How Religions Might Have Started: The Faith of Fred

Thanatophobia has a strong evolutionary basis; of course we are wired with an intense dread of our own demise and an inability to imagine a world without that entity we call "I" (although Mark Twain quipped that such a world without him existed for all of time before he was born so why should it bother him if that state returned following his death?).  Combining an intense dread of death with knowledge of death's inevitability has created the existentialist crisis that peddlers of religious explanations, especially of the metaphysical variety, have preyed on.  Imagine 100 people scared and trying to figure out how to console themselves with their mortality.  99 admit that they have no idea about what happens after death since no one has gone there and returned.  Maybe one guy, let's call him Fred, says quite loudly and angrily that he has a vision that they are all going to eternal bliss - all they have to do is follow him.  In fact, he has a book he just discovered, an ancient text that promises such a reward, and punishment for those who do not believe.  

Our brains are drawn to charismatic certainty, even ideas that are almost certainly wrong.  Honest equivocation seems weak, flip-flopping.  Fred does not sound weak.  He seems to be sure of himself.  Maybe he is on to something. 

So perhaps half in that first generation join the new Religion of Fred (what do they have to lose?) and spend their lives consoled with the idea that they have tapped into a way to dodge death (only their bodies will seem to die - their spirits will live forever).  The problem is those other 50 who keep bringing up those pesky doubts.  If they could just find some way to silence them.

Then something bad happens to this group, perhaps a drought or a flood.  The Followers of Fred pounce on this as proof that if everyone followed the new faith, this never would have happened.  Fred Followers sacrifice a couple of free thinkers in an imaginatively horrific way (after all they are acting for God who hates people do doubt), burning them alive or drowning them while everyone, including their family members are forced to watch.  Following the execution, people are asked if they would like to join the Faith of Fred. 

What do you know?  Membership goes through the roof.  Now those who have not done the reasonable thing and join to save their own hides are seen as obstinate, even dangerous.  They are ostracized by Fred's Faith, denied jobs, told they can't hold property, and occasionally rounded up and executed or tortured.  But they still do not break, not all of them anyway.

After many generations of this, you will see what you see now:   one dominant, loudly confident religion with a long and bloody history of suppressing all dissidents.  But since the ashes of those who resisted have long since cooled, the victims mostly nameless and forgotten, the great-great-great grandchildren of those who mouthed words they did not really believe to avoid the pyre or the gallows forgot or were never informed of the circumstances of their ancestors' renunciation of their faith.   Like Marilyn Albright, who discovered her family was Jewish but had converted to Christianity to avoid persecution, they live blissfully unaware of the torment the Faith of Fred has caused and the alternate belief systems (including none at all) that Fred snuffed out.   They light candles, sing songs, hold hands, and get together for special holidays whose non-Fred origins are politely forgotten.

With the passage of time, the Word of Fred becomes enshrouded in a misty fog that modern adherents say excuses its obvious logical and moral lapses.   Maybe Fred made some statements about things he never thought anyone would be able to test, and when those statements are proven to be not just false but patently absurd (such as that the Earth is the center of the universe, flat, and only 7,000 years sold), the error is forgiven, forgotten, or politely ignored.

So asking people to renounce Fred outright seems too much.  Let them keep their softer, gentler Fred, just as long as we all remember that we can never rely on the Teachings of Fred to shape foreign policy, train surgeons, or decide the number and timing of our children.  

