“Jesus loves me! This I know, for the Bible tells me so” (Traditional, Words by Anna B. Warner) Most Christians assume Jesus had affection for anyone who accepted him; that he had a personal interest in each and every individual. I think they seriously misunderstand their main man. Jesus, as he’s portrayed in the gospels, quite clearly didn’t love gentiles (who he referred to as pagans.) He told his disciples More

Maybe so…he deserves it. “From bitter searching of the heart, Quickened with passion and with pain We rise to play a greater part. This is the faith from which we start: Men shall know commonwealth again From bitter searching of the heart. We loved the easy and the smart, But now, with keener hand and brain, We rise to play a greater part. More

Yeshua (Jesus) and his entourage were easily outmaneuvered. The Romans swooped on them in the garden of Gethsemane while Jewish residents slept. John’s gospel claimed a cohort of soldiers was consigned to collar him: “Judas the traitor knew the place well, since Jesus had often met his disciples there, and he brought the cohort to this place together with a detachment of guards sent by the chief priests and Pharisees, all with lanterns and torches and weapons” (John 18:3 JB.) ... More

There’s a fascinating angle to consider about the beginnings of Christianity. I think that the Roman government was the driving force behind Paul’s pagan propaganda (which became Christianity's theology.) The fact that belief in the divinity of Jesus arose in many diverse areas of the empire a number of decades after Jesus’ death suggests to me that it came from a central source, and it wasn’t Jesus’ Jewish friends in Jerusalem.There was good reason to mar the power of messianic Jud ... More

Preachers propose that people can achieve anything through prayer. They often quote Jesus, who said, “For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith. More

The Bible, the basis of Christian belief, has been debunked in my book. The Biblical Yahweh does not exist; “he” was only the product of a small group of ancient men’s attempts to control others, and the real Jesus, if he ever existed, was not a Christian God, but a belligerent Jew. More

There have been literally hundreds of wars started or inflamed by Christian intolerance. Millions of people were murdered in the crusades, the Inquisition and the witch-hunts. For centuries women, homosexuals, Jews, and Muslims were attacked or suppressed. Churches have opposed secular education, fought against each other and resisted scientific advances. They have been the cause of, not the cure for, many of the world’s ills. More

Yahweh was originally only one of many fictional Israelite gods, and power hungry priests engineered his rise to prominence for political purposes. - The Old Testament is rife with immoral instructions and examples of depravity. - The Gospels are largely fabricated. Yeshua, if he ever existed, More

“But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” (Jesus, Matthew 18; 6, KJV.) This is a newsworthy topic, as there have been generations of victims, the Catholic Church has often protected the perpetrators, most of whom (if still alive) are free to offend again, and the overwhelming majority of casualties have not been compensated. More

The Bible is very ambiguous. Every verse is a product of people in particular times and places; always to assert authority, maybe to restate tradition, upstage a rival story, assimilate a popular myth, or create a new one. As a consequence, different authors had quite varied ideas about G More

In the mid years of the second century the proto Christian Churches of the Mediterranean world were autonomous entities, with little doctrinal agreement among them. Churches in Asia Minor, Palestine, Egypt, Armenia, Rome and Syria had their own idiosyncratic interpretations of Christianity. Modern historians know most about Christianity in Rome, but Alexandria, Ephesus, and Antioch all had la More

This is an important post. If some Christians are real enough to realize that many of their beliefs are noxious, they will be happier and safer, and so will their children, and the world will be a better place. More

Paul was the creator of Christian theology. I feel no warmth for him, nor do I like his messages. He had an incessant self-righteous manner. His ideas were irritatingly convoluted and his ethics depraved. He deliberately distorted the Nazarenes’ (including the family and disciples of Jesus) beliefs with his own. He was a man intent on manipulating people and shoring up his own status, and all this is very More

To examine the Gospels objectively, we need to dig deeper than just reading well-chosen, neatly packaged snippets as typically presented in Christian books and churches. We should assess them in their entirety, who wrote them, what their connections with Yeshua (the real historical Jesus) were, when they were written, and why. Massive holes then appear in the traditional tales. More

Jesus made big promises that never came true. He was judgmental, intolerant, inconsistent, egocentric and ethnocentric. He failed to give clever or comprehensive solutions to life’s conundrums. Most of his teachings lack the detail to make them meaningful. Dogma without reasoning and explanation does not cut the mustard as philosophy. More

“The importance of apprehending the beginnings of Christianity as wholly Jewish cannot be exaggerated. Only to the extent that we are able to do this by priming ourselves with information about Jewish life, thought and faith at the time do we become capable of understanding Jesus and the original character of Christianity” More

