 I had a terrible experience with Christianity growing up. I was lied to, pressured, and scared into believing things which turned out to be nonsense. Because of this, I hold a lot of resentment and bitterness towards the Christian community. Now though I have become personally persuaded by the philosophy of Jesus Christ, I believe it stands in contrast to the philosophy of most Christians that I've ever met. I grew up in the stereotypical Christian evangelical household. Now for this article I'll use the terms evangelical and fundamentalist interchangeably. My mother with the best of intentions decided to homeschool her children for religious reasons. She started in the middle of the 1990s when homeschooling was almost entirely underground. She was a trailblazer. I was the youngest child, so my entire pre-college education came from homeschooling. The education was superb. I wouldn't change it for the world. I learned the principles of self-study. I learned how to learn. I learned to question authority and come up with my own conclusions about the world, and I progressed at my own pace. If anybody doubts the quality of my homeschool education for what it's worth, I started college at 16 and got my bachelor's degree at 20 from Alfred University. But my education was not purely academic. It was religious too. And Frank, I was indoctrinated as a child by my parents, by my peers, by the broader homeschooling community and the evangelical community. I'm not saying it was a cult or anything, and I know many individuals who had much stricter religious upbringings than I did, but by my standards today it was indoctrination. My education was crafted around Christian ideas, and it was supposed to be the bedrock of my entire world view. Now, I don't blame my parents. They were acting in accordance with their beliefs. Non-Christians were in peril of burning in hell for eternity, so of course they would want their kids to avoid such a fate. I have no doubt if my mother could only teach us one thing, it would be to believe in Jesus. And as much resentment as I hold towards Christians, my mother really was one of the few exceptions. She was aware of the profound disconnect between the philosophy of Jesus Christ and the rest of Christendom. She always struck me, and everybody else that interacted with her, as a true Christian, for lack of a better term. So my intention in writing this piece is manyfold. Four years ago I had a profound spiritual experience, which did convince me that God exists, that life has meaning, and that this figure of Jesus Christ is incredibly important. Now, prior to that I was something like a deist for philosophical reasons, a position that I will defend at length in the future. But my spiritual experience also came with a clear understanding that A, the Bible and every other holy book is horribly misinterpreted and is not the perfect Word of God. B, most religious people are full of shit. And C, religious ideas do not necessarily have to be irrational. In other words, there is such a thing as good religion. So because I intend to defend many religious ideas in the future, I must first deeply criticize religion. And I admit this could be a very easy task. Religious ideas as they are frequently articulated are often cringe-worthy, laughable even. But this is not my goal. The world is already filled to the brim with enough religious mockery and most of it is juvenile and arrogant and ignorant. What lacks is a clear articulation of sound and philosophically precise religious ideas. I intend to write several pieces on this topic, both defending and attacking such ideas. But I need to start at the beginning. My personal experience with Christianity and all of the errors, misinformation and nonsense that accompanied it. The worst of it came on Sunday mornings. I despised going to church. Specifically, going to Sunday school. The morning classes that taught the basics of evangelical Christianity to children. Impressionable children, mind you, many of whom also went to Christian schools and mainly hung out in Christian circles. The walls of the social bubble were thick. Outsiders were seen as lost souls who could be saved with enough persuasion and kindness. Or from my parent's point of view, non-Christians were often seen as corrupting influences on their children. Now my Christian circle wasn't too extreme. My parents didn't want us to listen to the secular radio and they were fairly protective about the media that we consumed. Our textbooks were written by Christian organizations, most of them at least. But I knew families that were far stricter. Some poor kids, I remember, weren't even allowed to watch the movie Toy Story because their parents thought that some of the characters and themes were satanic. While my parents sheltered us as best they could, I remember my mom being upset that I started the Harry Potter series at a friend's house because witchcraft and sorcery shouldn't be glorified. I must say I saw plenty of Jerry Springer shows when she wasn't in the room. My siblings and I got away with a fair amount of mischief, at least by comparison to other Christian households. But church, church was the worst. The people were judgmental. The ideas were shallow. The culture was toxic. I'll just be honest, most Christians are unbearable. They are arrogant, hypocritical, authoritarian, inaccurate, and foolish. They make grand conclusions about ideas that they do not understand, both their own ideas and others. Of course, to be fair, most people in general, not just Christians, also fit this description. And yes, there are exceptions. So don't get me wrong, most interactions with Christians, especially if you meet their criteria for being a good person, won't be sour. But from my experience, the hypocrisy and judgment lies beneath the surface. Scratch your average Christian evangelical, and I think you'll find something foul. So what did we learn in Sunday school? In a nutshell, there is only one way to God. One path leads to heaven, the rest to hell. That one path is Christianity, and specifically Protestant Christianity. And if you get into denominational disagreements, potentially only a small group of Protestants at that. Whether or not Catholics are Christians is an open question to many evangelicals. There's a line in the Bible in which Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes unto the Father, but by me. And let me tell you, they take this literally. It's Jesus Christ or the Abyss. So you better get your theology straight. Now, these ideas are not self-refuting. They are not, obviously, wrong, and especially to a young person, so I don't want to mock them. It's not the ideas that I have issue with. It's the way that they were taught. For example, the existence of God was never treated as a serious philosophical issue. It was taken as a presupposition, one which you were not allowed to question. Doubting was tantamount to heresy and reflective of a lack of Christian character. Absolute devotion, or blind faith, as I would put it, was expected of each young Christian. We used to sing songs every Sunday about Christianity. They'd be about stories in the Bible or about the majesty of Jesus Christ. Sometimes they were practical. I can still hear the tune to the books of the Bible song in my head. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus. To a child, when all of your peers and their parents are all singing the same song, it's powerful, it's your community united together in the same exact beliefs with the same presuppositions so confident that they are willing to sing about it. It's kind of like the National Anthem or a Pledge of Allegiance, a public commitment to the same ideology. And if that's the only world that a child knows, they are practically destined to believe, at least for a time, those same ideas. Thus, I call it indoctrination. Western culture is a bit desensitized to Christianity, so you take the same process, the singing, dancing, praying, preaching, believing, and apply it to a different religion. Imagine children all holding hands, praying to the God Marduk on Sundays. Or instead of vacation Bible school in the summer, imagine children attending summer adventures through the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I mean people would be horrified. But because Christianity is so popular, people don't think twice about their kids attending the same church, presented the same ideas with the same peers who believe the same thing every Sunday for their entire childhood. Now I don't know what happened, but at some point, a few ideas seeped into my young head. There was a problem. I started to question things. Not necessarily the conclusions of Christian evangelicalism, but the method. Take the same method, faith, trust in elders or your parents or holy books, but put it in a different environment, and I could see how you'd end up with different conclusions. The Muslim, following the same method as I was following, wouldn't believe that Christianity was true. He'd believe in Islam. But how could this be possible? I started asking people, and I would only receive crummy answers in return. This was the first seed. I started examining the why behind my beliefs. If a method was faulty, then the conclusions could be trusted. Take a clear example. Say that some guy tax up a bunch of propositions to a dartboard. Wherever the dart lands, that's the proposition he believes is true. Well, after throwing a few darts, it is possible that his conclusions about the world are accurate. But it's a dubious method, and only a fool would trust them. Now imagine he didn't throw those darts, but his parents did. Then whatever the resulting world view, he was raised to believe. The ideas became essential to their family and community, and his peers also believed the same things for the same reason. Would he be any more justified in believing? Of course not. The methodological mistake is obvious. But unfortunately many religious communities make a similar error. Your average believer does not scrutinize the beliefs that he was taught as a child. He merely assumes that they are true. A disturbing thought is never grappled with. What if my parents, my peers, my pastor, my teachers, what if they are all wrong about the basics? What if nobody actually critically examined these ideas? Why would I believe them to be true? I'll give you a concrete example that is nearly universal in evangelical circles. The perfect accuracy of the Bible. Supposedly the Bible is the Word of God that it contains no errors whatsoever. Many Christians take this a step farther and say that the Bible should be taken literally, meaning the stories and genesis about giants and talking serpents. Those were historical facts and should not be taken metaphorically. Now these ideas are possibly true, but they run into some difficult problems. First of all, which Bible is the perfect Word of God? Is it the English translation from the Greek? And which translation, the NIV or the King James Version? And what about the different interpretations that we have for words? My understanding of the word justice is not identical to yours, and same is true for heaven or for God or for even turning the other cheek. Can two Christians have different definitions for words while still believing their interpretation of Scripture is divinely inspired? And speaking of which, why would we assume that the Bible is perfect in the first place? If we can't even communicate perfectly amongst ourselves, what reason would we have for believing that this particular translation with this subjective meaning is infallibly true? The sad reality is this. Most Christians believe the Bible is the Word of God because the Bible says so. I cannot tell you how many Christians have quoted Scripture to defend the inerrancy of the Bible. And here's the reality, folks. Christians are not alone. They don't realize that fundamentalist Mormons and Muslims and Hindus all do the same thing. Their holy books are all divinely inspired and yet mutually exclusive with the others. The Muslim insists that his book is perfect. Not even one line can be improved upon. It must be from God because it says so within the text. Now when I first started to understand this, my heart sank a bit and my skepticism started to emerge. Here we have a gigantic problem. Billions of people claiming that their holy book is perfect all for the same reason because their book says so. All while making mutually exclusive conclusions. The Muslim won't be persuaded by the Bible's claims to perfection and the Christian won't be persuaded by the Quran's claims to perfection. But Christians and Muslims make the same error, the exact same methodological mistake. And I'm sure with few exceptions, these religious folks only arrive at their conclusions because of the happenstance of their birth Take your average Christian, birth him in Malaysia to Muslim parents and I can guarantee you he would be a Muslim and the same is true in reverse. This particular methodological error results in people believing whatever their larger culture believes and to the extent they base their ideas on circular reasoning, that scripture is inerrant because it says so, they will never be convinced