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

[WishfulThinking]

Let's start with something simple.  Have you actually read the Bible?

I'd like to say yes, but if I'm 100% honest, I'm not sure if I've read all of the Old Testament prophets. If I have, then it's been quite awhile.

That's a big question, you know.  Why not start with a simpler one?  Such as . . . oh, do you believe the Jesus of Nazareth died to redeem humankind and stop people from going to hell?  

Have you read Christopher Hitchens' "God Is Not Great"?  Or Richard Dawkins "The God Delusion"? You'll get opinions on both authors here, positive and negative, but it's where a lot of folks start.  Have you seen Bill Maher's "Religulous"?  Have you searched YouTube for "the Atheist Experience"?


You ask a very broad question.  Most people who come asking that question in this forum are just waiting for someone to answer, so they can try very hard to prove the answer wrong.

I'm sorry that the question is so broad. Bringing it to this forum before spending more time figuring it out on my own might have been a mistake. I guess I'm not entirely sure where to start, which is why I brought it here.

Of those books, which do you think would be most useful/a good start? I heard that The God Delusion wasn't very well liked by atheists or theists, neither of which found his arguments compelling enough. Would you say that I should read it, or is there a better book (is "God Is Not Great" (one of) the best books in this regard?)?

Let me get this straight...

You're asking a bunch of people who you think might be former Christians with experience at debating Christians to give you the arguments that you need to go out and ambush your Christian friends who may have NO experience arguing with atheists.

Then, when - surprise, surprise - they fail to respond to your pre-meditated attack adequately (as measured against your own subjective standards), you'll feel good about giving up on Christianity altogether?

Seriously?



Why bother? It seems to me that you're already there.

I'm very sorry, that isn't my intention at all, at least, I don't think I'm doing what you seem to think I am. I'm not doing this in order to attack other Christians and make myself feel superior. Honestly, I don't want to convince them that Christianity is wrong, because I don't see it doing any harm in their lives. The reason I would want to bring these arguments to them is because I don't trust myself to figure this out on my own without someone else pushing back (I hope what I'm saying makes sense, I can be somewhat inarticulate at times).

Almost everyone I know is a Christian, which means that they'll all be biased in favor of Christianity. A lot of the people here, on the other hand, will be biased against it. I'm hoping that by talking to both groups, I'll be able to find the truth. The Christians in my life aren't the sort who don't give a second thought to their beliefs. I know that they'll do their best to give counter-arguments and to break down the arguments I get here (if they didn't, there would be no point in bringing the arguments to them).

Sorry, I don't mean to be mean or rude to anyone. I just want to figure this out, hopefully with the help of some of the people here.

Can't disprove your religion.

Christians exist therefore Christianity exists.

The claims of the religion, however, can be disproved.

The existence of a deity, however, cannot.  And that includes ANY deity.

I'm sorry if I worded things incorrectly. I don't mean to disprove the existence of the people, but rather, figure out if the beliefs within Christianity are contradictory and false. I also don't mean to disprove the existence of a deity. I apologize if I didn't make that clear before.

Whether hell exists or not, is irrelevant to Christianity.  Even if no religion is true, hell maybe true. Therefore you should investigate if it's logical concept in itself.  However, a lot of morality is properly basic, and what of it that is not properly basic relies on properly basic assumptions. 

So what you are asking is a spiritual/moral question. Do evil people deserve hell?

It never really occurred to me that there could be a hell without a religion. I'm apologize if I'm being obtuse, but how do you investigate it without the two tying together? It seems that the last question could have an entirely different answer depending on whether or not hell and a religion were intertwined. Forgive me for not understanding, but what do you mean by morality being properly basic?

What reason do you have to believe that?  It is entirely possible for them all to be false.  Given that most of them come from primitive people who were ignorant of the way the world works, we can be pretty sure that they got things wrong even before we start looking at the particulars.

If you were serious about wanting someone to convince you that your religion is false, you would want to tell us what your specific type of Christianity is.  The approach one would take with a Catholic is different from what one would take with a fundamentalist Southern Baptist.  And even within a specific type of Christianity, individuals have different beliefs.  It is very common, for example, for people who call themselves "Catholic" to disagree with official Catholic doctrine in many instances (e.g., the morality of using birth control, etc.).  So you would want to start by telling us the beliefs that you regard as important to your specific religion.

However, we can say that there isn't any good evidence that any type of Christianity is true.  Just like there isn't any good evidence that Santa Claus lives on the North Pole.  Do you think it would be reasonable to require a specific proof that Santa Claus does not live on the North Pole before rejecting the belief?  Do you approach other questions that way, that you believe everything until it is proven false?  If so, you must also be a Muslim, a Hindu, a Buddhist, etc., until you encounter specific proofs against them.