Some Biblical texts reveal a bigoted attitude about homosexuality. Yahweh ordered homosexuals killed; “The man who has intercourse with a man in the same way as with a woman: they have done a hateful thing together; they will be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads” (Leviticus 20:13 NJB.) More

Paul, the author of much of the New Testament, loathed his own sexuality. “The fact is, I know of nothing good living in me—living, that is, in my unspiritual self—for though the will to do what is good is in me, the performance is not, with the result that instead of doing good the things I want to do, I carry out the sinful things I do not want. When I act against my will, then, it is not my true self doing it, but sin which lives in me…I can see my body follows a different law that ... More

Throughout history the Vatican has tried many tricks to convince, impress, and make money from people. They have employed the world’s best architects, artists and composers to create the impression of their Church’s grandeur with overpowering edifices, music that can move one to tears, and stupendous sculptures and beautiful paintings. These things may be magnificent, and the world would be a poorer place without them, yet they add nothing to the veracity of the Bible, or to More

It is a free world, so Churches have a right to advertise to adults, but when they impose dogma on young children they are playing dirty. Youngsters are prime targets because they are uncritical, trusting, sensitive and pliable, so it is easy to sell them mythical nonsense. Churches own schools for this very purpose. Churches behave like a schoolyard bully preying on little kids for their lunch money. More

In the hundred years before and the few hundred years after Jesus’ death, the most popular religion in the Roman Empire was Mithraism. Many of the main mantras of Mithraism found their way into the Bible and the traditions of Christianity. More

The men who compiled the New Testament canon wrote volumes attacking their opposition and arguing with their critics, so would have recorded basic facts to bolster the credibility of their books if they had them. They did not. There are no such facts about an historical Jesus in their own writings. More

Even if Peter was the first Roman bishop, which he was not, that adds nothing to the authority of today’s pope. The poorly documented and ethically flawed ideas of a person (Jesus) who may or may not have existed, and who died nearly two thousand years ago, cannot be transferred through a chain of hundreds of men, nor can they be used to adjudicate on issues for which there is no historical precedent. More

In 1945 two brothers were looking for fertiliser at the base of cliffs in the Egyptian region of Nag Hammadi. They found a huge earthen jar that contained twelve books bound in gazelle leather. These books are one of the most important archaeological finds of the twentieth century. Now known as the Nag Hammadi Library, they contained a complete More

The real Jesus, if he ever existed, was not the preacher of ethics he is portrayed as in the Bible. He was a man whose primary agenda was the establishment of a Jewish Kingdom of God in Palestine. It is obvious from the details of his death, and some of the things he allegedly said in the Gospels, that he tried to give the finger to the Romans. More

Toward what was to be the end of his campaign, Jesus focused on Jerusalem. It was the political, economic and spiritual center of the Jewish nation, and boasted a large Jewish population that swelled exponentially around Passover. If Jesus was going to begin an insurrection against Rome, it had to start there. More

Saint Paul, the most prolific author in the New Testament, had almost nothing to say about Jesus the person. He had not read any of the Gospels, as they had not been written yet. There is, however, one notable exception, (although it may be an interpolation,) when in the first letter to the Corinthians, the author claimed he knew what Jesus said on the night he was betrayed. toys in church More

The Romans crucified Jesus. That did not look good. The Gospel authors could not have Jesus just disappear after such a dreadful demise. They had to spruce up the story, because no one idolizes a loser. Jesus had to come back, just like a god was expected to. The Egyptian Osiris, the Greek Dionysus, the Persian Mithras, and many others had all risen from the dead. Resurrection is a timeless theme; if a character was charismatic enough, people like to imagine he has defeated death, even today. Co ... More

Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, said, “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!...woe to you, blind guides…You blind fools!…You blind men!…You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell?” (Matt. 23:13–34, NJB.) More

"Is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course; but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time; it is, therefore, at least millions to one, that the reporter of a miracle tells a lie.” More

Stories of gods born to virgins could be found in many countries thousands of years before Jesus. In Greek mythology, Danae was the virgin mother of the demigod Perseus. The Egyptians had Isis as the virgin mother of Horus, and she was worshipped throughout the Roman Empire in Jesus’ time. Mithras, whose cult outshone Christianity for popularity in the first three centuries, was conceived when God entered a virgin. Attis, Adonis, Buddha, Krishna, Osiris and Tammuz were all born to virgins. It ... More

If Christians are going to pray to, and even love, Yahweh, they should picture him in their mind’s eye. Some conclusions about Yahweh can be made after reading about his exploits in the Old Testament. More