Christianity is one of the major global religions. Centrally, Christianity believes in the abrahamic god and the creation. It derives these claims from its holy scripture, the Bible.

Christianity is the largest and most influential religion in human history, spanning the length from the Roman Empire all the way to the modern times. Being history, I wouldn't usually really care, but since Christianity still affects our daily lives quite significantly I will address its influence here on this page.

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Because Christians come in many shapes and forms, Christianity as a whole is hard to pin down. For example, some Christians consider certain things sinful, others don't really mind. Some take the Bible literally, others see it as an interpretative piece from a certain timeframe that they think should be cherry-picked because the times have changed (as if slavery was moral then but is immoral now). In fact, what people believe “is Christianity” is interpreted so differently by each individual that some Christians don't even think they're Christians, they just think they're special.

The point is, whatever you say about Christianity, you will probably always find someone who will point out that this actually isn't true and doesn't apply to them. Or they will point out that what you're saying is true, does apply to them, but doesn't apply to every Christian denomination. Christianity is very, uh, popular, so Christian denominations spread as colorfully as their beliefs. The variety you will find here is so large that the Christians themselves don't know and actual scientists named an entire field of inquiry after it. Getting an overview of the Christian religion is an undertaking that will take you back to the beginning of larger-scale civilization and is an appropriately epic task.

This page does not aim to chronicle Christianity. It is meant to provide an interesting perspective into the kind of concept that I've gotten to learn about what calls itself “Christianity”. That is, Christianity as it is found in my time and in my sphere of knowledge, and a historic Christianity as I know it and how it has shaped the societies, politics and scientific inquiry throughout the ages. When I talk about Christianity, I will try to talk about the kinds of sentiments that seem to most appropriately describe Christianity as it relates to me. This means that my evaluations of Christianity may disagree with invidual members or even the central scripture itself.

The overwhelming majority of “Christianity” are traced, in one way or another, back to what is called “The Bible”. The bible is a collection of texts written by various writers a few thousand years ago and collected into one book. These texts, according to Christians, lay out the fundamentals of the world: How the world came to be, who's the real ruler of the world, how people ought to act, how people ought not to act and a bunch of stories of things that allegedly happened to a few people, including the saga of one guy in particular who let himself get beat up to make a point. I mean, if I was the child of god then my self-preservation instinct would be reduced too.

In my interpretation, the bible has basically two sides: One side is a I'm 14 and this is deep story of reality-defying pacifism and forgiveness that makes everyone think they're smart by understanding, but then not actually following through. I've not seen a single person ever actually do as Jesus did and show vulnerability in conflict. The idea is to advertise your humanness and go out of your way to give the person you're in conflict with an obvious opportunity to realize that they're being cruel. From personal experience of trying this exact strategy I can tell with absolute confidence that this strategy is ineffective for 100% of the population, and the vulnerability you're showing will be mercilessly exploited. Not even outside observers are smart enough to recognize this and they'll just call your strategy dumb.
People want what they want, and they'll take the shortest path to get there. If you show your other cheek, you are guaranteed to get that cheek slapped also because that's the shortest path. I mean, an actually laudable sentiment, but very much divorced from reality. But the much bigger problem is that people's ethical/moral mental development seems to largely end with such one-dimensional stories about love, justice and forgiveness (which they then don't even adhere to). Right and wrong is a lot more complicated and the bible's stories are only a primer into a field of study that is very expansive. Many people, however, think that they've got a good understanding of what is right or wrong just by getting old enough to understand the bible's teachings.

The other side of the bible is the part that Christians either don't like talking about or have mentally twisted beyond recognition to avoid the confrontation. The bible is riddled with problematic sentiments, teachings, data points and contradictions. It is scientifically inaccurate, ie. factually wrong. RationalWiki has a fully annotated bible that lets you read the entire goddamn thing meticulously taken apart from a scientific standpoint. If you don't feel like reading the whole thing, you can find a more condensed account from RationalWiki at RationalWiki: Biblical scientific errors and RationalWiki: Biblical scientific foreknowledge. Hey, RationalWiki even has a full category on the bible: “Light iron-age reading”. Needless to say, while RationalWiki has many explicitly Christian editors, it isn't particularly popular with the more devout demographic of Christians.

One thing about the bible is that people really, really love derailing conversations because of individual words. Can we stop bickering about words? Every time you get even a little bit into the weeds with the bible all you're seeing is nobody being able to agree on words because to them these individual little words seem to matter significantly. The constant bickering about how to translate Hebrew is one of the worst things humanity has come up with since the invention of language. And they do this even though anywhere else in the bible these people are 100% capable of dismissing anything they don't like as “allegorical”. It's just these select words they need to be really picky about because otherwise their whole worldview falls apart.

And this already leads me to the one thing I think about the bible. The bible is an interpretative, historical piece that is interpreted differently by every single human under the sun. And I'm not talking about subtleties, the differences are so large that many Christian denominations even produce their own translations, which is then published for their members to re-interpret again. And then they switch around and around, interpreting individual words or sentences however they feel like it at any given moment. Big numbers exist, but I doubt there are numbers large enough to describe the amount of times that a Christian denomination has changed their interpretation of Bible passages. And all this, even though the bible is not authoritative. It is a book made by man for man, with self-referential stories that offer nothing more than “trust me bro”-stories¹⁾ and pre-enlightenment level understanding of ethics.

