong for some reason. Personally, I encourage this aspiration. When a scientists who was working on genetic manipulation for protein development was asked whether he was playing for god, he answered: “I’m not playing” and it is such an attitude that deserves respect. I can’t wait to go post-human.

In any case, God wasn’t amused and felt threatened. To ensure his totalitarian reign, he punished women by making sure childbirth isn’t fun, and that the men will reign over them. He punished men by making sure they’d have to work hard to stay alive. He ban-kicked Adam and Eve out of Eden, and placed Cherubs with flaming swords (cool!) in East Eden to protect the way to the tree of life; making people wouldn’t live forever.

Noach and the flood
People didn’t live forever, that’s for sure, but I’d say 900 years is pretty close considering our current life expectancy. While the descendants of Adam and Eve were populating the earth and fucking like rabbits, God got more and more pissed off. He decreed that people shouldn’t live more than 120 years. God became sorry that he created humankind, because to him all of them were “bad” for reasons unknown. Luckily, he came up with a solution: Fucking kill them all, and with them all the animals: divine global genocide. God liked Noach though, and commanded him to build a boat too small considering its purpose. He told Noach to bring on board one pair of each animal seven pairs of clean animal and one pair of unclean animals and seven pairs of each kind of bird and NOach agreed and brought on board one pair of each animal seven pairs of clean animals and birds and one pair of unclean animals one pair of each animal. And so, after the flood, Noach and his family and the animals on the earth began the task of repopulating the earth.

Abraham’s deal with God
Following the line of first sons from Noach to Abra(ha)m, who is a strange character. He leads an army and kills off the army that sacked Sodom. When the king of Sodom wants to give Abram a reward, he suddenly turns holy and swears by the lord that he will not take anything, because it isn’t his to take - forgetting the lives of those soldiers he killed a moment ago. God, however, is impressed by Abram and appears to him in a vision and tells him he will bless him. Abram sacrifices some nice cattle too God, who loves dead cattle (Ask Cain!). After the birth of Abram’s first son Ismael, God appears to Abram again and asks him to become his little bitch. First of all, God changes Abram’s name to Abraham. God says he will bless Abraham’s descendants with kingship and furthermore offers Abraham and his descendants a big land. In return, God asks Abraham to cut off the end of his and his descendants penis. In this way, God will have a way to recognize who his has to bless, and who his has to curse. Abraham agreed, and showed great courage but sawing off the end of his penis when he was already 99 years old. He mutilated his extramarital son’s genitals that same day, too.

The destruction of Sodom
God tells Abraham of a serious accusation against Sodom. There is never any mentioning of a jury or judge to either confirm or reject this accusation, because God takes matters in his own hands. He tells that he will destroy Sodom and everybody in it. Abraham asks if God would destroy Sodom even if there was one person innocent in the whole city, and God tells Abraham he would leave the city alone if this would be so. Luckily for the people living in Sodom, Abrahams nephew Lot lives in Sodom, and he is quite innocent indeed. You’d guess there’s no need to worry for the city and its inhabitants because of God’s promise. However, God has a trick up his sleeve. He can’t wait to commit another genocide, and sends two angels to Lot. These angels get Lot out of the city, making way for the sickly murderous God to rain fire and sulphur down on the city.

Other general remarks
One thing that I thought was remarkable was the consequent mentioning of animal (and almost human) sacrifice to God. It shows the connection of OT Christianity with other ancient religion in which such sacrifices were the norm - of course, current day Christianity would rather forget this tradition while still hoping they can get away with calling the Bible timeless. Women’s rights are also non-existant. Men used to marry multiple women - even Abraham slept around with his wife’s slave to produce a receptacle for Abraham’s offspring - he’ll be damned to give it to his wife! Another interesting instance of cruelty against women is when the angels enter Lot’s home. The people of Sodom demand Lot to bring the strangers that entered his home, but he offers his virgin daughters instead, saying the Sodomites can do with them whatever they want.

In the coming months, I will be publishing articles that are the direct consequence of my confrontation with the Christian Holy Hardcover I have purchased. I have been playing with the idea for a while and I’ve presented the idea to the ACP community over at last.fm. Yesterday I received that number one best-seller of all times, and I’ll be keeping you up to date with my thoughts about its actual content.

The Art of War
My foremost reason for reading the bible is simply because I am interested about the actual, integral contents of this most famous book. I have been reading some mythology literature as of late, and the Bible adds well to that list. As an opponent of religious doctrine in general and Christianity in particular and remembering Sun Tzu I feel obliged to study its roots.

I will be reading the bible critically, as any book that is considered to hold truth should. However, I will make distinctions (and analyse differently accordingly) between parts presented as matter-of-fact (such as Genesis) and symbolically laden parts (such as Jesus’ parables). I will try to form an image “from the Bible up” of important Biblical characters such as God and Jesus - letting go of previous conceptions.

I will write articles whenever I feel I have enough to talk about. Therefore, I will not guarantee articles to be spaced evenly over time. Any other questions or recommendations are welcome and can be posted in the comment section.