Hi, I'm a Christian. Help Me Disprove My Religion!

[Redbeard The Pink]

Probably the biggest argument against Christianity is the Bible itself. Knowing the Bible and knowing it well is the quickest way to catch a Christian on his/her heels, especially if they're part of the bunch that tries to insist that the Bible is the inerrant and true word of Jehovah.


Jehovah himself is inherently contradictory because of his laundry-list of mutually exclusive powers and personality traits. No all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful being could possibly be responsible for our Universe. For that matter, such a being would never behave the way Jehovah does in the Bible. A not-so-close reading makes it perfectly clear that the Bible was written by Bronze and Iron Age primitives who had no practical knowledge of science, no human rights for women, and no respect for the autonomy of other nations. Even if he did exist, the god of the Bible would be a completely immoral monster if we're to accept what's written about him in the Bible.


There's also the issue of the "inerrant" word of Jehovah containing a shit-ton of factual errors. The creation story is obviously crap; science has pretty well kicked it in the balls with all that "Evolution" and "carbon dating" business. The flood story is also pretty problematic because it would have essentially wiped out the whole planet, even Noah and his boat-animals. The enslavement of the Jews and the Exodus from Egypt completely lack even the most basic archaeological evidence, making it one of the few cases where absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence.


Jesus himself is also a problem. Even if you go with the mainstream position that the Jesus of Nazareth character was based on one real guy who was actually crucified by Pontius Pilate, mainstream historians still generally reject most of the gospel as being fiction; any way you slice it, the Jesus of Nazareth character didn't exist in the way the Bible said he did. The real human (if there was one) has less historicity than pretty much anyone, and the Bible version has none at all. At most, his baptism and crucifixion happened, and at worst not one bit of it happened.


The simple point in all of this is that if this much of the Bible is definitely fiction, and the test for salvation is believing the Bible, then it means that whoever created the Universe gave us a book that directly contradicts the reality he put us in and then started damning us for not believing this book in spite of all the contrary evidence he sprinkled throughout the Universe. Such a deceptive test could not possibly be the work of an all-loving, all-powerful deity who never lies.


Edit: Oh yeah, and there's also the issue of Jehovah having generally worse moral guidelines than modern day humans. The god of the Bible barely cares about rape, occasionally encourages genocide, and absolutely loves slavery. If he's the highest source of morality, why does he allow things that modern man deems immoral? Why are these things now morally unacceptable except in the most religious countries?