CHRISTIANITY IS CAMOUFLAGED IDOLATRY

Christianity is not like a pagan religion where the gods may not feature much once the morning prayers are over.  It is an ethos that permeates and drives all you do.  So if pagans are idolaters Christians are worse if God is the idol of illusion, if Jesus is dead or in fact a fraud.  Christians hold that your goodness is not yours but you letting Jesus do good through you.  The stakes are massive.  They are infinite.  When the Christian for example baptises, as the Church says it really only Jesus who baptises.

If you learn about and focus on prayer to a God who is not there or to a false version of a real God then you are wasting your time. That may be seen as harmless but it is not. You are doing that when you could be selling tickets to raise money for the poor. You are depriving yourself of a chance to develop. It is harmful if your goal is service of the truth for you are defeated.  

Religion says that adoring the wrong god means you are failing to honour that is due to the real God.  So the concern is what idolatry does to God not us.  God bans idolatry for he deserves to have the worship that is given to a non-god. He bans idolatry for our sake too for depending on what cannot help you or is unable to want to can only lead to tears not. Wasting your time on them seems harmless but it is your time that is gone and so it is not harmless. Idolatry has to cover praying to dead people who cannot hear you as well as praying to statues that cannot hear you either. If Jesus is dead or did not rise then Christianity is idolatry. That idolatry is through the roof when Jesus is described as God incarnate.

With God, believers seem to argue that belief is in itself an argument for believing there is a God or even a proof!  This is arrogance - "I have formed this belief therefore I am right".  Or "God gave me this belief therefore it is right.  I know what God has done."  It is pretending to know what you do not know.  When you are sure that you are in love with Johnny in the next village and you hardly know him you are not in love with him in reality.  You turn your feeling into a proof of what Johnny is like.  What passes for piety is really arrogance.

The Old Testament God frequently rants and raves against the sin of idolatry. Despite that, Christianity took great pleasure in making a God out of Jesus and falling into this sin. Idolatry has to be sincere worship to count as idolatry. The Church has not feared this sin despite not having hesitated to call idolatry sin, something that is always seriously immoral. The Church only condemns whatever doesn’t suit its agenda. Jesus did come to promote hatred and division like he said he had (Matthew 10:34).  He was a supporter of the anti-idolatry brigade.

You cannot be as sure of the existence of Jesus as you can be of the existence of Napoleon Bonaparte but Jesus asked to be loved like he was something special and to be put first. He said that what he wants comes before what your family wants. This is an automatic sanction for injustice and fanaticism. Fanaticism is always bad for it starts off small and grows and grows and encourages others who would like to go further into fanaticism that you would. Even the anger among fanatics when they are criticised by those who are fanatics themselves though perhaps on a lower level spurs them on to more terrible things.

If the Bible calls Jesus God and means it literally then it follows that it is blasphemy to agree with it because there is no evidence that Jesus made that claim for himself and that the apostles were not just assuming or misunderstood or even lying. Only John may say that he did but the Law says you need two trusted and sound witnesses to back it up before you can believe all that. You would certainly need far more than two to be able to say that Jesus was God. What if three people come along and say that some saintly person was really God? You would have to believe them even more than you would have to believe it about Jesus for the testimony is stronger.  And at least you know for sure who the witnesses were something you cannot say of the gospel writers.

To believe in Jesus you have to believe in God first. God is the most important belief because God deserves all our love and you cannot believe that Jesus is God without agreeing that there is a God. Jesus said we must love God with our whole being as did Moses. So when God is the only important thing it follows that the evidence that Jesus existed and claimed to be God and was God has to be as good as the evidence for God. Otherwise it would be blasphemy to say Jesus was God. It is certainly true that the case for Jesus is not great therefore it is blasphemy to say that Jesus is God. You would need the evidence to be better than the evidence to secure a murder conviction for God is all-important.

Jesus claimed to fulfil the Jewish Old Testament prophecies. He claimed to do miracles. He claimed to be a prophet. His fulfilling the prophecies would be the most important credential for the Old Testament was believed by him to be the only true scriptures at that time. The prophets needed to testify to him so that he could have authority. His being a prophet would be the second most important thing  while the miracles would be the least in importance. Prophecy is the best miracle because we can check it out so it is the only one worth doing. We cannot check out the resurrection for we didn’t see it and can only depend on witnesses which is not the same thing. What Christians don’t tell you is that Jesus himself would have believed that prophetic ability to tell the future accurately was the real test for they know there is no evidence that he was indeed able to do it inexplicably. The prophecies from the Jewish Bible said that the saviour had to be a prophet so if Jesus was not a credible prophet then the predictions were about somebody else. Prophecy is where Jesus falls for what he said about Jerusalem being destroyed was only what had to happen some time and that prophecy and his prophecy about his resurrection were written down after the events. The doctrine that there has to be miracles that can only be recognised as the work of God and there is no other explanation is philosophical garbage and even the Bible rejects it though it sometimes forgets itself. The resurrection can be safely dismissed as not being the work of God for Jesus deceptively pretended that it was his big sign.

