It's never easy being a Christian. You got to live up to some high and some would say impossibly unrealistic standards. If one were to judge those who profess or are baptized as Christians ( some before they have attained the age of reason) by what they actually say and do instead of what they parrot as their "beliefs", I venture to suggest that 99.9% of them would probably fail to qualify as "Christians" and that would likely include even many priests, nuns, and other so-called "religious" people. Of course, I am not the first one to have observed this. Søren Kierkegaard in the 19th Century had written about it in his Fear and Trembling (1843). But this is not why I said that it is getting more and more difficult to be a believing Christian, whether one be a Roman Catholic, an Anglican, a Lutheran, a Calvinist, a Baptist, a Methodist, a Presbysterian, a Pentecostalian, a member of the East Orthodox Church etc. I am referring to the publication of a number of books in the late 20th and early 21 century by some more or less militant atheists like Michael Martin (The Case Against Christianity 1991), John Selby Spong (Resurrection: Myth or Reality 1994) , Ludovic Kennedy (All in the Mind: A Farewell to God 1999, ) Charles Templeton (Farewell to God: My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith 1999), Nicholas Everitt (The Non-Existence of God 2004), Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a natural phenomenon 2006)and Victor J Stenger ( God the Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does not Exist 2008), Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion 2006), Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything 2007), David E Comings (Did Man Create God: Is your spiritual brain at peace with your thinking Brain 2007, 2008)
John W Loftus (Why I Became an Atheist: a former preacher rejects Christianity 2008 and The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails 2010 ). They go directly to the root of Christian beliefs. In addition, there are a number of other works by scientists upon the underlying irrational or biological basis of so-called "religious beliefs" in the form of such works by Michael Shermer ( How We Believe: Science, Skepticism and the Search for God, 2000), Ruth Tucker (Walking Away from Faith: Unravelling the Mystery of Belief and Unbelief 2002) John L Schellenberg (The Wisdom to Doubt: A Justification of Religious Skepticism (2007).
Of course, they were not the first. As far back as the last century, Sigmund Freud already treated religion as an illusion (The Future of an Illusion 1927 ) and Ludwig Feuerbach, (“The Essence of Christianity”( 1841 ) in Religion and Liberal Culture, ed. Keith Michael Baker,
vol. 8) already explained religion as social in origin: Feuerbach argues that
"In the consciousness of the infinite, the conscious subject has for
his object the infinity of his own nature.". Whilst conceiving of God as
a "being of understanding", a "moral being or law" and as "love," Feuerbach thought that God is fashioned in our own image and that it is in getting
acquainted with himself that man may find God: "If man is to find
contentment in God," he claims, "he must find himself in God."ie. man's
own best nature is now projected on to an external being of his own
making. It is thus that we have fashioned our God as just benevolent, tolerant,
forgiving, wise, imaginative and creative, ie. loving and well
disposed towards man. In short, God has become “the principle of [man's]
salvation, of [man's] good dispositions and actions, consequently
[man's] own good principle and nature.” Through the creation of the
notion of the incarnation of God as man in the form of Jesus, God has
become flesh and blood and by the same token, God's spirit may also have
become a part of man. But man also resents God because “God alone is
the being
who acts of himself.”when man removes all qualities from God,
“God is no longer anything more to him than a negative being.” He
treats the view that God has a separate existence from mankind as
mistaken. Feuerbach claims that God's only action is, “the moral and
eternal salvation of man: thus man has in fact no other aim than
himself,” as his salvation is placed upon God. Later, Feuerbach says that we are urged
to give up our personality and
to place it in the hands of upon God, who however is also a selfish
being. According to him, it is this selfishness
which turns onto man and projects man to be wicked and corrupt and
“incapable of good, It is only God that is good or can be “the Good Being.”
In this way Feuerbach shows us how in worshiping God, we have alienated him from ourselves: Feuerbach affirms that goodness is, “personified as God,” and through such personification, we turn
God
into an object. To him, man contemplates objects which themselves
give rise to conception of what externalizes man. Therefore if God is
good, so should man be (because God is merely an externalization of
man, God being in such a case conceived of as an object. But our religion would show us that man is
inherently corrupt.
