First off, I want to state that I’m not a Christian. I know this is pretty appalling to a lot of people nowadays, which is only natural as a lot of people are Christian: out of the 329.5 million people (as of 2022) here in America, around 65 percent believe in God and a pantheon of saints. Does this mean I am inherently wrong, as America is founded upon majority? No. America was founded on religious safety, from the despot king and church in Europe, and to discriminate on faith is exactly the kind of thing our society would do today, which is not at all a complement. But I digress. This article is not about whether I should be protected by the law from discrimination which I haven’t, interestingly, received (I know a very large amount of intelligent and amiable Christians who accept my faith graciously), it is about why I’m not Christian.
I guess a lot of things happen by nurture, especially early in childhood, and my beliefs were indeed spurred by my father, who didn’t believe in anything, and my mother, who was fairly pagan. Reading Douglas Adams and Stephen Hawking at a young age didn’t exactly help either, and now I see myself as rather enlightened: I can’t believe anything, no matter how hard I try. Finding out the truth about various childhood deities sealed it permanently: once there was nothing I couldn’t understand, I couldn’t understand things I couldn’t understand. If it sounds convoluted, be glad that you’re not delusional: it really really is. Nowadays I’ve been deciphering more and more arguments against Christianity or Christian arguments that I would never have found in my younger and less intelligent years, and thus this article.
Before I go any further, I want to make something clear: I don’t expect to convert you. People well over average intelligence believe in God, I know some of them, and thus I can determine it isn’t related to intelligence. Belief can never be rooted in intelligence, because the two are contradictory: I don’t mean that people who believe are unintelligent, but that they have not intelligently considered it because if you consider something you find holes in it. If you take offense to that statement, then maybe you really aren’t intelligent: being provoked unnecessarily by well-explained sentences that are obviously not meant to bait you is a sign of lackluster mental operation. I am about to list a set of beliefs and arguments which may contradict yours; if you consider it sinful and don’t want to read it, want to curse me to your Hell and reduce me to a sinner, to burn me at stake for a witch or to stab me for my religion (all of these have happened, not, luckily, to me), you may stop reading now.
I’ll start off the argumentation with a simple thought experiment, directed at some common Christian beliefs. I know for a fact that Christians believe wholeheartedly that they are right, so in my opinion it is interesting to point out that every religion says exactly the same thing: that they are, uniquely to all religions, correct; and that the other religions are, as a whole, incorrect and often sinful. Isn’t it weird to think that all believers tend to have the same mindset? I tend to find myself falling into this sinkhole of belief as well, and I think it has something to do with human nature: we are passionate creatures, and never think of the other views, lest we find evidence we are wrong. I’ve had arguments (not religious) where I had all the proof on my side: the argument was in relation to the Trump election, namely that Trump won legitimately. I don’t buy into the whole Russians-hacked-it theory; as a computer programmer, I can tell you how hard it is to actually hack things like that, but he hacked it in a much easier way: the Electorate. He won with the aid of a of a system that was designed because the populace wasn’t smart enough to vote for themselves (look it up) - the majority was against him. Anyways, I digress. My point is thus: if everyone believes, wholeheartedly and with complete conviction, that they are right, who is right? Furthermore, a thousand years in the future, won’t we have another set of religions that looks at Christianity and Judaism and all of the others the same way we today look upon Greek, Egyptian, and Animist beliefs? Yes, I know this isn’t an argument. It just makes you start considering things, that’s all.