Why A Frontal Assault on Fundamentalism Will Probably Be Less Successful than Just Continuing to Marginalize Them

I am trying to be kind; in an ideal world we would challenge every assertion and throw out those that cannot be proven or disproven along with those that are patently false, keeping only what we actually know. We did this in medicine about a century ago, throwing out bleeding and purgatives and tinctures of opiate and creating a much thinner compendium of evidence-based treatments on which we have building since then. When Semmelweiss, an Austrian physician, pointed out his colleagues were killing their patients by not washing their hands, he was dismissed as a quack - tradition dictated that he was wrong even if carefully controlled trials showed he was right. Which do you think prevailed at the time? Even in medicine (perhaps particularly in medicine) mindless adherence to tradition trumps truth but for the past couple centuries at least, truth has been winning most rounds.
It seems to me that people are wired in such a way that most of them cannot live in a world in which they do not have some sense of connection to some force or power beyond themselves. Religious traditions, even ones that are patently wrong about some matters and absurdly so about others, give a sense of comfort that makes it very hard for its followers to test them critically. Since most have been lied to that their religion has a monopoly on truth or faith and that putting on other faith glasses will only make the world appear black, the impulse to just keep doing what mom and dad did, passing this relatively unexamined package of beliefs and moral dictates onto our children is made only stronger.
In an ideal world, we would all be rational, compassionate, and fearlessly self-critical, but we don't live in that world and perhaps never will (although 150 years ago, it would have been hard to imagine a world without de jure slavery and we got there). Religion seems to be dying a natural death as people evolve away from its less useful teachings - slavery and stoning of women come to mind, along with circumcision and absurd dietary restrictions (avoidance of rabbit and pork) come to mind - and realize the world does not end as Leviticus intoned it would.
It was while under attack, the Catholic church launched the Crusades and the Inquisition. Fearing for its life, Protestant faiths in the New World saw witches behind every tree. But left alone, these faiths mellowed out and became marginalized. We no longer burn people alive in the public square not only because brave men and women of conscience stood up to the religious bullies and hypocrites of their time (I number Jesus as one of those men of conscience) but because men and women who had jobs and families and real problems to solve slowly woke up to the idea that the teachings of a group of unelected men were not very helpful in running a government or guiding scientific research. We can even celebrate Christmas in Massachusetts, something that you could have been fined for (Christmas is not mentioned in the Bible) until the early 19th century, thanks to the quiet marginalization of the religious extremists who tried to create a theocracy but ended up founding a much more pluralistic and diverse place than they ever imagined.
Osama bin Laden and Jerry Falwell were both responding to the same perceived threat: a modernizing world that was largely marginalizing them and making them appear increasingly absurd and anachronistic. The religious conservatives who embraced monarchy over Republican democracy, then fascism over socialism, then more restrictive, gender-based suffrage over universal suffrage and the anti-Biblical notion that a woman's testimony should count as much as man's in court, for example, have been fighting a rear guard action for the past 200 years. The shrinking territory and now only titular power of the Vatican in an Italy that is nominally Catholic but largely ignores the teachings of Pope (Italy now enjoys a negative population growth thanks to its embrace of family planning practices condemned by the Church) is emblematic of this erosion. American Catholics are slightly more likely than their non-Catholic counterparts to get an abortion, and a majority use and believe in science-based contraception.
Yes, the religious fundamentalists of the Abrahamic faiths can be dangerous at times but I doubt many women will relinquish the right to vote, nor will we give our local religious leaders the power to break a perceived nonbeliever on the rack anytime soon.
What we have to do is continue to work within the framework of these traditions, emphasizing those parts that are good (and many are) while marginalizing or ignoring those parts that are morally and logically offensive. Yes, we have a Disneyfied view of Jesus and certainly of the bloody jihads and genocides purportedly condoned by Yahweh in the Old Testament. So we can remind people that the idea of trumpets causing walls to collapse is as ridiculous as the idea that god advocates genocide and the slaughter of innocent animals (the Battle of Jericho, if it can be called a battle, should be remembered with the same horror that we think of the much less bloody "cleansing" of the Warsaw Ghetto, not made into the stuff of children's songs).
Maybe one day someone will do for the entire Bible what Jefferson did for the New Testament and excise all those parts that are almost certainly false or that do not have any moral instruction anyway (memorizing a long list of names of descendants of David is about as helpful in raising my children or deciding optimal tax rates as memorizing the cast of Gilligan's Island). It would be a thinner, better book, perhaps with an appendix apologizing for all those killed in its name and all those murdered for stating what most of us agree to be not just true, but trite: that it was written by angry, vengeful, occasionally murderous men who wanted us to believe that they were created in the image of an equally angry, vengeful and occasionally murderous god.

