My 5 Dilemmas of Christian Religious Beliefs

My Five Dilemmas of Christian Religious Beliefs

by Godwin Johnson

I discovered this forum (ex-christian.net) a while ago and have enjoyed reading the many stories shared on this site. I have a not so different story. I was an Evangelical-Pentecostal Christian for 25 years or so. My inexorable move towards unbelief was about a decade or so in the making. It all began with a serious determination to study and better understand this faith I had dedicated myself to and was spending an inordinate amount of time and emotional, psychological and financial resources to. While I am still working on a much longer story to share, I want to summarize what it basically came down to for me; the situation is captured in what I call the FIVE PROBLEMS:

1. The Problem with the Bible

Increasingly, it is hard for me to believe that the Bible in its entirety is the inspired Word of God. It takes extremely contorted arguments to try and reconcile the dozens, even hundreds of contradictions. Many of the statements are not only historically false, but ethically abhorrent. That the Bible is not meant to be fully understood by the mind but believed by the heart is a cop out for a book that purportedly comes from a perfect God. It is far more likely it is the work of man. No one who has studied the origin, development and translation of the Bible could possibly deny it is the work of man. Saying God was working through human agency is too convenient and did not result in a perfect book from a perfect God.

2. The Problem with Science

More and more, science and religion (Christianity) do not agree on the fundamentals. For many things, both cannot simply be true. It takes extremely contorted arguments to try and reconcile them. Anyone who thinks or believes otherwise neither knows the Bible nor science well enough, or perhaps simply disingenuous in their approach to both.

3. The Problem with Religious Plurality and Eternal Damnation in Hell

Over 70% of the world's population right now are not Christians and are unlikely to ever be. It is hard to believe that all these billions will go straight to hell when it is really not their fault that they never heard the Gospel. And which Gospel is another issue. There is little agreement in Christendom on some of the fundamentals. The entire premise of missions is that those who have not heard are doomed to eternal damnation. It never occurs to anyone that millions lived before and after Jesus Christ who never heard the Gospel. There are dozens of convoluted arguments about how God in his omniscience and omnipotence will resolve this dilemma, but the inescapable consequence of not hearing the Gospel is fully described in the New Testament and gives the impetus to reach the unreached before they perish. Christian missionary work has gone on for millennia and most of the world is not convinced. True Evangelicals as you know do not consider over 80% of Christians as real believers and believe only those who are "born again" will go to Heaven. Even heaven is a concept lacking in the Old Testament scriptures and a unique invention of the New Testament. That humans will suffer untold torment for eternity (forever and ever and ever… is not only absurd, but sick and twisted). It seems all religion including Christianity not only are man-made, but man-propagated and helps together by natural human forces in human societies with no real supernatural influences. In fact I believe natural explanations for everything in life is all there is.

4. The Problem with Evil and Suffering

I know of all or most of the classical Christian and religious arguments to justify the presence of both moral and physical evil in the World. Honesty requires me to admit that these arguments do not cut it well at all. God if he exists cannot be omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent and omnipresent in all of these. Indeed there are theologians who believe the same thing. That evil is the result of human free will is only a small part of the problem, and that it works out a larger purpose in the will of God is another cop out. It seems these explanations are designed to protect God’s reputation, and is followed with explanation that all evil will be conquered someday as comfort to humans. Believers who do not understand this dilemma have never grappled with this problem or do not understand it.

5. The Problem with Prayer

This is the most personal of the problems because prayer does not work as religionists of all persuasions proclaim. After being a born again Evangelical Christian for 26 years until my lapse into agnostic-atheism, I know that most "answers" to prayers are wishful thinking or at best coincidences. All answered prayers are plausible, and there is no evidence of answer to prayer for a truly “impossible” problem such as amputees re-growing limbs, destroyed optic nerves restored, cancer cured, hysterectomized women giving births, or paraplegic and quadriplegics walking again. I have thought through this very carefully over a very long time and found that not a single "answer" to prayer I know lacked a natural explanation. And when a truly supernatural move was required to made a difference, it was nowhere to be found and all the blame as always came back to humans who were either too ignorant, too proud, too sinful to get the prayer answered, did not pray the right way or just too blind to see that God answered it in another way. It seems in 100% of the cases with unanswered prayer, the problem was man and not God. In reality there is no such thing as answered prayer by a benevolent deity.

Religion no doubt plays an important role in the lives of humans and is not going anywhere. That one religion is superior to another is just plain nonsense. Every religion thinks it is superior to another, although a few do not proselytize and have a live and let live mentality. The most proselytizing religions of Christianity and Islam which believes in converting others have also precipitated the most atrocious acts in human history. If you do not believe it, go to Wikipedia and do a tour of histories of Christianity and Islam. Proponents and supporters say those acts do not truly reflect the teachings of these religions, which is of course nonsense. The vast majority of believers in these religions do not really know what their religions teach, and simply hold to them by cultural affinity or family upbringing.