The idea of an afterlife is silly because your mind is pretty well known to be some processes of your brain or the result of some processes of your brain.  (This is known through a variety of things, such as the study of brain-damaged people.  It also explains why it is that your mind gets drunk when sufficient alcohol is introduced into your brain.)  When your brain stops its processes, your mind is gone and so you are gone.  So there is no possibility of an afterlife.

Sorry, I meant to say that one of the beliefs about how the universe works must be true, whether that belief be one of the 4,200 religions, or atheism. I mean, I suppose it's possible that there's another possibility outside the realm of all those religions and atheism, I just can't think of what that might be (we're all living in the Matrix?).

As for the specifics of my religion, I'm a protestant, but my denomination within Christianity doesn't get more specific than that. The church I go to takes the Bible as the Word of God, divinely inspired. I'm fairly certain that the majority are creationists.

Not all of that matters to me though. I guess a lot of what matters to me is first of all whether Jesus existed, that books about him (the New Testament) weren't changed due to the politics of the church throughout the centuries (I guess changes in grammar and minor spelling mistakes would be fine, but changing its mind in issues like some sort of politician would be unacceptable). I suppose the events in the Old Testament actually happening... Honestly, a lot of the stuff that Aractus mentions in his post below (which I still need to reply to).

I guess more important than anything else would be internal consistency. If the Bible contradicts itself, then why believe any of it (on the other hand, some historical documents contradict each other, so that gets complicated fast)? So I guess if I could find something concrete in that, it would at least make Christianity much more unlikely.

Sorry, I know this isn't a complete list of what beliefs I hold to be important by any stretch of the imagination.

As for how I'm going about this, attempting to disprove it without proving it first, well... I recognize that how I'm doing this is kinda absurd. I certainly couldn't go about treating other religions this way (like I said before... 4,200). I guess I'm treating Christianity differently because it's what I was brought up in, and I'm hesitant to throw it away without having very clear reasons to show. As it is, I'm sorta stuck in this nebulous state of not quite being agnostic because I believe in God but at the same time not having solid reasons for that belief... I guess I'd just feel a lot better if I had something to stand on.

As for the existence of an afterlife... I think that's as hard to prove or disprove as proving or disproving the existence of a deity. To say that there is no possibility of an afterlife is a rather bold claim. I'm not sure how you can discount that for sure (though I can definitely understand doubting it). I guess a person reaching one would depend on them having something more than a brain that could survive (e.g. a soul), but a soul is such a nebulous thing that I'm not sure there would be a point in debating about it.

Here: http://atheistforums.org/thread-36296.html

All the proof you need.

Or pick one of these topics and I'll explain it to you:

1. God lies to Abraham about the covenant he makes with him. Then he lies to Moses, Joshua, and David too.
2. God is a misogynist: Women are property, only men can get divorced, and adultary means sleeping with a married woman (married men are allowed to sleep with sex slaves, prostitutes, other wives they own, and unmarried women).
3. There is no morality in the Old Testament that isn't reflective of the conventional wisdom of the age.
4. There was no Exodus.
5. There was no conquest of Canaan.
6. The Pentateuch wasn't written until the 7th century BC at the earliest - that's 6-8 centuries after the mythical Exodus.
7. While there's very good evidence that Jesus was crucified, there's almost no evidence for his supposed bodily resurrection and ascension which forms the cornerstone of modern Christianity. Paul never mentions it, James and Jude and Peter never mention it, the author of Hebrews doesn't mention it, and Mark doesn't mention it either. Mark does say that Jesus ascended, and he does say Jesus will appear to people - but that's it - there isn't any mention of a bodily resurrection or an ascension. Matt 28:17 says that "some who saw the resurrected Jesus doubted" - so by the own admission of the gospel writer there were people who saw the supposed resurrected Jesus and said "that's not him". So what makes the people who did believe right and those that didn't wrong? We have no objective way to determine that other than to ask the question "who are the ones that are religiously biased"? So the gospel writer is basing the account on religiously-biased hearsay - that's hardly convincing evidence.
8. God is not faithful to his followers: Jesus is crucified, John the Baptist is beheaded, Judas Iscariot hangs himself, Herod has James the son of Zebedee killed by the sword, Simeon and James the Just are stoned to death, Peter is crucified, Paul is executed by the Romans, Nero persecutes the Christians from 64-68AD, and in 70AD the Jerusalem Church is completely destroyed (along with the rest of Jerusalem) as far as anyone can tell. BUT Jesus promised that the Son of Man would come before they finish going through all the towns of Israel (Matt 10:23).

Thanks Aractus, would it be alright if I ask you about individual parts a bit later, after I've had time to go over all of this?