"I Like Your Christ. I Do Not Like Your Christians. So Unlike Your Christ."

To My Fundamentalist Friends:
Labeling those things you think are true as "faith" (and therefore good, just, and above reproach) and any variation of those things as "nothing" (and therefore false, meriting eternal torture) is not likely to win many converts to your cause (which you, as a Christian, have an obligation to do).
I hope one day that telling other adults they are going to hell for what they believe will be seen as offensive, odious, and primitive as advocating slavery or the stoning of adulteresses. The fact that all 3 doctrines have some support in some parts of the Bible does not mean our ethics and morality cannot evolve beyond the narrow exclusivity and tribalism of the agrarian Mediterranean society out of which these belief systems developed.
Telling someone you believe something because your conscience dictates it, your parents or community taught it to you, or you discovered it through your own personal journey of exploration and study is beyond reproach. Telling everyone else who has not come to the same conclusion as you (even if we agree about many things) they are to be punished forever and ever (and that you find that punishment just) is just plain verbal bullying and I have a habit of standing up to bullies and calling them out.
Taunting people with your goodness and their wickedness is many things, but I doubt it would jive much with the message of compassion and forgiveness taught by a certain Jewish day laborer over whose divinity, you, I, and several billion of our fellow planetary citizens disagree.
When Jesus was asked how to pray, it was a simple prayer that didn't involve hell, but did involve a request to "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us."
He never said Jews are going to hell, as you have repeatedly, which would have been some trick since he and all of his followers were Jewish.
He didn't say to taunt your enemies, but to forgive them, to treat them as you would a friend.
He didn't say to pummel your enemies with threats of hell (or stones) but not to throw stones unless you yourself are without sin. (When the alleged adulteress in question found Jesus had saved her life from the Biblically sanctioned horror she otherwise would have suffered, he didn't say anything about fire and brimstone. He told her to go and not sin again.)
Maybe I'm out of line and you are indeed without sin. For all I know, you're right, and those of us who disagree with you are as good as bacon, but if so there is nothing any of us can really do about it, since I cannot feign belief in a metaphysical reality anymore than you can feign tolerance for those who do not share your belief. So reminding us all that we are going to hell is a bit like telling chronic smokers about the horrors of emphysema that await them. It's just not very nice. Not very Christian.
I will close with a quotation from a wonderful human being whom you believe is suffering eternally right now, someone who nevertheless had far more moral courage and simple goodness than any of us. "I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. So unlike your Christ."
- Gandhi

Why Those of Us Who Do Not Claim a Monopoly on God May Have Greater Faith Than Those Who Do

"By their fruits you shall know them."   Unlike Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, or Glenn Beck, I have no way of measuring anyone else's faith, but I do know a thing or two fruit inspection.
I have faith that whoever is in charge of this universe has greater wisdom and a larger sense of justice than those who claim so loudly to be his only followers.
I do not believe god makes junk or gives us reason and a sense of wonder and a strong sense of right or wrong only to have it count for nothing if we don't answer a single historical trivia question to his pleasing. More importantly, those who wrote the book you cited (but perhaps have not gotten around to reading) do not state this either, certainly not with the clarity you would like it to.
I find the idea of hell offensive, intellectually and morally, and oh-so-conveniently unprovable. Its invention and propagation are traceable to declining church or temple attendance by a rightly skeptical audience who wanted to explore more generous and compassionate faith traditions or none at all. It may exist but so are a thousand dancing virgins or blissful oblivion or a very long game of Tetris.
I don't know and either does anyone else. We may believe it, we may even want it, but we cannot know it in the sense that non-psychotic people use the term.