I think the best way to counter religious ideas is to force them to justify themselves. Religious people sometimes say nonreligious people can’t prove anything and are thus objectively wrong, despite the fact that most of the time they get their information from a magic book, supposedly containing the word of an omnipresent ethereal being. In many cases, not just Christianity (if you didn’t know, the Christian old testament is actually the Jewish bible), this ethereal being suddenly decided to create large mass of water from whence cometh the land, in some interpretations a large flat disc, with a 3.8 * 10^26 watt light bulb and a gray and rather inefficient mirror stuck above them along with a massive Sugarcandy Mountain-style (George Orwell, Animal Farm) paradise floating along with it, in which the souls of everyone that follows a couple rules reside in infinite splendor. If I had said this to you completely out of context, you would have thought I was crazy, wouldn’t you have? Here’s a test: find somebody who you know is Christian and who isn’t used to hijinks like this. Pop up to them and say, “Hey <their name>, I have proof in this book that the Earth was made by a massive dude with a cloth napkin for pants who also put a lot of big lights up there in the clouds with his friends!” Until they realize, they will think you are on drugs. It isn’t that the idea of a god is inherently improbable, it’s that the way Christianity portrays it is hilarious. I don’t mean this as an insult: some of the greatest literature was hilarious. The Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas) was hilarious, Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was hilarious, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was hilarious, and we can with pride say that the Bible was hilarious. A work of fiction is not an insult, fiction is better than nonfiction in many cases, and we see the same kinds of powers, good-and-evil clashes, fights for truth, etc in the Bible as we do in the best fictions. People can remember the things God said in dreams perfectly with perfect prose, a guy walks on water before turning it’s kin into wine, noble kings protect their lands from evil rule by defeating giants, and at the top of it all are ethereal purposes which drives the actions of everyone, those of Satan and God. This isn’t just good fiction, this is great fiction. The kind of thing authors wish they thought of first. We can conclusively say that The Lord of the Rings was neither the first nor the foremost in it’s genre: the Bible defeats it with one hand tied behind it’s back. This is, I think the fundamental misconception that everybody in the world makes: Atheists argue that it’s ridiculous, that it could never happen in real life, they heckle and cleverly set verbal traps to the unsuspecting Christians on Internet forums, citing Wikipedia articles over their Brandon Sanderson novels. They are taking it all too seriously, taking beautiful art and effective prose as more than beautiful art and effective prose. Personally, I don’t think the bible is wrong, I think the interpretations are. If I worship Kendra Sorenson as a saint, send all those who disagree with me to the Society of the Evening Star, and bless those who follow me as Knights of the Dawn, I am wrong, right? But that doesn’t mean Fablehaven, not an entirely awful work of fiction, was wrong, it just means I was taking it too seriously. Similarly, Starry Night by van Gogh is a painting and a beautiful painting. I can extrapolate it all I like: back then, the stars swirled through the actions of a grand spirit, or I can appreciate it as art. This is what I think religion should do with their books: appreciate it as art.
To focus on the Bible, it is rather compromised. An example, that applies especially in this age of freedom and enlightenment, is that it forces slaves to be servile (1 Peter 2:18) and kind - rather than mentioning the fact that slavery is evil and should be revoked, but I’m more interested in the scientific perspective: In the first page of the Christian-adopted Jewish bible, it states that God placed in the heavenly firmament two great lights, one to rule the day and one to rule the night (close, perhaps not exact, to the original phrasing). The moon is, quite clearly, not a big light. I don’t have a bible on hand right now, but I know the standard interpretation of the rest of that part of Genesis involves God scattering a load of stars along the sky: but we know there are things past the sky. We’ve sent a spacecraft well outside the solar system and haven’t run into a Heaven yet, so considering the vast distances I think it’s pretty safe to say there aren’t any angels up in the sky constantly watching us. And then, that Hell business - how do they keep breathing down there with all that molten rock? I don’t defy the idea of a Heaven and Hell - that’s for a later article - but it makes sense that neither Heaven nor Hell are anywhere near us geographically speaking. I think the most interesting thing I can pull out of these few paragraphs of Genesis is how we stopped believing in that one part. It wasn’t a new interpretation sent to us by the Pope, it wasn’t a shiny new bleeding-edge testament, it was… science. We realized that the geocentric view was stupid, and that the stars really aren’t just dots of glow-in-the-dark paint, and it didn’t matter how much the Catholic church tortured Galileo, we simply couldn’t bring ourselves to believe in something so obviously wrong. Why don’t we extrapolate this to other shaky parts of the bible? Why couldn’t Jesus have simply invented the first fast-acting fruit juice powder?
