by Bahdko / NCCG-Concern 
From http://web.archive.org/web/20050212095718/www.bahdko.org/practical.html


This is a practical evaluation and explanation of Christianity; how it began, why it followed us throughout history, why it is still with us today, and perhaps how it will eventually disappear.


Early Christianity began like all of the other primitive religions. It is the nature of intelligent beings that co-exist with danger in their environment to be afraid of things that they don't understand, especially when the non understood thing appears capable of causing pain, sickness, or destruction. Early Mankind, with it's comparatively great creativity, intellect, and imagination, observed inexplicable natural phenomena all around it, and desired an explanation for them, because having an understanding of the world would make these natural processes less frightening. When the tendency of Mankind to personify otherwise inanimate objects and occurrences is taken into account, it follows that Mankind, in an effort to make sense of his natural world, could come to think that an intelligent being was causing Nature to function as it does.


Belief in a religion, and its corresponding god or gods, made early Mankind more comfortable with his world. Even in cases where the belief system explained unpleasant experiences as having been caused by the god(s), it was more comfortable to believe that someone was causing these experiences than to have no understanding at all. This trend repeated itself across the world, over and over again; it's hard to find evidence of an early culture which does not include drawings or artifacts relative to its religion.


The beginnings of Christianity spawned in this fashion, in the general area of Egypt and the Mediterranean. With this innocent start, the human imagination ran wild, just like in other early, developing religions. When the ability to read and write developed for this culture,  religion based stories were recorded, as well as genealogical records. The stories, like the other religion based stories recorded by early religions across the globe, are typically exaggerated representations of actual events, or perhaps some were fictitious. These writings, taken in a group, are now referred to in Christian context as "The Old Testament", and are the basis for a religion we now call Judaism, a religion with a very different history from Christianity. Judaism was the dominant religion in the Mediterranean before Christianity developed, the religion specific to the Jewish people of the region.


Judaism happened to have what amounts to an open ending. Someday, supposedly, there would be a return of God to earth, and who that person would be was left to the imagination. It was not that uncommon in this time period for individuals to occasionally appear who claimed that they were associated with this returning God ( in fact, its not unheard of today, either ). One of them was the catalyst that caused Christianity to come into existence.


Around Zero A.D., a child named Jesus was born to a recently married woman who reportedly had not yet had sex with her husband. The husband convinced himself that since the woman was claiming not to have had sex with anyone, the conception was a magical conception from God (which also solved the problem of dealing with a woman who had screwed around on him). The child grew up being told this, which you can imagine did wonders for his ego. When he became an adult he was able to convince at least twelve people to believe that he was this expected, returning son of God. When he was around thirty, he took his twelve people, traveled to a roman controlled city, and began to evangelize. Some jewish people in the city were annoyed by his being there and evangelizing, and they got the Roman government to execute him. Even though Jesus had claimed that he would come back to life after the Romans killed him, he stayed dead. Someone moved the body out of the tomb after a few days, which by some historical reports is normal for that culture when a poor person has died. All written references of Jesus being alive in the flesh, traveling with his disciples, cease after the execution and subsequent moving of the corpse out of the tomb.


Killing off the leader of a religious sect does not necessarily kill the religion. I doubt the Romans or the Jewish people understood what this small cult was about to turn into; I expect they just wanted this annoying freak out of their faces. They got rid of the annoyance all right, but the remaining followers stuck with the religion anyway. The disciples also wrote their own material, which is now collectively known as "The New Testament", and proceeded to split apart and travel the area, infiltrating the population with this new religion.


This new, spin off religion became established as Christianity as it is understood today, and its wide geographic dispersion throughout history has resulted in the evolution of many moderately different versions of it. Judaism continued to exist and evolve, but its development from then on was separate from that of Christianity.


Both the writings of the "Old Testament" and "New Testament" went through massive editing as Christianity proceeded to grow through the years. Some books were excluded in their entirety, some passages were inserted into the remaining books, and the books were not so much translated as re-interpreted repeatedly. Through this editing process, the writings became what the Church of the time wanted them to be, depending on their needs of the time.


Christianity has a built-in, aggressive growth factor. It's not unlike a computer virus in this respect. Sections of "The New Testament" strongly encourages members of the religion to proceed with their best efforts to convert nonbelievers to their religion, and this is one of the reasons that it has been as perverse throughout history as it has. This aggressive nature stayed with Christianity when certain governments adopted it, and this built-in intolerance was escalated to a national and political level. Large, Christianity based countries would inflict economic and political pressures on weaker countries to cause them to convert to Christianity ( Iceland is one country that converted from it's original religion to Christianity due to this ). Sometimes, wars were even fought between regions of Europe where the expansion of a particular region's form of Christianity was used as an excuse.


European church leaders (who were very powerful in politics) used Christianity as an excuse to invade the Arabic countries. Jewish people were targeted with various forms of discrimination, justifying their actions with the excuse that Jews had helped get Jesus Christ executed. The Church used Christianity as a means to dominate the local cultures, limit literacy to the Church leaders and people of power (which kept that power away from everyday people and in their hands, where they wanted it), and suppress science and invention. This period of time is known as the "Dark Ages" for these reasons. There was almost no scientific advancement during Christianity's reign in Europe, and the bottom line is, the Dark Ages existed because of Christianity, not in spite of it.    


Individuals in Christian controlled areas also suffered the effects of this inherent intolerance. Any historical discussion of Christianity would be incomplete without a description of Christianity's tremendous, well documented, but not frequently publicized barbarism. When Christianity was expanding throughout Europe from around 1000AD to around 1800, Christians were responsible for the torture and horrific murders of what is conservatively estimated to be between 60,000 and 300,000 people, many of them women. As cultures of that time period go, the things that the Christians did were among the most barbaric of the period . This policy of murder and torture was a contributing factor in Christianity's success in maintaining control over such a large geographic area over the centuries.  


Mankind has finally made it to modern times, and science, industry, and technology have taken off in a fabulous explosion of human innovation. First we had the Industrial Revolution, then medicine and technology began to expand, and now in the 21st century we are experiencing what we call the Information Age. Less than one hundred years ago we were all still using horses or our feet for daily transportation; and today we have automobiles that contain onboard computer networks. The advancement in technology and science over the past 100 years has been astounding when compared with the past 3000 years of recorded history.
So now that Mankind has, through Science, explained most of the natural phenomena that Christianity formerly held within its domain , why is Christianity still with us? I see several clear reasons, and there are probably more.


The first reason is that the western world just hasn't had good science for a long enough period of time to overcome Christianity's stranglehold. Christianity has held a dominant role in western society for nearly a thousand years, and what we would consider reliable science and medicine has existed for, maybe, fifty years? It is unreasonable to expect any society, no matter how advanced, to cease participation in a religion as well established and geographically dispersed as Christianity overnight.


The second reason is that Christianity, as a modern religion attempting to preserve its existence, is being modified  to be more aligned with Science's determinations, and therefore more acceptable to a society of better educated, free willed people. Various Christian denominations which historically were intolerant of non biblical interpretations of nature and medicine are now as a group accepting the scientific facts. Some modern Christian denominations even appear to accept concepts such as evolution of animals (although so far denying that humans themselves could be accounted for by evolution). They are even developing a new, more politically correct version of the bible that attempts to dampen as many of the chauvinistic references as they can get away with. Christianity, the ever changing chameleon of religions, is morphing into various shapes in an effort to survive in this modern age of Science, technology, and free thought.


A third reason is related to Science itself. Our Science is now pretty good, especially compared with the Science of recent centuries, but we have not yet answered enough questions to take all of Christianity's ground. For example, Science has not yet enabled humans to create a life form out of nonliving matter; there is evidence of the existence of some phenomena that Science has not yet been able to explain; and we have not yet convincingly determined the nature of reported life-after-death possibilities. While questions like these remain, there is an information void, and religion will predictably fill this void for a number of people at least until these mysteries are resolved.


A fourth reason is that Christianity is still being used, in some areas of the world, to dominate the local culture and control the things that people say and do, for the benefit of the people who run the respective churches. It's amazing to think that after all these years, and in an environment where Christianity is not enforced by the law, this kind of abuse of people is STILL going on. Apostolicism and Southern Baptist organizations across the southern and middle United States are an easy reference.


A fifth reason comes to mind, and this one is just as real as the others, although significantly more derogatory. The recent progression of Science does not necessarily mean that each and every individual is intelligent or open minded enough to take it seriously. You could say that some people are just too fucking stupid to get it. That or they are too weak minded to have the capacity to make a mental shift from the Land of Santa Claus and Barney to *Real Life* .  I don't know how, or how long it will take this group of people to resolve its uhh.... issues. For this reason, perhaps there will always be some individuals who find it more comfortable to participate in a religion than to actually understand their world around them.  


So how is Christianity going to die? Here's one hunch that has a happy ending, assuming of course that no cataclysmic event causes western society to backpedal in terms of progress. Let's say that Christianity is going to continue to morph as Science solves more mysteries and presents more and more realistic knowledge, until eventually mainstream Christianity's beliefs will be closely aligned with the beliefs presented by Science. This may take some time before it happens, specifically because it will take our society some time to recover from a thousand years of indoctrination and culling. Science will slowly undermine Christianity this way, just as has been happening for the past 50 years. Some cult like Christianity based religious groups will remain in place, but they will be increasingly seen as the exception to the rule, and will not be accepted by the mainstream population. And then, mainstream Christianity will either quietly disappear into the pages of history, or become so indistinguishable from Science that it will lose it's identity.


Cool off-site Bible and Christianity links! These are good. If you're interested, check out:


The Historical Construction of the Bible:
Part 1: American Law and the Bible's Claim to Divinity
Part 2: Alterations within the Old Testament
Part 3: The Co-opting of the Tanach
Part 4: A New Testament -- The Rise of the Christian Church
Secret Gospel of Mark
Part 5: Distortions of The Roman Catholic Church 
Part 6: Protestant Christianity -- Reformation of the Bible
Part 7: A Babel of Bibles


Satan: Everything you ever wanted to know about the big guy with the pitchfork!
Jesus Christ: The great Js all die young — Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jesus