If I had to tally all of the religions that believe all the other religions are going to hell then the resulting list would probably be longer than one of the lineages from David to Joseph (either one, take your pick). From the suppression of the Aryan doctrine** (forever after known as the Arian heresy) in 325 to the the mutual "I excommunicated you first!" tit for tat of the Great Schism to the pointless religious-fueled cruelty in Northern Ireland, this game of mutual condemnation only seems to end when there is no one left to kill, or people suddenly wake up to the idea that midnight bowling is at least as entertaining as Midnight Mass. 

If the divinity of Jesus is so painfully self-evident that its questioning merits eternal punishment, as some fundamentalist Christians insist, why  - fully 3 centuries after the birth of Jesus, did half of his followers not believe in it, and why did it require a decree by the Nicean Council in 325 to settle the matter (by fiat, not argument or persuasion, and mainly for political reasons - in an attempt, ultimately unsuccessful, since the Western half of the Roman Empire was to collapse a few decades later)?  Why did so many who  read the original Greek texts, such as Isaac Newton come to the conclusion Jesus was not divine?

Those who are confronted with textual counter-evidence from the book they like to thump so much more than read will sometimes counter that unless you first have decided to believe what you are going to read in the Bible, you will not really understand it.  That is a strange, circular observation that does not apply to any work of literature or textbook.  Even granting that reading a text with a certain spirit of generosity may make you more likely to overlook the glaringly inaccurate or just plain weird parts, it is intellectually dishonest to claim that only those predisposed to believe this of all texts claiming to be sacred and vying for our attention have faith. 

Perhaps those of us who are skeptical have a certain faith in the essential goodness or even benign indifference of god that allows the discernment of a deeper truth, and lets us see through the fabrications and narrow prejudices contained in this rambling work on the evils of rabbit-eating (Deuteronomy 14:6-7) and the joys of slavery and total war (as long as directed by the Goodies against the Baddies). 
A child who believes in Santa Claus has a certain form of faith; one who realizes it was his father dressing up all along, after overcoming the initial shock, is now free to have a much more honest and fleshed-out perspective of the world, his parents, and personal responsibility.   He now must do right not because someone can magically read his thoughts and bring him presents if he is good, but because doing right is the right thing to do.  There is no more evidence that those who do not believe in god suddenly go on killing sprees, freed from the inhibitions of a punitive father in the sky,  anymore than those who have such a fearful vision of an all-knowing, all-powerful, judging god are any less likely to start wars, launch crusades, or turn planes into cruise missiles.  

Is Homophobia a Core Teaching of Christianity?

With the tragic death of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi exemplifying an ugly recent homophobic trend, the central question emerges as to 

whether one can be a good Christian without condemning homosexual behavior (along with the ingestion of shellfish, wearing clothes of a mixed fiber (polyester-cotton blends come to mind), rotating crops, and allowing menstruating women to enter a church or temple (which is apparently offensive to the Lord)).   Most of us find homophobia abhorrent, just as we find Biblically-sanctioned slavery and stoning of adulteresses abhorrent, but there is no evidence that Jesus explicitly condemned the passages in Leviticus used to condemn homosexuality. However, there is one enormous piece of evidence that Jesus was no homophobe: he never once mentioned homosexuality, although he had a lot to say about other specific "transgressions" including adultery.

Thank Zeus that most modern Christians have abandoned these Leviticus injunctions but not because of anything Jesus said.  Rather, times have evolved and so have our mores.  Most importantly, Western governments are now secular, so the church no longer has the power of life and death over citizens as it did as recently as the 1700s.