I think I’ll present the argument of evolution at this point. To be fully concise: evolution isn’t an argument at all, it’s a very compelling contradictory viewpoint, one which has real scientific basis. Christianity probably wants to object here with the “we don’t really know!” argument, but I’ll remind you that the only basis of Christianity is a magic book written by people who lived in the same times that we thought throwing women into a pond was the best way to get rid of witches so our cattle could make it to market and we wouldn’t have to sell our daughters to the king. Back in them yonder olden days when men were real men, women were real women, slaves still believed that their masters were being pretty nice, and water was never real water, at least not if a guy we nailed to a tree had picked himself back up off the cross and stumbled into town, looking for a stiff drink and some blind people to heal. We know that some species have evolved - us! Unless the father of our favorite crucifixion victim faked and buried those bones there, imagining the looks on our faces with a grim chuckle as he did so. The most compelling argument I’ve ever received against evolution was from a very intelligent person I know, who believes in evolution but not speciation. His idea is that to become a new species, you have to evolve several body systems at once, and that while they are evolving they are a detriment, thus counteracting the evolution in the first place. This was a great argument and I didn’t really have a rebuttal to it, but I don’t exactly have a degree in biology. My dad does, though, so I asked him. He explained that multiple body systems needn’t evolve at once: such as, for the early water-based creatures to leave the oceans (which gives them an advantage: such as with African mud-fish, if you can skip across to the next puddle to feed, you’re better off than your neighbor who’s stuck), they only had to evolve one thing at once. Here’s an example: the African mud-fish (a species doubtless in the process of evolution) doesn’t need to have the body systems for open-air respiration, it just holds it’s breath. The change to become a mud-fish from a normal-fish is easy: gaining stronger fin muscles to flap along the ground, holding their breath, until the next puddle. From there, an evolutionary urge is created: the urge to breathe in the air rather than the water. Gills are basically lungs, so the gills will enlarge and become more capable of filtering oxygen-laden air, the respiration rate will likely slow and probably gain muscles to open and close the gills and to expand and contract the newly-formed air sacs, and we have an animal which is suddenly more comfortable on land than in the mud. The fins elongate and become stronger, so it can now walk, the mouth grows teeth, etc, etc. The animal started as a fish and ended as a frog, in a set of distinct steps. Here’s an idea of how it was for apes to humans: first, the apes began growing bigger brains. This is obviously an advantage because it means they can use more advanced tools (indeed, the unusual mental capacity of apes at the moment may be a sign that they will soon evolve into something more human-like all over again, although this is a messy theory). As our brains got larger, we naturally had to get physically weaker, because the brain takes up more and more energy, so we started getting taller, making it easier to grab fruits without as much climbing. Standing erect is an even bigger advantage for the same reason, and we already see apes doing something similar: they crawl with their body at a 45-degree slant. We may have lost our hair for climate adaptation reasons: as we became weaker and smarter, it became more important to be naturally cool in the summer than to be naturally warm in the winter, as we could use fires and furs to keep ourselves from dying of hypothermia. To this day we still show signs that humans were never meant to be in colder climates like North America, we tolerate the melt much better than the freeze, giving the impression that we evolved from species that were already optimized for heat. Agriculture meant an atomic boom in our brains: it became more important to develop tools than to hunt or fish or forage. Stepping - pun not intended - back a few million years in the chain, let’s look at feet, just to clear up the missing links. Apes have highly dextrous feet and legs, like a third and arm/hand pair, and humans don’t - it looks like our legs began to optimize for running instead of climbing, and our toes became less effective as breaking them while running was more of a risk than the benefit of having them.
These are some points in the argument against Christianity and to a lesser extent all of Religion. I don’t mean to convert anybody, mainly because I know I can’t, I just want to set some wheels turning, make people start looking beyond what they know. These views aren’t comprehensive, nothing like it, and there is surely more to come - if you have any suggestions or counterarguments, please e-mail me so I can begin working on the second part of this article. I know many Christians won’t want to do this, as it will fuel the sinful flames of my argument, but I promise that I use all arguments anyone sends me in the next draft. To be perfectly clear and to dispel lawyers, I would like to note that an argument is: