Why Christianity is Evil
Christianity is evil, because its beliefs and practices do produce
much sufferings (of course while never intending to do any evil, but
rather as collateral damages, we may say), and distract
well-intended people from searching for better or more efficient
ways to do the good.
And also, because it defines holiness by conformity to their assumed
characters of God which they describe as a stupid psychopath and
bloody tyrant. Indeed, why do Christians
claim to believe that God's characters include "justice" and
"goodness", if by "justice" they mean cruelty (desire to send us all
to hell for "our sins" that he let us no decent choice to avoid by
the way He created us), and by "goodness" they mean injustice
(punishing Somebody else instead of us and judging us on our faith
rather than our deeds) ?
See more about God's
characters
Also in this essay "Even
if I did believe" :
"The
thesis of this essay is that even if a God as described in the
Bible does exist, he is not fit for worship.
If I had undeniable proof of
the existence of Yahweh (...), I still would not worship the
bastard. My primary reason for not being a Christian (...) is
that the Bible is a disgusting book describing the behavior of
a god without the morality of the average high school
student."
The Biblical God does everything to mean that he wants to be
worshiped and wants people to remain sorts of sheep and children
that cannot do anything on their own but remain under His close
dependence and necessity to pray for anything, rather than to do any
decently efficient good that would let us free and independent. And
usually for terrible results.
All this in direct contradiction with other claims of the same
doctrine, that God is also such a devout worshiper of our absolute
freedom, that he'll prefer to let "us" (or rather the natural course
of things) destroy the Earth in the name of His kindness and
absolute respect of our freedom, rather than bring any assistance to
stop the plague.
Here
is Weinberg's view on Christianity.
"The
prestige of religion seems today to derive from what people take
to be its moral influence, rather than from what they may think
has been its success in accounting for what we see in nature.
Conversely, I have to admit that, although I really don't believe
in a cosmic designer, the reason that I am taking the trouble to
argue about it is that I think that on balance the moral influence
of religion has been awful.
This is much too big a question to be settled here. On one side, I
could point out endless examples of the harm done by religious
enthusiasm, through a long history of pogroms, crusades, and
jihads. (...) On the other side, many admirers of religion would
set countless examples of the good done by religion. For instance,
in his recent book Imagined Worlds, the distinguished physicist
Freeman Dyson has emphasized the role of religious belief in the
suppression of slavery.
(...)
Where religion did make a difference, it was more in support of
slavery than in opposition to it. Arguments from scripture were
used in Parliament to defend the slave trade. Frederick Douglass
told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse
when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him
to justify slavery (...) she had never heard any sermon opposing
slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was
God's will. With or without religion, good people can behave well
and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that
takes religion. "
(However I would not agree with him that religion is the only way
for good people to do evil; I think this happens naturally in many
ways, but only that religions, including Marxism,
contribute to make these risks worse and more systematic)
Of course, most Christians will strongly disagree with such a
judgement, have no clue what it can be based on, and claim it must
be unjustified. Without trying to be exhaustive, let's give a few
clues and references on the issue.
Christians are blind to the consequences of preaching the Gospel on
people's lives. They claim that Jesus will change their life for the
better, but this is a mere belief
in the usefulness of their religion for people's lives or social
sustainability through its morality standards, but this is just what
they guess things should be if they were right, unsupported by any
observational evidence. While some people have positive testimonies
(genuine or just for being praised by other Christians ?), they will
never want to understand or admit the devastating consequences it
may produce as well, that is the Religious
Trauma Syndrome.
Then, instead of admitting their fault in the trauma they caused to
the people whose trust they (sincerely) abused by telling (holy)
lies in God's name, they systematically reject the fault on their
victims. So, behind their childish belief in the idea that they have
a religion of forgiveness, the truth is that they make the innocent
victims of their own wrong actions feel terribly guilty. Here
is a testimony about this.
Most of
Christianity promotes homophobia
(which in particular led to the death
of one of the founders of computer science)
Christianity
deletes or at least direly underestimate the concern for the
protection
of the environment, that is our heritage from millions of
years of evolution that is being irreversibly destroyed just now for
the millions of years to come, with as an only justification
(whenever they bother justifying themselves) their arbitrary belief
that Jesus will soon come back and destroy the Earth with all its
contents anyway.
Religion generates despise and social exclusion against those who
dare have the misfortune to think sanely and rationally, treated as
the enemies of God, guilty of "pride" or whatever. In the same way
it can also make a trouble to the chances for serious people to find
love, either in the same way (through social exclusion) or by
denying the difficulty and taking too seriously the call for trust
in God.
Christianity delayed the development of science in Europe for about
a millennium (in the middle ages).
There are a number of Christian terrorist organizations: IRA, KKK,
anti-abortion terrorism; and in the past, of course, crusades and
killings of heretics and "witches".
More generally, here
is a list of examples of wrong actions that Christianity generates.
Christians usually dismiss cases of wrong things done in the name of
Christianity, as not Christian, just because, for them, Christianity
is just about doing right things (but then, why isn't the Bible
reduced to the simple command "Act good" ? what is the proof that
its teachings aren't leading to do the wrong things, if its contents
had to be revealed by God rather than logically and provably deduced
from this simple command ?)