Although the potential universal appeal of Jesus's message has been seized upon to - among other things - justify its spread to Gentiles, Jesus was a Jew preaching to an all-Jewish audience about how to be a better Jew. The lost sheep he had come to save were Jews who were not properly following the mitzvahs (collected in what Christians have since come to call the Old Testament, although he would have found such a name strange, since of course there was no New Testament that had been written, nor would one be written until decades after he died).
The idea that he had come to replace the law would have been news to him; in Matthew, he told his followers that only if they followed the laws with perfection, every one of them, would they get into the Kingdom of Heaven, which he spent a great deal of time and energy describing:

• 5:17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.    
• 5:18 For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.   
• 5:19 Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
• 5:20 For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.  

                    - Matthew 5:17-20, emphasis added

When asked which of the many Jewish laws were most important, he gave various responses, but usually they involved the idea of loving God (Yahweh) with all your heart, not committing adultery, lying, or stealing, and not judging others lest you be judged yourself. The novelty of his message was his expansion on some of the mitzvahs.
He took Rabbi Hillel the Elder's formulation of what has become the Golden Rule to a new level, stating that you should not just tolerate but love your enemy, and if you have a falling out you should promptly make your peace (lest he be arrested and out you), and if he hits you, you should not just not hit him back, but turn the other cheek so he can hit that too!
His message of radical social justice and redistribution of wealth should be familiar to any reader of the Jewish prophets Amos or Isiah The rich are going to hell, Jesus said, unless they give away everything to the poor and follow him.
The only explicitly sexual message he gave was an expanded definition of adultery to include not just actual acts of sex but even sexual fantasies (what Jimmy Carter admitted to in a 1976 Playboy Interview) or remarrying following divorce. These last teachings in particular are said to have left his followers "amazed" but they certainly do not replace the Jewish laws he felt he was enforcing.
He did state that what comes from our bodies (our words and deeds) will condemn us far more than what we put into them (meaning pork or shellfish, for example), but that does not mean he was saying the teachings of Leviticus should be abandoned, only that they could not substitute for being kind to your enemies and treating the poor and outcast with justice.
It is quite clear from his teachings that he envisioned an imminent final judgment approaching that would come before his followers "tasted death" meaning in their lifetimes, which clearly was not the case, but may have explained why he didn't write anything down or if he did, why it was not preserved.
My fear of Christianity is the same as that of Chinese communism: although both have mellowed out quite a bit from their more blood-soaked days, there have been no statutory or formal doctrine amendments that would guarantee that Christians would not attempt to reimpose public executions of adulterers or Chinese would not shut down free markets and go back to the horrors of the Cultural Revolution.
Until and unless Christians come forward and formally renounce those doctrines such as slavery, the murder of accused adulterers or witches, misogyny, and homophobia (which most often involve other Christians), there is always the danger that the darker side of this faith will emerge again.

Following Orders Is No Excuse; Why Morality Should Trump Blind Obedience in Religious as well as Secular Affairs

To my fundamentalist friends who believe Anne Frank's parents are in hell, but her tormentors (if they were Christians, as most were (if you visit Auschwitz, you can see displays of the families of the guards celebrating Christmas together)) are not:
I cannot find words to express how deeply offensive this view is. Cloaking it in religious garb is no excuse; I doubt this is a view shared by many other Christians, and even if it were, you have a choice as to whether to endorse or advocate it. 