otherwise. In my mind, every question regarding holy texts has a simple resolution. All books are written by men and aren't perfect. Merely stating that the words contained in this book are divinely inspired doesn't mean that they are. Problem solved. There are a hundred different problems with evangelical Christianity. Biblical inerrancy is just one. But these errors do not seem to stop many Christians. Instead, they embolden them. So enter the next gigantic religious error. Faith. Getting caught in a poor argument or even a logical contradiction is an opportunity for many religious folks to proudly turn off their rational faculties and proclaim, I do not need critical thinking. I have faith. Now I have devoted an entire post to the unnecessary and toxic errors of faith. But for now, I want to focus on my experience with it. Many Christians use faith as an excuse for aggressive anti-intellectualism. My dad was a good example of this. We had countless arguments about Christianity and he would frequently end up raising his voice making dramatic and ridiculous pronouncements about how he didn't need limp-wristed philosophizing because he had faith. The same nonsense was peddled by pastors and preachers. But this odd and anti-intellectual aggression seemed especially popular amongst Christian fathers, many of whom I don't think coincidentally, had military backgrounds. Just when I would point out an error or a contradiction, I would so frequently be met with the same boisterous claptrap, quoting scripture, getting emotional, creating dramatic storylines invoking angels or demons, Satan, Jesus, heaven and hell. Quite often my frustration with these answers would be met with a condescending pat on the head. They'd say, oh, you're just searching or you're just going through a natural rebellion. Essentially, oh, you'll grow out of it. In time, you'll see it our way. So if you don't mind, if you'll excuse me, I would like to respond after all of these years. I don't see it your way, folks, and I never will. You are wrong, deluded, and dangerous. I understand why, but you do not. I have grown into spiritual knowledge over the last several years. It's true. And it just reveals how wildly inaccurate and toxic evangelical Christianity often is. Good riddance. It is clear to me the reason that Christian evangelicalism, as I understand it, cannot stand up to examination and the reason that these people are so often anti-intellectual is because the ideas are wrong. The worldview collapses under scrutiny, so it's distressing for many to scrutinize. I do not mean this hyperbolically. Christian evangelicalism is not only wrong, it is often dangerous. It's a net negative on society. Why? Because a huge number of evangelicals blend their religion into politics. They merge nationalism with religious fundamentalism. They want the government to enforce their religion on the rest of society, and unfortunately, even the rest of the world. Authoritarianism is important to the evangelical mindset. The authority of scripture, pastors, parents, laws, and leaders. The Bible and the laws within are supposed to give a structure to all society. This includes the relationship within the family, within marriages, within local communities, governments, and even within the international community. I know evangelicals who want, sometimes explicitly, a theocracy. They want people to follow the rules as they perceive them, whether they are a neighbor or somebody on the other side of the planet who have never even heard of the NIV version of the Bible. As a result, the United States military is seen as doing God's work, literally. No exaggeration. Fundamentalist families will often thank God for the military, ask God to bless the military operations, and see soldiers as essentially missionaries for Christian civilization, carving through the world of barbarism that lies outside of Christendom. I know Christians who will say with a straight face that the Middle East should just be nuked, except for Israel, of course. They hold their religion so strongly and couple it with a nationalist zealotry that they enthusiastically support military adventurism overseas, even at the expense of innocent lives. Now, to me, there could not be a greater disconnect between the philosophy of Jesus Christ and the Christian evangelical. Turn the other cheek has been turned into nuke the savages. Love your neighbor into kill your neighbor for the greater good, assuming that he's foreign. These Christians love power. They love crusading around the globe, imposing their ideas on anybody who disagrees. In Jesus' name, of course. It is a nauseating mix of self-righteousness, anti-intellectualism, confusion, ignorance, and hypocrisy. Or, as Gandhi put it, I like your Christ, but I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. But to their credit, hypocrisy isn't always a bad thing in this context. After all, the Bible says quite clearly that you shouldn't eat shellfish and that men shouldn't grow their hair out, right next to the verses about not getting tattoos. But for some reason, evangelicals are frequently anti-tattoo, but they'll give you a pass for eating shellfish. There's also a bunch of nastier, more violent recommendations in the Bible, and I'm glad these Christians apply the lens of biblical literalism inconsistently. Growing up in this community, I had lots of Christian friends. And today, I know that I am not alone in my criticism. While I might be particularly anti-authority, both politically and intellectually and personally, I know plenty of calmer folks who have also outgrown evangelicalism. As loud as pastors or fathers might shout, these seeds of doubt are hard to erase from a young mind. To any truth-seeking evangelicals reading this, don't be afraid to question authority. The resulting doubt you feel is good, it's healthy, and it's for a reason. The foundational ideas of all religious fundamentalism and mentalism are wrong, but don't take my word for it. There is no reason to fear skeptical inquiry. If an idea is true, it will hold up to criticism and doubt. And more importantly, I am convinced that spiritual truths do exist, and I think Jesus and many others spoke about them. But these truths are not mutually exclusive in any way with philosophy or logic. They don't require blind faith or trust in authority. In fact, I think spiritual truths are largely incompatible with deference to authority. They must be discovered by each individual for their own reasons during their own journey. I have much more to say on this topic. And you can help support the creation of a more rational worldview.