Christians believe in the abrahamic god, an entity common to all abrahamic faiths like Christianity. As an agnostic I'm not fundamentally opposed to the idea of a god, but the problem here is that people are making claims that cannot be verified. God, to them, has a particular identity, with a particular history, things the god did and values the god espouses. Over the course of hundreds of thousands of humans wandering Earth, humans have come up with tens of thousands of different gods to worship, where the Christian god is roughly about as unsubstantiated as all the other ones.

Even if something measurably divine were to happen, every religion would claim that it was their god who did it, and the advantage Christians would have in that debate would be exclusively the number of their adherents, not any actual veracity of their argument. Really, the annoying thing about all of this is that even if the god tried to identify itself, we could never be 100% sure because any god could pretend to be anyone. Or, for that matter, it would probably be very hard to know whether something that happened was divine at all (though I guess with that one I would be open to convincing).

Now, a god would be free to literally just rewire my brain to make me 100% convinced that god is real, and that would solve a lot of problems. But at this time their excellence seems to be rather unbothered and leaves that work to its subjects. If Christianity just said that “we believe in god, and we worship them” then that would be fine, but Christianity makes a lot of falsifiable claims about the nature of its god, none of which are really substantiated in any particular way.

Unfortunately I cannot find the scene anymore, but there is a Caleb and Sophia video from Jehovah's Witnesses that essentially tries to make a line of argument that goes like this: Beautiful things exist, therefore god exists. Or, here is a more involved one:

What does my intelligent mind tell me? Well, my intelligent mind tells me that you should have called it Argument from Incredulity instead. Additionally, it tells me that I don't have sufficient evidence for god's existence and that, even if I agreed that a god must exist, it would not prove that the god in question is indeed Jehovah (as opposed to any other god).

I'd say that the “things exist, and they can't just come into existence by themselves, so originally ultimately there must have been something that was that was uncaused (god)”²⁾ argument is about as good of an argument in favor of god as “an omnipotent god couldn't create a stone that it itself can't lift because of its omnipotence” is as good an argument against god. Nice thought experiments, but neither prove anything in a way that could be demonstrated or, ideally, be tested, measured.

As far as intelligent design goes, I will say that this is merely a matter of having or missing the intelligence to find natural explanations for complicated processes. The idea is that god must exist because life as is is way too complicated to have come about randomly. As the character from above is saying, many things in our world are way too orderly to just have happened that way. Well, it is true that many things around us, at least on a large scale, are quite random. Perhaps the better term for that would be “chaotic” instead of random. Weather is a perfect example for something very chaotic but in no way random. The thing is that, on a small scale, many things arrange themselves very orderly and unchaotically indeed. The laws of nature seem to have some kind of order built into them, like for example these hexagon-shaped basalt columns arraging themselves more orderly than any line of human beings ever could. There are mechanical, physical processes going on here that make these columns orderly just by the nature of how things are.

Now, when it comes to life, life is capable of sustaining itself (that's just the definition of life, really), and this continuity allows life the process of iteration. Iteration is crucial to living beings because it has the ability then to evolve beyond hexagons. Random mutation, among other things, causes some living things to be born different, and “fitter” beings have a better chance of being naturally selected. Or in other words, fitter beings have a better chance of reproducing than less fit beings, which means their genes propagate better. At each generation, new variations are introduced, which - if fitter - have a higher chance than others to reproduce. This generational iteration over billions of years is what allowed for the formation of not just single-cellular living beings, multi-cellular living beings and finally living things as complex and well adapted as the human.

While evolution can explain the development and diversification of life, it does not explain how life came into being in the first place. Unfortunately, the evidence on that front is a lot less substantiated than desirable, but the general consensus at this time is that it is likely that life emerged spontaneously in a process called abiogenesis.

Functionally, abiogenesis is beyond me. I wasn't in school for long enough (or didn't pick the right classes) to learn about it. I'm not qualified to explain most of the things I try to explain on this website, but this topic is so deep in the “biomathematics” that even I have enough respect for it to not try at all. If repeated billions of times over billions of years concurrently, naturally occurring chemical processes could have produced increasingly complex systems, until self-replication emerges. From there, evolution would do the rest³⁾. As I said, I don't fully understand this and, if I am informed correctly, a strong scientific consensus doesn't really exist, but we at least have a potential mechanism by which life could have emerged, which makes it reasonable for me to believe that a supernatural explanation is not necessary.

The point of all of this: We need not invent gods to explain life. Complex things can arise from less complex things, and we don't need an ultra-complex magic being to create beings of our level of complexity from thin air. In comparison to the complexity of a god, we are still quite basic living beings anyway. There is no reason that god couldn't have made us more complex, more sophisticated. I mean, birds have some very breathtaking, highly adapted and extremely optimized feathers, but that level of complexity/optimization is just a tiny speck in comparison to the sophistication of life that a god could have given us if god had just wanted to. Why instead create life so lowly, deplorable and simple that it's just uncomplex enough to leave the door open for it to be explained away with just a bit of chemistry and evolution? I mean, seriously, they're a god. What's stopping them? Why would a god need to create animals with wings just so that they could fly, they're a god, goddamnit. Why is it always that with anything god supposedly does, god always does it in a way such that natural explanations are better explanations than a god? This has been an ongoing thing for centuries now.