If a man broke into your house and threatened to burn your family alive but spare you if you showed him obedience, would you? Perhaps out of self-preservation, you might, but would you not at least have compassion for those sleeping, oblivious to their impending torment, out of which you have cut a separate deal? You may fear this monster, you may appease him so as not to be tortured by him, but would you call him good? Would you not, if given the opportunity, try to spread the word and get others to oppose him rather than endorse and worship him? What sort of morality or love is based on such a threat which you have made several times in this exchange?
I don't know anything about Mayan calendars; highlighting fallacies in one sacred text does not in imply endorsement of other, equally problematic ones. (The difference between us is that I do not believe those who went to their graves without renouncing the faith of their fathers are in some sort of eternal torment, or that heaven, if it exists, is "pagan-rein" as the Germans might have put it).
I advocate freeing ourselves from the compulsion to tie ourselves in knots over forcing reality and morality to fit into some formula arbitrarily created by long-dead men (and most were men) and instead use what our founders would have called Natural Law and reason and our inherent sense of compassion and justice help us create a better world, something fundamentalists oppose because it would undermine their authority and make their apocalyptic predictions look even more ridiculous than they already are.
You act as if you are powerless to modify what you believe ("I wish they weren't [in hell], but that is how it's stated in the bible?" [where, pray tell, does the Bible mention National Socialism, the Holocaust, or Auschwitz?]) Yet you hold others responsible for not changing what they believe (perhaps they wish they could, but that is what is stated in the Koran (or the vedas, Upanishads, Manusmriti, Srimad Bhagvatam, Bhagwad Geeta - by the way, have you read these texts before rejecting them outright?). Your selective interpretation of an arbitrarily chosen part of an arbitrarily chosen collection of texts has led you to a place that a child (the ones you say Jesus has saved) could tell you is morally wrong. I respect at some level your obedience, but wonder whether the defense that you were just following orders (even if you chose only some orders among many others (such as those against judging others) will save you.
Perhaps there are some on the margin reading your words and contemplating exploring Christianity more deeply. Honestly, after seeing the dark place it can take at least one of its followers, do you believe you are advancing or hurting your cause?  (Don't you have an obligation to "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations" as Jesus is quoted in Matthew ?
There are many good and decent Christians whom I admire greatly, Martin Luther King, Jr., among them. I think it is noteworthy that most of his criticism were leveled at the predominantly Christian society that he felt - because of its renunciation of the Christian imperatives of pacifism, social justice, and respect for all of God's children.  The  Jews you believe are all going to hell were disproportionately represented in the Civil Rights movement, and a number gave their lives to the cause.  None of his speeches focused on the allegedly "false religions" you seem convinced merit eternal punishment; in fact, he studied with Hindu followers of Gandhi in India, where he learned many critical lessons in nonviolent resistance.
I think studying his example might be instructive; if he went around telling everyone they were going to hell for being racist, if he turned back rabbis and imams and agnostics who wanted to help because they were of the "wrong" faith, then no doubt we would still have Jim Crow laws and de jure racial disenfranchisement.
I can love my wife without begrudging my neighbor for making a different choice. I can recognize the intelligence of my children without calling all other children morons. I can even state my love of my country without mocking and disparaging all others. Why can we not be as open and humble in our spiritual convictions as we are in other areas where we have strong, but clearly diverse, convictions?
Why indeed.

Why There is Little Difference Between Those Who Advocated a Temporal Holocaust and Those Who Advocate an Eternal One

To My Fundamentalist Christian Friends who predict that all Jews, Muslims (and presumably Mormons, Catholics (or Protestants if you are Catholic), Sikhs, Janists, Native Americans (who have not renounced the faith of their fathers), free-thinkers, Buddhists, Hindus, and countless other adherents to faiths and traditions you condemn) will be punished eternally (and who consider this outcome good and praiseworthy), let me try to put in words why so many of us consider this sort of speech hateful and immoral.

That you may sincerely believe these words does not make them right or even forgivable. No doubt many National Socialists who harbored similar anti-Jewish sentiments went to their graves as sincerely convinced of the righteousness of their secular holocaust as you may be of the righteousness of your eternal one (let's not forget that the word holocaust denotes the place where a burnt offering was made to Yahweh).   If you sincerely believe that God will punish an entire race of people for having been born in the wrong place to the wrong family who practiced the wrong faith, then it really is not that much of a logical leap to support those who are simply advancing their torment by a few years (which by definition will asymptotically approach zero when averaged out with infinity).

Cloaking these ideas in religious garb does not make them less offensive or excusable either, especially since you have admitted to cherry-picking a single verse from a much more complex text that generally does not support your narrow and idiosyncratic interpretation.