But, let us remember what was the motivation for what is currently
seen as one of the most indefensible actions make by the Church long
ago : crusades and burning "witches". Why did they do it ? Their
argument was that they are burning people to save them from hell
because, with their heresy or practices they would otherwise go to
hell. So, Christians thought: if I were in their place, I would much
prefer to be burnt this way for my salvation, rather than live and
be doomed to hell.
So, Christians of that time were strictly following the golden rule:
do to others what you would like others to do for you. They had no
bad intention at all. They were just sincerely trying to follow
God's will. You can accuse those crusaders of anything, but not of
being bad in themselves, nor of refusing to obey God's will. And
they had no way to guess that God's will was anything else than
this.
This illustrates a very general point: that acting good is often not
a matter of intention or of being good in oneself, but of having the
right information on the world.
Still, most Christians remain blind to this.
A general problem that makes Christians do the wrong things and fail
to understand and do the right things: their essentialism, mistaking
the moral qualification of an action with its nature or intention,
disregarding the context; their inability or refusal to understand
the consequences of their actions. They make this systematic, by the
following childish reasoning and set of more or less hidden,
unquestioned assumptions:
- There is no point to try to understand anything about the
world because it is trivial: holiness is a matter of
simple-mindedness, so that the only way to the truth is the one
of childishness and oversimplification
- For everybody, the right thing to do is trivial, given by
God's will and directly put by Him under their eyes; or, it
would be impossible for man to have any reliable clue about
right or wrong unless it is dictated to him by God.
- There is no other possible cause or influence to human
suffering, than the direct will by men to do the wrong thing;
nothing can stop bad people from doing wrong things, as long as
they remain the same in their hearts
- God is so generous that he will let bad people do their wrong
actions
- The idea that any suffering could be caused by anything else
than people's wrong intentions, or would be unnecessary with
some given set of human bad intentions or imperfections, would
be an intolerable blasphemy (suspicion that God did not create
everything perfect with a perfect freedom for us to do and live
exactly what we intend to), and must thus be rejected
- Ifever any well-intended people do something wrong, it does
not matter and we should not think about it because these people
and anybody they happened to hurt will go to heaven anyway. Or,
if what they did was really wrong, then they were in fact bad
people
- Thus, human suffering testifies that the world is full of big
bad wolves, and all the problem is here
- Thus, the only good thing to do for the world is to try to
change big bad wolves into sheep. Or better (since the latter
would be impossible), to change big bad wolves into forgiven big bad wolves,
who will keep making this world a hell like now but will go to heaven anyway
instead of the hell they deserve)
- The one, only and efficient way to change big bad wolves into
sheep forgiven big bad wolves
is to pray for them and preach them the gospel
- The development of this exclusive obsession and crusade
towards everybody becoming
good in themselves forgiven
for their badness, is the one and only way to be good in oneself;
- Any care outside the values of the heart and intentionality,
would be evil (make people the enemies of moral values, or an
intolerable insult to the people who focus on the heart and
intentionality that would be accused of something else than
their intentions, which is an inconceivable criticism); any
claim to understand anything else about the world, any plan to
help it in any other way, would mean hubris and a revolt against
God's will;
- Such a pride is one of the main evils in the world.
But their blindness to the difference between intentions and the
consequences of actions, is leading them to actions focused on good
intentions that ignore their real consequences worse and worse
(because, for them, intentions are all what matters to please God
and reach heaven while complex rational understanding of other
cause-to-effect relationships has no spiritual value), which worsens
the ignored problem. How the hell can then God judge people who were
led by previous false teachings, to "sincerely" dedicate their good
will to spread these false teachings and do the wrong things (by
mistaking them with the right things) and to make the world's
sufferings worse and worse out of blindness and unconsciousness
by/for making the navel of their own hearts holier and holier (more
selfless in their self) ? What a terrible conundrum they are giving
Him to handle in this way ! Only God knows how to cope with it :-(
And if there is no God but just karma or whatever, the problem is
the same: the question of right and wrong makes no more sense.
Indeed what is a good action when good intentions produce bad
consequences ? Maybe the bad consequences should be no more
understood as coming from men, but from a natural disaster (the
sociocultural force of memes) that controls humans actions like
puppets.
So, religions save human responsibility with respect to suffering,
by abandoning the world to a natural (cultural) disaster. Yeah
right. Good or bad ? So, humans suffer more of the consequences of
actions which are no more theirs (but those of the memes that
control them) but will go to heaven anyway because their heart is
purified. Wonderful.
So, Christianity (as well as many other religions and
non-religions), misinterprets morality as an intrinsic character: as
a matter of being rather
than having (to be good in oneself, rather than
to have done actions that have useful consequences on
the well-being of others). It insists on principles but cannot
operate correctly the application of these principles in concrete
situations. What's the point of insisting on morality principles if
their application turns out to be selfish (to the improvement of
one's virtue and intentions) and failing to fulfil the object
of those very intention (the well-being of others) ?
For example, one of the intended lessons of Christianity is to value
love and sacrifice, give to the poor and respect the miserable.
However in practice (like many others), Christians usually don't share love but mock and
despise the poor in love. Their principle of self-sacrifice
turns out to be reduced to empty words, failing to meet its
practical chances of applications.
See also in links,
in particular "Atheists and Anger"
Criticism of Evangelical Christianity
Up : Religion
Main site : Anti-spirituality