It seems I have become a skeptic and perhaps now doomed to eternal damnation. The problem with that is we have no proof whatsoever that there is such a thing as surviving this earth when we die. Life it seems makes far more sense when we believe the reality of human experience rather than the wishful thinking of what religion expects it or assumes it to be. For various reasons I cannot go into, I am going to stealthily keep my new views and lack of belief from most of my friends and associates, especially from close family who knew me as a very strong Christian for decades. It will be equivalent of an emotional and incredulous earthquake for many who know me if they find out that I have become a skeptic. There will come a time to come out clean, but not at this time.

Christians Believe in Bible Verses That Aren't in the Bible

Christians Believe in Bible Verses That Aren't in the Bible

By Austin Cline, About.com Guide
July 19, 2011
[REPRINT]

It's hard to take seriously Christian claims about the importance of the Bible to their lives and religion when they have so little knowledge about it. I'm not just talking about the history of how it developed and how it's been used. I'm talking about the fact that so many Christians believe that things which aren't in the Bible are actual Bible verses.

Some are paraphrases that are similar to actual Bible verses, which is an easy error to make. Some don't have anything to do with the Bible at all -- and in some cases contradict actual Bible verses. But people still believe them. Why? Because they are statements which reinforce what people already believe and they are all too happy to accept biblical authority for what they want to believe.

Here are some popular statements that people think can be found in Bible, but which aren't really there:

"God works in mysterious ways."

"Cleanliness is next to Godliness." ...

"God helps those who help themselves."

"Spare the rod, spoil the child."

And there is this often-cited paraphrase: Satan tempted Eve to eat the forbidden apple in the Garden of Eden.

Source: CNN

It would be bad enough if this were just limited to "the average Christian in the street," but it's also true to people who study the Bible and should know better:

"In my college religion classes, I sometimes quote 2 Hesitations 4:3 ('There are no internal combustion engines in heaven')," [Steve Bouma-Prediger, a religion professor at Hope College in Holland, Michigan] says. "I wait to see if anyone realizes that there is no such book in the Bible and therefore no such verse.

"Only a few catch on."

Most people don't recognize that favored sayings and ideas don't really come from the Bible because they want to believe that they come from the Bible. The authority of the Bible is such that this belief reinforces for them the truth and validity of whatever idea is being expressed.

Belief that something is in the Bible provides a comforting assurance that what they believe also happens to be what God wants and, moreover, side-steps any possible debate over the matter. If it comes from the Bible then it's God's Will and if it's God's Will then there's no legitimate basis for disputing it, disagreeing with it, or rejecting it. Adopting this position is a lot easier than actually having to develop your own arguments in defense of an idea.

"Most people who profess a deep love of the Bible have never actually read the book," says Rabbi Rami Shapiro, who once had to persuade a student in his Bible class at Middle Tennessee State University that the saying "this dog won't hunt" doesn't appear in the Book of Proverbs.

"They have memorized parts of texts that they can string together to prove the biblical basis for whatever it is they believe in," he says, "but they ignore the vast majority of the text."

Honestly, if you believe that something like "this dog won't hunt" appears anywhere in the Bible and actually use that belief in defense of the saying, then I think your right to ever use the Bible in defense of anything at all has been irrevocably lost. Actually, I think a lot more about you, too, but I won't go into that...

The worst and perhaps most significant example of attributing to the Bible something that doesn't appear there is the popular saying "God helps those who helps themselves." Not only does it not appear in the Bible, but it's arguably contrary to some things which do appear in the Bible -- at least in some of the ways this saying can be used.

The passage is popular in part because it is a reflection of cherished American values: individual liberty and self-reliance, says Sidnie White Crawford, a religious studies scholar at the University of Nebraska.

Yet that passage contradicts the biblical definition of goodness: defining one's worth by what one does for others, like the poor and the outcast, Crawford says.

Crawford cites a scripture from Leviticus that tells people that when they harvest the land, they should leave some "for the poor and the alien" (Leviticus 19:9-10), and another passage from Deuteronomy that declares that people should not be "tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor."

"We often infect the Bible with our own values and morals, not asking what the Bible's values and morals really are," Crawford says.

This is a useful piece of evidence of the degree to which religion in America is uniquely "American" -- infused with American culture, history, politics, economics, and assumptions. American Christianity is recognizably Christian, but it is also quite distinct from Christianity everywhere else because of the extent to which American assumptions have infused it.

This isn't unique to America, of course. At every place and time throughout Christianity's history, it's absorbed elements of the surrounding culture -- politics, art, economics, etc. Some of it is retained and passed down to future forms of Christianity; some of it is dropped and forgotten. It's precisely Christianity's ability to adapt to local conditions that has helped it spread so much. A more rigid system would not convert so many people and cultures.

I think Crawford is mistaken to say that these are cases of local cultures "infecting" the Bible or Christianity. After all, the Bible was itself created out of local cultures at particular times and places. The Catholic Church even recognizes the fact that the New Testament was produced by and for early Christian communities and thus not every element is necessarily something that binds every future community of believers.

So some people are simply in denial of the fact that their religion and religious beliefs are shaped as much by their own cultural, political, and economic beliefs as by scripture and tradition. Others are in denial of the fact that this not only always happens, but was in fact instrumental in the creation of those scriptures and traditions. They are all in denial of the fact that religion is a product of human culture, politics, and economics, and so we shouldn't expect to find anything else.