Nailing It To the Church Door

THERE ARE TWO FUNDAMENTAL PILLARS of the Christian faith which I cannot accept, and which therefore prevent me from ever being a Christian. The first is the most fundamental tenet of all; that Christ died on the cross to atone for my sins, and that by accepting him as my lord and savior my atonement, my salvation is complete. I will not worship, much less admire, a god who would permit and sanction such a cruel, brutal, purely theatrical ritual.The second is that the Bible, errant,symbolic literal, or otherwise, is the Word of God. Plainly, without these two bedrock beliefs, it is impossible to be a Christian. The sacrificial lamb theology I see as having been inherited from a long lineage of primitive forms of religion; sacrifce the virgin to an angry, meat eating God, receive the blessings of good weather, good crops, good fortune, in return. To rejoice at this arrangmet seems to me cowardly; by paying for our own sins, we can,if nothing else, retain our dignity and pride. We can always find more rassonable ways to be humble and grateful. I have long observed that every mistake I make I pay for, in some form or other, in this lifetime, without having to wait for death for the scales of justice to balance. Washng away my sins in the blood of Christ is a notion I cannot abide. Its too bloody, barbaric, and primitive. About the Bible, I refer to Goethe, who said: "It is beyond me how anyone can believe that God speaks to us in books and stories. If the world does not directly reveal itself to us, and if our hearts do not tell us what we owe ourselves and others, then we most certainly won't learn it from books, which at best are designed only to give names to our mistakes." The very notion that God speaks to us in book has ong seemed ridiculous to me. As a child, I tried to accept it, but at length could not; I began asking questions early. Just as the image of Christ nailed to a cross, suffering in agony, a crown of thorns on is head and blood dripping from is body appalled and disgusted me from an early age, and still does. To use a tortore device as a religious holy symbol to me is no less barbaric. The idea that God himself wrote or even inspired people to write a sacred manuscrpt, more autoritative than all other books, raised a red flag in me early in life. I began, thanks to my parents, reading books at an early age and to thus acquire a basic understanding of books and science. I actually tried to embrace the holy scripture as valid, divienly ordained fact when I was quite young, but it didn't hold up, didn't pass the test of my own reason. And now, as we plunge headlong into the heart of the twenty first century, and the wonders and tangible results and benefits of science become ever more apparant, and science become ever more deeply embedded in human civilization and culture, religion is observably beginning at long last to fade away, as it inevitably should and indeed must. Mark Twain said that when the first con man met the first sucker, religion was born. I take a somewhat more generou, inteellectual view. To me it seems evident that all over the world humans invented religion for inspiration and emotional comfort, and as a ameans by which to esplain a complicated, mysterious world. Religion served as pre science, and led directly to science. Nw that we have science firmly established and progressing rapidly, we are given teh great gift intnded to us by religion; the abilty to love, admire, and understand the world in which we live, but, without the encumbrances of false beliefs and cruel dogma.