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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Christianity as a whole is hard to pin down, so anything on this page needs to be treated very carefully. Christians come in many shapes and forms:
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, none of which exists evidence for. Over the course of hundreds of thousands of humans wandering Earth, humans have come up with tens of thousands of different gods to worship, the Christian god is just as much unestablished 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, all of which have been falsified, so that I cannot believe in it. The only solution here is to say that god just makes the world look like the claims are falsified, to which I say “yes, maybe” and “I'm waiting until we start verifying anything” or “if the god covers up its own existence then maybe it doesn't want to be worshipped”.