It’s difficult to explain to your loved ones why you left their religion. Some of my friends and family have become angry with me, worried for me, or disappointed in me. I certainly understand their confusion. How does someone lead the church praise team, read missionary biographies for a hobby, join the honors program at Bible college, and then leave Christianity altogether?
Skeptics did not influence me, which seems to confuse people. I had never read The God Delusion— I read the Bible. I would say that my deconversion began with the carelessness of devout Christians. The Christian leaders I’d encountered didn’t share my obsession with getting to the bottom of things. Any time they were questioned about their faith, they provided “defenses” that I later came to find unsatisfactory. For example, here are three common arguments for Biblical infallibility they repeated from each other:
- The Bible was written on three continents by 40+ people over 1500 years and does not contradict itself once.
- The gospels were written by eyewitnesses.
- The scribes who copied the Bible were so careful that if they made even a little mistake, they would burn the entire thing and start over.
As a child and gullible teenager, I believed them. Why would these good-hearted people trying to guide my spiritual life lie to me? But I eventually became old enough to read the Bible thoroughly for myself and encountered the undeniable evidence that these arguments were not only misleading, but flat-out lies. For example, is it really possible for an intellectually honest person to read a synopsis of the gospels and continue believing that the gospels do not contradict once? Additionally, it soon became clear to me that the gospels were not written by eyewitnesses (feel free to read my post The Gospels Side-By-Side for more on that). Finally, while it is true that Masoretic scribes from the Middle Ages are traditionally said to have destroyed their manuscripts whenever they made mistakes, this is not true of any portion of the New Testament or the Hebraic texts from before the Common Era.
Once I realized that I had been deceived, I began thinking, “Maybe the Bible isn’t infallible, but it is certainly still inspired.” Lots of educated Christians are aware of these facts, yet they’re still Christians. But not wanting to be fooled any longer, I began to study the Bible as objectively as I could.
Reading the so-called sacred texts objectively for the first time, I began to look at the surrounding communities and ask myself what motivated the Biblical authors to use the specific metaphors, linguistic patterns, and stories they used. I studied history, literature, anthropology, and philosophy. But stepping back from the Christian-apologetic mindset, I began to notice connections to the surrounding mythologies, ideologies, and worldviews of the surrounding communities. Temples of worship, religious relics, animal sacrifice, enslavement, war, misogyny—what part of these core principles of the Torah wasn’t already deeply embedded in the Ancient Near East? What a coincidence that the core religious and behavioral preferences of the correct creator of the cosmos happened to closely mirror those of the surrounding cultures and religions.
Not only did the key features of the Old Testament closely mirror those of its neighbors, but the Old Testament’s theology changed and developed accordingly with the social surroundings of the Israelites. Wherever the Israelites went, their theology became a little more like that of their neighbors. These unoriginal core principles of Jewish theology cannot be brushed off as mere cultural extras with the all-too-common, “That was just their culture at the time;” you see, these core principles (temple worship, animal sacrifice, religious relics, etc.) served as the foundations of Christian doctrine. What was Jesus’ crucifixion other than an all-encompassing substitute for animal sacrifice? What would Paul’s mission across the seas have mattered without the New Covenant’s disestablishment of the Ark of the Covenant in the second Temple as God’s resting place? Try as they might, an intellectually honest Christian can never truly separate the most influential features of the New Testament from the most unoriginal features of the Old.
To illustrate my point, let’s follow the development of Hades throughout Bible history. First known as “Sheol,” it started merely as the grave when Israel lived in a world with a poorly-developed afterlife (early OT). Sheol later became a dwelling place for the sleeping dead (pre-exilic “writings” in the OT), complete with gates and rivers just like that of the neighboring Babylonian mythology (the Descent of Inanna, for example). Once the Israelites lived among the Persians and their dualistic Zoroastrian religion, Sheol became a constantly-developing holding place for those awaiting resurrection[1] (mid/post-exilic OT and Second Temple literature). When the Greeks conquered Persia, Sheol endured a language-change and became “Hades” to the Jews. But along with the language-change came the connotations of the Homeric idea of Hades. Jews began reading the Greek underworld into Sheol. By the time our observation of Hades comes to the synoptic gospels, Hades is complete with a torture chamber for the wicked and a peaceful holding place for the righteous, as evident via Jesus’ description in Luke 16:23-25. As you can see, this key Christian concept develops in accordance with the ideas of its writers’ surrounding cultures. Wherever the Israelites go, their afterlife becomes more like that of their captors and dictators.
Likewise, what a coincidence that God waited for the arrival of a culture in which men had long claimed to be “sons of gods incarnate” to send his never-before-mentioned son to claim himself to be the son of God incarnate. In other words, the very central foundation on which the entire Christian religion sits is so obviously unoriginal that my newly-objective mind could no longer buy it. Truly, I realized, one must have already chosen to believe the principles of Christianity in order to rationalize it in the mind. Could an intellectually-honest person really look at the full picture of the Bible in its context and become convinced that it (or even its most basic principles) was inspired by the creator of the cosmos who exists from one end of the universe to the other?
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[1] Hallote, Rachel S. Death, Burial, and Afterlife in the Biblical World. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001. pp. 126-127.
Cover Photo by Clark Young on Unsplash