Not in My Book!

Readers sometimes ask my how I lost my childhood faith, christianity. The short answer is that I read the bible from cover to cover at age eleven, and it was a shock to my then-short system...

I grew up in a devout evangelical christian family with missionaries, pastors, Sunday school teachers (including my mother), and a deacon. We went to church faithfully (pardon the pun) three times per week: twice on Sundays and Wednesday nights for bible studies and “potluck” dinners. We said grace before each meal and prayers at bedtime: “Now I lay me down to sleep…”

Yes, it got old, boring and repetitive for an energetic preteen who would have much rather been chasing fly balls and girls, but I never doubted the “truth” of Jesus and the gospels … until I read the bible from cover to cover at age eleven.

What a shock to my then-short system, or rather a series of shocks!

The first thing that assailed my faith was discovering that the biblical god Yahweh was hideously evil, not good, a serial mass-murderer of men, women, children, toddlers, infants, babies and unborns in their pregnant mothers’ wombs.

Not to mention trillions of animals drowned for no reason at all, since “righteous” Noah got drunk, was running around naked, engaged in some sort of perversion with his son Ham, and the world was immediately back to its former ways, if not worse.

Then the cause of the Great Flood, the Nephilim, popped back up in the Promised Land centuries later, so it seems Yahweh murdered everyone except his prime targets!

Nothing this incompetent god ever planned worked out as he intended, which left him eternally in a baby-killing rage, despite his alleged prophetic abilities.

This understanding — that Yahweh was evil and thus I had been lied to — opened my eyes, and I began to see all the other flaws in the bible: the obvious errors, the blatant contradictions, the satanic commandments.

Everything I had been told about the bible — that it was the “word of god” and thus “infallible” and “inerrant” — was complete and utter nonsense. And much of the nonsense was ludicrous, such as the ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE, the talking ass and talking snake, Yahweh defeating a multi-headed sea monster and feeding its flesh to the Hebrews in the wilderness, Egyptian magicians being able to turn the Nile into blood, etc.

It became obvious to me that the bible had been authored by primitive goatherds who created a primitive, barbaric, wildly unjust god in their own image.

How barbaric?

So barbaric they stoned their own children to death. (Deuteronomy 21-22)

Many years later, as an adult in my forties, I read the bible from cover to cover again, and came to exactly the same conclusion.

As for Jesus, if one studies the New Testament in the order the books were written — the epistles of Paul first, then the gospel of Mark, then the gospels of Matthew and Luke, followed by the gospel of John, then the book of Acts — one can see Jesus evolving from a fully human Messiah in Mark and Paul, to a demigod born of a virgin in Matthew and Luke, to a preexistent creator-god in John, to a god who in the book of Acts endowed Peter with the ability to heal all the sick people in Jerusalem and surrounding cities with his freakin’ shadow!

Not some of the sick people, all the sick people.

In entire cities.

Utter nonsense.

The “big fish” kept getting bigger and bigger, and fishier and fishier, as pulpy christian propaganda was churned out then solidified into the New Testament over several centuries of writes and rewrites.

Bible scholars now consider much of the New Testament to consist of forgeries, including half the epistles of Paul and those of Peter, James and John.

My own extensive research has convinced me that the earliest gospel, Mark, was written much later than generally believed because the author was using the writings of Josephus for plot details he gleaned from Jewish Wars (c. 75 AD) and Antiquities (c. 93 AD). The other gospels plagiarized Mark and thus were written later, certainly in the second century AD and probably, at least parts, into the third.

Critical parts of christian dogma were never mentioned outside the bible until the second century or later, including the cross, the resurrection, the ascension, and the virgin birth.

The mysterious Holy Ghost did not became a member of the “trinity” until the Nicene Creed was updated in 381 AD.

As late as 1552 christian charlatans were still trying to sneak a fake “trinity verse,” the infamous Johannine Comma, into the English New Testament of Erasmus.

Can a true religion be based on lies?

Not in my book.

by Michael R. Burch

#BIBLE #MRBBIBLE #MRBJESUS