Bible Nonsense!

The Christian Religion in a Nutshell

Here’s the Christian religion in a nutshell:

God, our loving Father, made Man and Woman flawed. He could have made us perfect but chose not to.  Don’t bother asking why.  Just having a bad day, maybe.  God would not make a very good clinical psychologist.  With forethought if not malice he laid temptation in our path.  Just what the Lord’s Prayer, not yet written, asks him not to do.  “Lead us not into temptation,” says the Lord’s Prayer.  If Adam and Eve had had the Lord’s Prayer to work with things might have turned out differently.  Anyway, being omniscient God knew in advance what kind of human dynamics he was setting in motion by introducing temptation.  If he didn’t know he could have and should have.  Big surprise: being flawed and curious and weak when it comes to temptation, we bit the bait.  Bad news.  That automatically made all God’s beloved children, present and future, smart as all hell, but sinners, candidates for eternal punishment in Hell.  Hell is a place God created...he created everything, remember...to punish human beings who behave like human beings rather than twitty little angels.  Hey, God, if you wanted twitty little angels why didn’t you make them instead of us?  And don’t blame it all on the Devil.  Nobody said you had to make a Devil to keep things screwed up.

Anyway, since all us weak humans became sinners overnight, because God threw temptation in our way, God decided he had better take a shot at correcting the situation.  (A delegation from the garment industry came to God’s throne in Heaven and prayed for him to keep people ashamed of their nakedness since it would be good for business.  God seems to have accommodated them.)

Did God correct the sin situation by the simple expedient of making  a human recall, like a carmaker would do, fix or replace the faulty part and send us safely out into the world again?  No.

Instead he decided to bring his one and only Son into the action and teach his Son something about godmanship (if that’s not a self-contradicting word).

“Here’s the plan,” God the Father said to God the Son.  “I’m going to send you to Earth, specifically to Judea where my Chosen People the Jews are.  While you are there you can do some teaching and healing and other miracles so that at least a few of the folks will get the idea of who you are without you walking around bragging about it.  But your main chance will be to get yourself arrested, charged with disturbing the peace or something, and crucified.  Crucifixion, in case you haven’t been paying attention to what’s going on down there, Son, is the way the Roman governors of Judea punish and dispose of their criminals.    What they’ll do is nail you wrist and foot to a wooden cross and leave you there until you die.  I can tell you, Son, it is going to hurt like hell.  But that’s the point.  You’ll be a blood offering.  To me, God.  Because of your token suffering on the cross for a few hours (I’ll see that it doesn’t last too long) you will in a figurative way be accepting the punishment for everybody’s sins, present and on into the eternal future.  Your suffering on the cross will be in lieu of my sending folks to Hell as punishment for their sins.  Get it?”

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Getting Started

You don’t need to be a biblical scholar or rocket scientist to either ardently agree or ardently disagree with the sometimes startling things you will read about Christianity in this book.

All you need is an open mind.  But that’s saying a lot.  Most of us have been taught since childhood to close our minds and believe what we’ve been told to believe about religious matters...or else!  Don’t think about whether it makes sense, we are told.  The promised reward for keeping your mind shut...an eternal life of bliss...combined with the threatened penalty for opening your mind to heretical thoughts...eternal torture in the fires of hell, compliments of your loving Father...are, quite understandably, just too over-powering for most people to stand up against.  Christianity has taken the two strongest motivations known to mankind...the promise of eternal life and the fear of eternal punishment...and build an empire on them.  For many if not most people raised in Christianity, the best bet, they decide, is to go along to get along.  Believe what you’ve been taught (or at least pretend to) and then pass what you’ve been taught along to your kids.  By going along to get along you may or may not go to Heaven but you sure as hell are not going to go to Hell.  So why take a chance?  Stay on the safe ground just in case it is all true.

It can be a fearful experience or a refreshing one to learn to let go of idea