Jesus did lead men away from God for he said he was the only one who could tell you want God wants and what God is like. That is the idolatry of seeing God through Jesus’ eyes. Even if Jesus was God it is still idolatry for only he could be sure of that. It is making God in Jesus’ image just as much as it would be idolatry to make an image of God of gold and to worship that. If Jesus claimed to be God then it gets worse.

The Old Testament and even Jesus made it clear that before a miracle can be attributed to God the doctrine the miracle supports has to be correct for the whole point of signs is to sanction the message as true. But we have no evidence whatsoever that Jesus taught everything the gospels say he taught. The gospellers could have made many honest mistakes. They were not philosophers or theologians and so had no right to ask for our faith on the basis of what they had written. Also Jesus is obscure at times. He did make errors in his moral teaching. Jesus’ teaching was not unique either so miracles could not function as credentials for him.

Jesus, if he existed, was just an ordinary man who did many wrongs. He boasted that he was greater than Solomon, who he believed following the Bible (2 Chronicles 9) was the wisest man in the world, in wisdom (Matthew 12:9). Jesus is often hard to interpret and there is nothing to indicate that he was exceptionally wise. The fact that he approved of the barbarous Old Testament shows that there was no beginning to his talent of wisdom. Jesus evilly agreed that an adulteress should be stoned to death and only freed her because her accusers who wanted to execute her were no better themselves. He was big headed as we shall soon see. It gives us good reason to hold that his pretensions to near-deity if not actual divinity were founded on pride.

No decent God who approved of the reason he gave us all, would have sanctioned Jesus’ statement that the Old Testament was the word of God. If Jesus assumed these writings were the word of God because they were true then without archaeology and a Ph.D in Philosophy and Theology he had no right to assume that. That was biased and anybody could write more convincing stuff and he was damning their work just because it did not fit his prejudices. And to simply assume the Bible is true because it is inspired is to start off assuming that it is inspired so rather than believing in the Bible he was assuming it was true.

Jesus said that anyone who insulted another should be brought before the Sanhedrin (Matthew 5:22) which contradicts his savage condemnation of their hypocrisy and hatred of justice which he considered habitual and incorrigible (Matthew 23). He was disguising evil as good here in scheming to stop people getting a fair trial. It was tantamount to murder.

Jesus told the Jews to believe that his works came from God even if they could put no belief in him (John 10:38). But to believe that while denying that Jesus was from God would be to call God a liar. He did miracles then to make a liar of God!

Jesus lied when he claimed that to do to others as you would have them do to you summarises the Law and the Prophets. The truth is, the God of the Law commands the cruel execution of heretics and gays and other sinners. Jesus agreed that a woman should have been stoned for adultery which was why he said that if anybody was without sin they could cast the first stone thus approving of their wish to kill her but he let it go only because those who wanted to stone her were no better and were trying to execute her illegally (John 8).

Jesus said that sin prevents conversion to his brand of religion not ignorance so if a person hears the gospel and does not believe it, it is because they hate God (John 3:21; 7:17). He said, “Whoever is of God listens to God. [Those who belong to God hear the words of God.] This is the reason that you do not listen [to those words, to Me]: because you do not belong to God and are not of God or in harmony with Him”. This is really an attempt to blackmail people to convert to Christianity and stay in it by making them feel they are bad people if they abandon it.

Jesus often got angry. He got angry in Matthew 23 and called the Jewish leaders every bad word he could muster up. Even a fig tree with no figs on it sparked off his temper and it was out of season. The Church says he did this to signify his anger against Christians who do not bear fruit. But there is no reason to suppose that they are right which shows that it was sheer badness.

Anger wants to hurt a person for emotional reasons. It is hatred for it is vengeful (Catechism of the Catholic Church (2302)) even though religion unintelligibly allows it as long as you do not sin though it forbids hatred (ibid 2303). It is not something going wrong that makes you angry, it is the way you respond to it that does that for worse things happen and you do not have an angry reaction. So, anger is an unnecessary evil. Anger would not be hatred if you rationally wanted to hurt the person because you loved them but it is an irrational feeling. It is always listening to the heart and not the rationality. Some things make people angry while the other equally bad or worse things do not. Anger and love are incompatible. The person who says. “I am mad at you because I love you”, is a liar and it is a lie that society and religion readily and eagerly encourage. The only justification of anger is that it makes others afraid of you. But that is no way to gain respect.

