Another Man's Belly Laugh

I was raised a Christian. We said grace and we went to church and my parents raised us to be civilized human beings, and when I was five I believed it all unquestioningly, because that's what everyone told me.

By the time I was ten, I had come to the conclusion that the Bible - and all the stories in it - were like Aesop's fables. They were there to tell you how to behave, and they were fine for that, but they weren't true in the sense of having actually happened.

Over the next twenty or so years, I went through a whole series of positions between between my original belief and straight atheism. I never came back to any strong sense of faith, because I never saw anything to convince me. God doesn't talk to me, and the people who claim He does don't agree with each other. Creationism made me wonder if Christians were just ignorant idiots; and Christians I knew helped me remember that they were not.

But the thing that finally convinced me that Christianity was just a human invention was the Bible. I had seen all sorts of arguments about historical inaccuracies and contradictions and moral lapses, and I decided to read it and see for myself. I expected mostly that it would not provide me with anything new one way or the other, but I figured that I owed it to myself to read it.

I started at Genesis, and finished at Revelation. I couldn't stay awake for Proverbs and Psalms, but I went through everything else. I was astonished at what I found. I had expected more of what I had encountered in Sunday School; lots of stories where God tells men what to do, men behave well or badly, and God rewards the good and punishes the evil. I had expected to run into all the issues I had seen discussed on the internet; what I did not expect was that it would sound so unlikely in itself.

It sounded like an ordinary politicial history of any other country, with power struggles and propaganda and claims of mandates and legitimacy; and with other countries intervening periodically. The Israel of the Bible is clearly not a major player in the region, and is regularly invaded. Its rulers are often short-lived, and the succession is settled by armed conflict or even one-on-one fights (assuming it's all accurate). Famine and disease are important as well; the four horsemen get a real workout.

But in the Bible, the author regularly claims that things are happening because of the will of God, even when they sound exactly like ordinary human history. Probably the best example can be found in Judges 1:19:
"And the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron."

Iron chariots are quite an advantage in the technology of the time, but we are supposed to be talking about the creator of the universe. I don't think there's much I can add to that.

Of course there are miracles described, but the people who see them are clearly a credulous bunch - not unlike people today. It is way too easy to imagine the tales getting bigger in the telling. Moses, in the book of Exodus, convinces the Israelites that he is sent by God with miracles that the Pharaoh is unconvinced by... because his magicians can do the same things. They even manage the plague of frogs before failing at the plague of lice.

When I got to the New Testament I found myself back in more familiar territory. But this means that I found it far from convincing, while not being able to dismiss it. It was completely inadequate to catch up the ground lost in the Old Testament.

I invite anyone who wonders why I am not a believer to read the OT. Don't follow it through a lesson plan, or pick out verses that cover a particular topic, or whatever - just read it. By all means read annotated versions, to make sure you understand the wording and the culture, but read it as a story in itself. If you still don't at least understand my skepticism, I probably wouldn't like you anyway.

I am convinced that if a larger Jewish rebellion against the Romans had resulted in the complete loss of the Old Testament, and a version were discovered today by archaelogists, it would be dismissed by the modern church as completely unrelated or faked. No-one would believe that this was the law and the prophets that Jesus claimed he had come to fulfill.

And neither do I.