Your assumption that morality is trumped by metaphysics, that all of life is a game show that ultimately comes down to whether we choose Curtain #1 instead of Curtain numbers 2 or 3, is so patently immoral a child could see through it (and only an adult employing sophisticated pseudo-religious legalism could not) - what sort of father would punish his children based not on what they did but on giving the correct question to an obscure historical question on which even experts (and half of all early Christians) disagreed?   Are we really to believe that Gandhi is in torment because he died a non-Christian but Timothy McVeigh may be in paradise because he was a Christian (as narrowly defined by you, that is believing that Jesus was the "Son of God" and not the Son of Man, as he himself claimed)?   Is not the moral of the Good Samaritan that we should not overlook doing the obvious right because of some complex religious formula (the priests who passed the man beset by robbers did so because they were afraid he was dying and that touching a dying body would require ritual ablutions; the Samaritan, free of such nonsense, saw a human being who needed his help and let his compassion succeed where complex religious formulations had failed). 

The idea of the blood of Jesus atoning for our sins, a metaphor that may have made sense to a Mediterranean audience, is frankly inaccessible to members of a society who recognize that not only is animal (or human) sacrifice cruel and immoral to the animal (or human) but ineffective at appeasing an angry god.  We have long since stopped offering animal sacrifices on the holocaust in the temple, sacrifices that were largely motivated by an insensitivity to the suffering of fellow creatures, especially other mammals, forgivable in a superstitious agrarian society that knew nothing of DNA (and therefore of our kinship to all animals, even the lowly earthworm, but particularly the large mammals that were generally preferred for slaughter), but patently immoral today. 

Beyond the cruelty of human and animal sacrifice, the idea of Jesus dying for our sins makes no sense, since he was executed almost 2,000 years before anyone alive today was born.  Unless we engage in some sort of Terminator-type backwards time leap, someone like myself whose ancestors were born in Northern Europe taking responsibility for the alleged failures of distant, peripatetic Mediterranean tribe to worship a god my ancestors would not have heard of for another thousand years (after the pope launched a Crusade to force them to convert or die) is historically and morally offensive. 

And when you consider the "sin" that the cruel torture and execution (pre-ordained by a father in the clouds who so loved his son he set it up so he would be captured, humiliated, tortured, and renounced - first by his followers, then by most of humankind) of Jesus was supposed to atone for, it seems pretty weak stuff - eating a piece of fruit (not an apple specifically as is commonly misbelieved, especially by fundamentalists) by Adam and Eve (not only Eve as fundamentalists used to justify the subjugation of women and the pain of childbirth, among other things).    How is eating a piece of fruit - because it tastes good - such a horrific sin?   Because it was from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil?  If this was such a horrific sin, why did Yahweh place the tree within such easy access of Adam and Eve, and does his surprise and rage at their rather logical action not make a mockery of the whole idea of omniscience?   If I leave poisoned candy in a bowl on the table then leave my children alone with it, even if I tell them not to eat it, who bears moral responsibility if they do - the errant child or the irresponsible father?    (Yahweh warned - incorrectly as it turns out, the first of so many false predictions in the Bible - that eating this fruit would cause death, but this was not true for either Adam or Eve.)  Again, try to explain to a small child why a man - the only son of God, in your estimation - had to be executed in order to atone for this crime of illicit fruit-picking that was supposed to pass generation-by-generation in our DNA (but magically passing Mary, the mother of Jesus, if the Catholic doctrine of immaculate conception is to be believed). 