Not only is Christianity under attack by philosophers, many of its core beliefs including the belief that the Bible contains the "Word of God" or that its writers are at least inspired by God, are being examined by biblical scholars and found wanting. There are studies upon the "truth" of various Old Testament stories, the historical Jesus: his birth, his death and his purported resurrection and ascension into heaven, his miracles and studies on which part (s) of the Bible can be relied upon and which not. e.g. William Lane Craig & Gerd Ludemann (Jesus' Resurrection: Fact or Figment 2000)) Bart D Erdman (Lost Christianities: the Battles for Scriptures and the Faith We Never Knew 2005. Lost Scriptures: Books That Did not Make it into the New Testament 2005), Tim Callahan (Secret Origins of the Bible 2002), Paul Copan & Ronald K Taacelli (Jesus' Resurrection: Fact or Figment 2000).
Inconsistent Bible
In the article "The Bible and Modern Scholarship", (in John W Loftus's book The Christian Delusion (2010)) , Paul Tobin argues that the canonical Bible, the authorized version used by most Christians, is inconsistent with itself, is not supported by archaeology, contains fairy tales, forgeries and failed prophecies and that it thus cannot be considered as inspired by God. Instead, it seems to have been "written by a superstitious people who were creating God in their image". In his book, The Bible against Itself , Randel Helms argues that the Bible is a "war zone and its authors are the combatants." e.g. there are differences on subjects like "racism" because "God declared that neither the Ammonites nor Moabites shall be welcomed "into the assembly of Yahweh, even to the 10th generation...forever (Deut 23:3 but there are mixed messages in Neh 13:1 and Ezra 10: 14-44 both of which denied mixed marriages. This is in contrast to the story of Ruth, who herself is a Moabite (Ruth 4: 22) and married a Jew, Baez. She became the great grandma of King David (Ruth 4:13). There is also conflict between the authors of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes: Proverbs extol wisdom and knowledge., saying that a wise son makes a glad father (Proverbs 10:1) but Eccl.1:18 states that wisdom and knowledge gives the wise only "grief" and "sorrow" because all is vanity as time and chance happens to everyone (Eccl. 1:2; 9:11).. Eccl. urges us "not to be amazed" at poverty as it is the natural state of of things (Proverbs 14:31 Eccl. 5:8) but Proverbs asks us to help the poor.. In NT, Paul called the Law of Moses "a curse" (Gal. 3:13) and compared it to "dung" (Philippians 3:8 but James (Jesus' brother") calls it "the law of Liberty"." the Perfect Law" and the "royal road"(James 1: 25; 2: 8). A man is said to be justified by faith apart from the works of the law (Romans 3: 28) but a man is also said to be justified by works and not by faith alone.".(James 2:24). These are just a few examples. In fact their errors are sufficient to form the title of a book by C Dennis cataloguing numerous biblical mistakes in his 500 page book Encyclopedia of Biblical Errancy (1995) . Other similar titles are the 476 pages Gleason Archer's Encyclopedia of Biblical Difficulties 1982; the 615 page The Big Book of Bible Difficulties 1992 of Norman Geisler & Thomas Howe's and the 159 page R A Torrey's Difficulties in the Bible (1972)
Biblical Inconsistency Not New
Biblical inconsistencies had already been found as long ago as the 2nd century by Celsus and by Porphyry in the 3rd. In one of his letters to St. Jerome (347-420), St. Augustine
(345-430) wrote: ...if in these writings I am perplexed by anything
which appears to me opposed to truth, I do not hesitate to suppose that
either the manuscript is faulty or the translator has not caught the
meaning of what was said, or I myself have failed to understand it."
According to Tobin, the problem began right at the start of the Old Testament in Gen 1.12. There, we read that the land had produced vegetation before the creation of Adam. In Gen. 2.5 , there was no vegetation and in Gen 1:20-25, we read that the animals were created on the fifth and sixth days, all before Adam, yet we read in Gen 2: 18-19
that they were created after Adam when God was seeking to find him a companion.
There are similar errors in the story of Noah's Ark and the Flood. In Gen 6:19-20,
we read that Noah brought into his ark two of every kind of animals, no
separation between clean and unclean but in Gen. 7:2-3, Noah brought
even more animals on to the Ark, 7 pairs of every kind of clean animals
along with 2 pairs of every kind of unclean animals.
Scholars have
concluded that the Pentateuch or the Five Books of Moses is "actually an ancient
compilation of many different documents written by different people at
different times in various different locations. (see Richard Elliot
Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible 1989 and The Bible with Sources Revealed:
a New View into the Five Books of Moses 2003). Since the late
19th century, biblical scholars have ceased to believe that the main
events of the Gospels are historical including the virgin birth, the
nativity stories, the miracles and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. If
the bodily resurrection of Jesus is not historical, then the whole of
St. Paul's theology and with it, traditional Christianity will be gone!
