Faith is the keyword to Christianity. The whole foundation is based on having faith that what Jesus said on earth will rein true in our lives after death. Skeptics who don’t believe are said to lack faith. Well-known Agnostics such as Bill Maher claim that they don’t believe because they don’t have enough evidence, and therefore, don’t know what to believe. This reasoning is easily dismissed by devout followers. To them there is ample and abundant evidence of God revealed to us through the Bible. But therein lies the problem. The Bible examined through an objective lens as a historical document reveals myriad inconsistencies, contradictions, omissions and subsequent additions—there’s no debating that. People choose to respond to this reality in different ways, and a lot of it comes down to the concept of faith.
Here’s my beef: what is responsible behavior in life is rejected by religion, while behavior that can leave you screwed in life is endorsed by religion. Here’s what I mean. In life you must be highly skeptical of everything, you have to be. If you believed every salesman trying to sell you something or believed every false prophet trying to get you to follow some dogma, you’d be flat broke, frightening, or dead. You have to wade through the bullshit if you don’t want to be taken advantage of. Con artists are ever present. According to the church, however, you must rely on “faith.” Ignore the previously mentioned incongruences with the Bible, the extreme fallibility of humans who wrote the Bible, the nasty and brutal acts carried out in the name of the Bible, the infighting about what the Bible even means—but just follow and trust and believe. Ironically, people who blindly follow think the people who don’t follow are painfully misguided. But what really makes more sense? In real life, it’s the uneducated, gullible people who blindly follow ideas sold to them. Intelligent thinkers don’t take anything at face value and want to know the true backstory of significant events.
What irks me is that within the Bible itself there’s something seen as wrong with nonbelievers who claim they’re not sure about all of it. It’s oxymoronic. It’s like the person who isn’t gullible and actually uses his brain is the dumb one. Jesus in the Bible addresses this directly. In John 20: 24-29, St. Thomas, who claimed not to believe in Jesus’ resurrection until he felt his nail wounds, was able to do just that when Jesus arrived and placed Thomas’s hands in his wounds. Thomas then believed and Jesus said, “Blessed are they who did not see, and yet believed.” But that’s exactly my point. What’s wrong with wanting some concrete evidence before putting your whole entire being behind something? Can you really fault Thomas? When someone claims he’s the fastest runner, you don’t just believe him. You watch him race. If he wins, you agree. No intelligent person invests money with someone who simply claims she’ll make a nice return on it. The intelligent person wants to see numbers and positive indicators. But again, blessed are those who don’t need to use their brain and just follow based on fear of the unknown? That logic rewards stupidity and ignorance.
My final point is that faith today is miles apart from faith at the time of Jesus. From today’s perspective, these events took place 2,000 years ago and were written about decades later. These events occurred before modern record keeping and during a time of widespread illiteracy. These events occurred during the time lightning strikes were believed to come from the heavens and sickness was punishment from the gods. And this is supposed to be an accurate, reliable document? Especially when it’s about something as important and esoteric as what happens after we die? Hmmm.
But imagine living at the time of Jesus. If everything in the Bible really occurred, it wasn’t even faith in the first place— it was real. Think about it, Jesus was walking around curing people of blindness, raising people from the dead, transforming water into wine. That’s not hearsay and folklore, that’s concrete real world evidence right in front of your face. That’s why I don’t understand why the prophets get so much credit for “believing.” They weren’t relying on a 2,000-year-old book that billions of people interpret differently and that millions of people have been slaughtered over. They were witnessing miracles happening right in front of their eyes. If someone appeared on earth right now bringing my dead friends back to life and turning all the beverages in my fridge into wine, believing would be easy. Unfortunately, when was the last documented and certified example of the laws of physics being suspended? I’ll wait… We get to rely on folklore tales that can in no way really be proven or disproven.
And let’s add in events we’ve seen since Jesus’ time: countless divisions of Christianity, decadent and evil Popes, bloody Crusades, dismissal and rearranging of gospels centuries later as desired by kings, rampant child sex abuse, and the reality that two-thirds of the world’s population is not Christian. I mean, I don’t understand how God himself could blame young people in 2013 of looking at the whole thing with severe skepticism. God gave us profoundly active brains. Blindly following anything with so many question marks and opposing outcomes is the antithesis of using a profoundly active brain. Reward the lazy who simply follow, but punish the thinkers who question? I don’t get it.