Jesus lived in an age in which girls were married very young. Brides were often thirteen years of age (page 35, Putting Away Childish Things). Jesus did nothing about this disgusting custom in which young girls were callously raped after being roped into marriage when they were immature and children. He as good as sanctioned legalised paedophilia. This was to hurt the girls for getting married and to sully the marriage bed. There is no excuse for him because we all see faults in our customs and he would have been no exception.

Jesus said we must not take oaths but say yes when we mean yes and no when we mean no (Matthew 5:36,37). In other words, he is not saying that oaths are wrong but that they should not be needed. In other words again, we should always speak the truth. Even if lies are allowed under strict conditions an oath would be required of us before we could be believed. If people tell lies even for good reasons they are deadening trust in other people and forcing people to need to use oaths with the result that there will be much perjury. Thus it must be a very very serious sin to tell a lie of any kind. The consistent Catholic will say that it deserves Hell and will take a person there. You are allowed to kill but you are not allowed to lie which infers that lying is worse than killing. In other words, listening to God, who says lying is always bad and killing is not, is more important than human life or anything.

Jesus said that the Jewish practice of children giving what they had for the sake of God instead of helping their parents with it was satanic because God said that the one who curses father or mother is to be put to death (Matthew 15:4). But he asked people to be ready to abandon all for him! And he specifically asked for parents to be forsaken for him. Jesus broadened this rule to the extreme so extremism is right according to him. He was a fine one to talk for he acted as if he was the fountain of knowledge about God and hadn’t even risen from the dead yet. Paul’s assertion that Jesus was shown by his resurrection to be the revelation of God indicates that Jesus lived an obscure and ordinary life.

Jesus claimed that the more one is forgiven by God the more one loves him and the less you sin the less you love God (Luke 7:47). He cannot mean emotional love. So, he means the more you are pardoned the more you love God by abandoning sin. One could laugh at this. How could one who resists temptation with a struggle and sins little be lesser to a person who sins a lot and then repents? Repentance is easier than living without sin. And anybody can sincerely repent and sin again in two minutes. Try it and see. The woman seems to have been a prostitute and all prostitutes want out of their work so it was easy for her to repent. She knew that Jesus had friends to help her stay off the streets. There was much libertinism in the early Church and Jesus condones it here.

Jesus said that prayer will only be answered if it is the prayer of trust in God (Matthew 21:22). This lie shows that he despised people who could not trust God. If you cannot trust you are doing your best to trust and so the prayer would be answered by a decent God. Trust is a sincere thing and so is distrust so Jesus wanted people to be punished for being sincere. He was a snob putting success above effort.

Jesus said knew his death was coming. And still he did nothing to avoid it. All he had to do was expel Judas Iscariot the traitor and hide. And this suicide is now hailed as the Son of God!

Jesus told the Sadducees who did not believe in the resurrection that they did not know the scriptures or the power of God (Matthew 22:29) for denying the doctrine. First he was accusing them of stupidity when it was himself who was stupid for he said that God saying that he was the God of the deceased Abraham, Isaac and Jacob proved the resurrection. Secondly, they did know that God had the power to raise the dead for they were convinced that Adam was raised from the dust of the earth which does not prove they were stupid for denying the resurrection.

Jesus said that it is easier for a camel to enter through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. He did not say some rich so he meant all of them. He meant the rich were too attached to things of this world to be saved. But that can be true even of a poor person who has a few possessions. He had no business singling the rich out for condemnation.

Once when the apostles were accused of breaking the Sabbath by picking grain as they walked through a field, Jesus replied that they did right because David and his men ate the holy bread that only the priests were allowed to eat (Mark 2:23-28). Jesus was encouraging theft here because the apostles had no right to take food from the field for they should have had some stored from the day before. David and his men stole the bread though a common priest gave it to them. The bread belong to the Lord by decree of the Law and David’s men could have hunted for food rather than taking what little bread was there for all the good it would do.

Jesus Christ was not God or God the Son despite Christianity having mostly said he was. He was a sinner and God cannot sin. If Christians find this offensive they find truth offensive and they say God is truth so they should not be.

Jesus said that nobody was good only God when he chastised a man for calling him good. And Jesus’ disciple Paul preached that man was naturally antagonistic towards real love (Romans 3, 7) and towards God suggesting that Jesus did the same. With all this cynicism, we should not be expected to believe in Jesus’ sinlessness on the basis of the skimpy New Testament accounts and the Church has a cheek to ask us to. If human beings are so bad then we need a lot of convincing before we can designate any man as sinless. It would be blasphemy not to.

The Bible says that if an idol can be hurt or damaged then it is not a God or divine. If the gospels are correct that Jesus suffered and died on the cross then he was not God.
 
Conclusion: Christianity is an idolatrous religion.

Putting Away Childish Things, Uta Ranke-Heinemann, HarperCollins, San Francisco, 1994