Most biblical scholars now view the resurrection as "some kind of internal
revelation of the disciples."
The Fall of Biblical Archaeology
Before 1970's it appears that one archaeological find after another seem to confirm stories in the Bible but it is no longer the case. Scholars are now questioning the assumption that the Bible is a reliable guide for field research ( see Collapse of the Paradigm in Thomas W Davis's Shifting Sands: the Rise and Fall of Biblical Archaeology (2004). It is so unreliable that the very term "biblical archaeology" has been discarded and Syro-Palestinian Archaeology substituted by some as a more appropriate term. P R S Moorey A Century of Biblical Archaeology (1992). The Great Flood in Genesis cap 6-9 is a scientific impossibility ( see Ian Plimer Telling Lies for God: Reason versus Creationism (1994). According to him, high energy sediment like gravel are deposited during the height of floods and low energy sediments like siltstone, mudstone and claystone are deposited during the waning of the floods. If the story of the Flood is true, we should be able to find a uniform worldwide sedimentary formation with the high energy sediment at the bottom and low energy sediment at the top. Yet none has been found. In fact it is most likely that the story of the Flood is borrowed from Sumeria (present day Iraq) in the epic tale called Gilgamesh about a Sumerian King living at the third millenium BCE who went on a quest to find immortality through looking for his father Utnapishtim, who himself was already enjoying such immortality and when Utnapishtim reached his father's island, he was told a flood story recounted by his ancestor. The similarities between this tale and that in Gen 5: 9-19 and Gen 6: 11-13 are remarkable": both tell how the gods wanted to destroy the world with a worldwide flood and that a single man, Utnapishtim was called by the gods to build an ark to save himself, his family and all kinds of animals (cf. Gen 6: 14-19). Just as Noah's Ark rested on top of the mountain of Ararat, Utnapishtim's rested on top of Mountain Nasir (cf. Gen 8:4). After the flood, both heroes released a few birds and when the last bird did not return, he knew the waters had abated (cf. Gen 8: 6-12). It is likely that the story was copied because,whilst floods are common in ancient Mesopotamia, Israel is in general dry land; having the ark resting on a mountain at the source of the Tigris-Euphrates points towards Mesopotamia as its origin. The Gilgamesh epic was well known throughout the ancient Near East, and a fragment was even found in Israel and whilst Babylonian culture was the dominant culture at the time, Israel was just a kind of backwater and history and experience shows that it is usually the minority culture which adopts the myths of the dominant culture.Scholars have found that there are two other even earlier versions of flood myths,viz. the Sumerian epic of Ziusudra (ca 2600 BCE) and the Akkadian epic of Atrahasis ( (ca 1900 BCE)
The story about Abraham, Issac, Jacob and Joseph or the so-called "patriarchal narratives", are no longer considered historical by most scholars competent in the field and there are a number of good reasons why:
1. According to Gen 11: 26-28, Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldees. Estimates of Abraham's life fall between 23 and 16 centuries BCE yet the Chaldeans only came together as a people around 8th to 7th centuries BCE, long after Abraham.
2. Genesis 26:1 says Isaac went to Gerar to meet Abimelech, King of the Philistines but archaelogical finds tell us that there was no city by the name of Gerar and no king of Philistines in the historical period Isaac would have lived.
3. Genesis 12: 14-16, 24: 10-11 and 37:25-28 all refer to the use of domestic camels but the the archaeological evidence that camels were not domesticated before 11th century BCE well after the time of Abraham and Joseph. Camels could not have been used during the time of the Patriarchs.
4. Gen 17: 9-11 talks about the covenant between God and Abraham, being sealed by the act of circumcision. We know that circumcision was widely practised by the Egyptians and Canaanites, the very people with whom the Jews had the most contact at the time.. How could circumcision then be "a sign of the covenant" between God and Abraham when every one else was doing it? It was only during the time of the Babylonian captivity in the 6th century BCE that this custom could have separated the Jews from the other surrounding races. Then, the Babylonian did not practise circumcision .
Of course, if these and other specific details in the patriarchal narratives are proven to be anachronistic, then they add nothing to the story. But these very references were historical anchors that are supposed in the first place to root the narratives into history, as alleged by the Christian fundamentalists. The fact is that we simply can't distinguish these narratives from other completely non-Christian mythical folktales without them.