It seems such weak and cruel stuff.  If indeed Jesus was the Son of God, why did he not say so?  Why did he command, again and again, that the demons he supposedly cast out (who somehow knew him to be more than what he appeared) remain silent about his identity?  Why did he also command those on whom he practiced faith-healing not to tell anyone what he did (and why did his disciples violate this order by passing on the oral tradition that decades later was written down by scribes in what we now call the New Testament)? 
If the FDA is trying to get the word out that a dangerous medication has been recalled, it does not simply tell 12 close advisors and a few random patients, asking them all to remain silent.  It advertises, it proclaims the message from the virtual rooftops, it uses its police power to yank the dangerous medication from pharmacy shelves.  Why would Yahweh - with a much deeper advertising budget than the FDA and much greater police powers - not proclaim in similarly effective fashion the poisonous competing non-Christian doctrines, if indeed they are so poisonous?  Could it be that they are not?
Jesus never appeared to me (except perhaps through a grilled cheese sandwich someone posted on the Internet) or to anyone else except allegedly a handful of his followers, George Bush, and an occasional child - conveniently in a field or behind a bush.  Why this coyness when so many are slaughtering each other in his name?   The most benign interpretation is that the interpretation of the half of Christians who believed Jesus was divine was incorrect.  The more sinister interpretation is that he was not, but that Yahweh is indifferent to the suffering of the countless victims of the wars, pogroms, witch hunts, Crusades, Inquisitions, and genocides launched in his name.  When Christian Catholics were slaughtering Christian Protestants and vice versa, why did Jesus not appear and settle the matter once and for all?  Why the silence during the Thirty Years War, the English Civil War, the Bartholomew's Day Massacre?

These are not legalistic, sophisticated questions of an overeducated psychiatrist with too much time on his hands, but questions that any school child (or Monty Python fan) could (and generally should) generate.  The fact that when my mother asked such questions while growing up, she was met with a savage ruler strike on the palm of her hand and a threat that she would go to hell forever and ever just for thinking them, and that when I raise such questions with my fundamentalist friends, visions of fire and brimstone are invoked yet again shows the fear the religious have of an honest debate.  Only those who know they will lose a debate will use terrorist threats to try to shut it down preemptively.    

Asking questions is not a sin; giving a lie for an answer is.  The same Bible that some use to justify burning their enemies alive also says the truth will set us free.  Indeed.

I know it is generally considered impolite to bring up these sorts of ludicrous inconsistencies, but so is telling everyone they are going to hell (and that the teller presumably is not).   This cosmic Schadefreude - the Bible makes clear that the sounds and smells (burning flesh) of those in eternal torment is necessary to heighten the pleasure of the righteous, who can witness the infernal torture from their perch in heaven - is not only immoral, but deeply undermining to the purported goodness of these saints.  Where is their compassion, sense of justice, or even basic proportionality (punishing someone infinitely for a finite sin, especially one as trivial as what one believes about a distant historical event, is like giving someone life in prison (with daily water-boarding) for speeding).

I have heard all the counterarguments:  that even though this strikes us as immoral, it must be true because it is in the Bible.  That what we believe in our hearts should be trumped by the legalistic translations of scribes we never met.  That in the end what we see, think, and believe does not matter.  That obedience and geography are more important than morality and logic.

To which I ask, why then should you be any more confident in your belief in this hateful doctrine and your use of reason to choose what you admit is one verse of all the possible thousands of verses of the dozens of known sacred texts on which to place your eternal bet?   Casting stones at those you believe are sinners may get a rise out of them, but are you really so confident that those vitriolic words and actions will be forgiven?  Isn't there a risk that your projections of eternal torment on those who disagree with you (in this narrow question) are themselves sinful, a sadomasochistic Stephen King fantasy dressed up in Biblical clothing? 

I hope that Jews, Muslims, free-thinkers, and Christians of good faith read carefully what you wrote, and realize that people who hold such views cannot be on the side of someone you think will burn in hell forever.   Why should you treat someone with decency and compassion if you are convinced that God won't?    If you really believe God hates an entire class of people, and you have established that this God is perfect and to be praised and worshiped, then how can you escape the fact that you too have a Biblical obligation to hate this class of people too?  This is the ugly underbelly of fundamentalism and it is why I will continue to speak out so forcefully against this sort of hateful nonsense.