Since the 1990s, there is also growing consensus in modern biblical studies that the major elements of the Exodus tale (the Jews living in Egypt for 430 years and their exodus from Egypt in Canaan and wandering in the Sinai Peninsula in the the intervening 40 years) are also myths not history ( Eric Cline From Eden to Exile: Unravelling the Mysteries of the Bible (2007), William Dever Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? (2003) Finkelstein and Silverman Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (2001), John C H Laughlin Archaeology and the Bible (2000), Niels Peter Lemeche Prelude to Israel's Past Background and Beginning of Israelites History and Identity (1998) Amy Marcus The View from Nebo: How Archaeology Is Rewriting the Bible and Reshaping the Middle East( 2000) William H Stiebing Out of the Desert? Archaeology and the Exodus/Conquest Narratives 1989)) :
1. The existence of Moses as a historical person is not proven either way but certainly many elements of that story are legendary e.g his birth, his escape of harm by being put in a papyrus basket and left to drift in the river before being discovered (Exodus 2: 2-10) parallels closely the nativity story of the legendary Akkadian King, Sargon, also placed inside a basket to escape dire circumstances and left to drift before being rescued by someone. The general flow of cultural influence and the antiquity of the Akkadian legend makes it likely that the Genesis account is based on the Akkadian legend.
2. We have at least three names for Moses' father-in-law: Reuel (Exodus 2: 18), Jethro (Exodus 3:1 ) and Hobab (Numbers 10:29; Judges 4:11). Even the name Moses was originally Egyptian and not Hebrew.
3. The date of the Exodus is also plagued with uncertainty. Per 1 King 6:1, the Exodus happened 480 years before Solomon built the Temple. This would place it sometime between 1495-1440 BCE. Yet the Israelites were forced to build the cities of Pithom and Ramses, according to Exodus 1: 8-11. Ramses came to power in 1320 BCE, a century too late for the biblical chronology to be accurate.Rameses II reigned from 1279-1213 BCE. But the story of Israelite slaves building Pi-Rameses could only have happened during his reign but this is more than 200 years after the biblical chronology
4. Any attempt to equate the Hyksos--a line of Semitic kings who ruled Egypt from mid-17th to mid-16th BCE must fail because the Hyksos were expelled from Egypt into Canaan by Pharoah Amose around 1570 BCE, which is also too early for any biblical chronology to work. But it is more likely that the violent expulsion of the Hyksos became embedded in the folktales of the Canaanite people which forms the basis of the oral tales of the Exodus narrative. However, the main details of the Exodus must all be historical fiction (Finkelman and Silberman (01)
5. The Jews were supposed to have lived in Egypt for 430 years (Exodus 12:4) but there is no literary or archaeological evidence outside the Hebrew Bible that records the sojourn of the Jews in Egypt.
6. There is also a similar question of of how many left Egypt. 600,00, not counting women and children leaving behind according to Exodus 12;37. But there is not a single trace of evidence showing that such a large group had in fact been wandering for 40 years in the Sinai Peninsula. Israelite archaeologist Ze'ev Herzog expresses the consensus view thus :"The Israelites never were in Egypt. . They never came from abroad. This whole chain is broken. It is not a historical one, a later legendary reconstruction--made in the 7th century BCE. of a history that never happened."
7. The story of the conquest of Canaan told in the book of Joshua show that it simply did not happen the way the Bible describes it. One of such most dramatic stories is the one about the conquest of Jericho by Joshua and the Israelites (Joshua 6 1-21). On the 7th day of the siege, we are told that the Israelites shouted and the priests blew the trumpets, which brought the walls of Jericho tumbling down. Archaeological digs showed that in the period most likely for this event (1550 to 1200 BCE), Jericho was either uninhabited or a small village with a few huts. There was certainly no evidence of such. Indeed according to archaeologists Bill Deer and Lawrence Stager, almost all of the roughly 30 cities Joshua was supposed to have conquered were either uninhabited or destroyed by other means or never even destroyed,
8. The story of the united kingdom of Israel under David and Solomon also unravelled that King David was supposed to be reigning between 1005-979 BCE. .Although none doubts his existence"Whatever evidence there is point to the fact that the story about the grandeur of David's "vast" empire is a myth of a fictional golden age created by later writers. If David was indeed king, he never ruled over the vast regions described in the Bible.
9. His son Solomon didn't fare any better. He reigned from 970 to 931 BCE. Although per the Bible, his empire was even vaster than their neighbors but modern archaeology simply finds no evidence of this empire or for his supposed architectural undertakings like the Temple of Solomon.
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