Christianity Killed Christ; Science will be the Resurrection

By Jake Lyron

Jake writes in support of the true spirit of Christ which has been drowned in a plethora of nonsensical Christian denominations. As G.K. Chesterton commented: “Christianity hasn’t failed; it has simply not been put into practice yet.” Jake returns to Jesus’ own words “I am the truth the light and the way” to rebuild a theology which holds water from a scientific as well as a spiritual perspective. Thought provoking, controversial and illuminating; join the debate at this pivotal era in the history of Christianity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jake Lyron
• Release date: Jan 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310415074

Jake Lyron

Jake is an activist for a sane world. His book "The Shrink from Planet Zob: Psychiatry for a Mad World" earned him a Mental Health Hero Award from leading mental health organisations for his contribution to the field. He publishes books which illuminate, creating clarity on reality expounding what Jake calls 'the spirituality of reality', a spirituality which makes sense from a scientific as well as a spiritual perspective. To this end he has also written about his new theory of the Holy Grail symbol in his book "The Holy Grail's Lost Meaning: Symbol of Receptiveness to Truth and Love". Google his author name to find all of the books he has published or find them on this, his Smashwords profile page.

Book preview

Christianity Killed Christ:

Science will be the Resurrection

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 Jake Lyron. All rights reserved.

The right of Jake Lyron to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988 (UK Law).

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Contents

Foreword

The Bible Study

The Alpha Course

Scepticism, Narcissism, Spirituality

Another Christian Meeting

The Jehovah’s Witnesses

Conclusion

More by Jake Lyron

Foreword

The title of this book may give the impression that I am against Jesus, but in fact that is far from the case as I have always been a big fan and I write in support of the true spirit of Christ. What I criticise in this book is how Jesus’ message of love and truth has been distorted over the millennia by people calling themselves Christians. I write not to destroy Christ’s spirit but to help bring him back.

In this book I have hidden the identities of people I have written about by changing their names and various other details. Any similarity between the people I describe and people in real life is purely coincidental.

The Bible Study

As part of the spiritual exploration I delved into Christianity on a small, local scale. Through a meeting with a local vicar I found out about a nearby Bible study meeting. He had a word with the organisers and I was duly invited along.

It was dark that evening as winter headed our way and I pulled up on my bicycle at the gates of the manor house where the study was to take place. A few others started arriving, one elderly gentleman in a Porsche. I thought to myself is this man coming along to explore Jesus? Will this be an exercise in Christian hypocrisy?

We chatted briefly, the few of us with a couple of elderly ladies and made our way through the gates and up to the house. A lovely house. Rather huge, of beautiful sandstone and set in extensive grounds in an extremely desirable rural location. I would estimate its value at pushing a million pounds, easily.

The man of the house, let’s call him Alan, greeted us and called us through to the kitchen. More of the Christian fellowship arrived, all except one were elderly, as I suspected might be the case. It reflected the state of the Christian church in Britain at the time, with dwindling congregations as the numbers of ageing believers drops off as each one leaves Earth for whatever afterlife awaits them at the other side (if any). But they were all nice enough, friendly and welcoming as I was a newcomer. We had small talk and then headed for the drawing room for the study class.

The inside of the house was as beautiful as the outside. Rather grand with the best of everything. The Aga warmed the kitchen, the double stair case overwhelmed the hall and landing. In the drawing room stood a grand piano, plasma screen TV, chandeliers and what appeared to be an actual lion skin hearth rug by the crackling log fire. Apart from the dead body parts on the floor it was lovely.

We sat about the various sofas and chairs and Alan did some welcomes and introductions. The Bible extract for the evening was from the Book of Acts. The section described how, after the death of Christ, the apostles were left to pick up the pieces and formed themselves into the proto-Christian movement, establishing methods for worship and such, the beginnings of the Christian church.

I was loaned a Bible for the evening and people took turns to read from the book. After we had finished the section, Alan directed the analysis and discussion.

Early in the reading things got down to the kind of weirdness which is often present in the Bible with They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. [The Bible: New International Version, Acts 2:3]. Alan asked us what we thought this meant; did it actually happen like that or what? The group fell silent. I felt what I perceived as awkwardness. I may be wrong in this, but I felt that inside the individuals there, they were uncomfortable with the bizarre writings. I reckoned that each of them was scared to say what they really felt, that it was embarrassing and incredulous and that no, they did not believe it. As I say, I may be entirely wrong in this assessment, but the silence spoke volumes, at least to me.

The silence suggested to me that each was in fear of saying that’s mad lest they should be labelled a faithless unbeliever by the group. Psychologists have shown group conformity to be powerful, driving people to agree on things which are unequivocally false. It seemed that it was striking the people here too and bringing cohesion to this group of Christians who were each individually afraid of being shunned by saying they didn’t agree. The experience of the moment made me feel sadness for them as I felt the Christian orthodoxy was doing them a disservice, forcing them to absorb falsehoods. I felt rather sorry for them. But it’s my interpretation of events; I am still willing to entertain the possibility that I was wrong.

So the tongues of fire went by unchallenged and were accepted as gospel.

The book of Acts went on with more bizarre events such as the sun being turned to darkness, the moon to blood, blood and fire and billows of smoke, people coming back from the dead, people changing the languages they speak, people getting visions in dreams, lords on thrones with a right hand man in a parallel dimension, escaping death, and 3,000 or so people being dunked under water to give them everlasting life.

This was the overall tone of the following section. But the feeling it gave me was of it being very typically Biblical. I felt tired at reading it, like it was the same old stuff that people have been sold for the best part of two thousand years. When I read the wild antics of God with tongues of fire, a moon of blood and so on, it seemed to me that the words may have been written by some ancient scribe and a theological agitator who were so desperate to get people to fear their ‘one true God’ that they made a whole load of scary stuff up just to impress and intimidate people. We still get occasional compulsive liars nowadays. Some people have no conscience in spinning lies to impress others. They exaggerate and when some naive member of their audience says Wow! That’s incredible! they get a shot of pleasure inducing chemicals shooting round their brain as they have quite literally enthralled somebody (that is, brought somebody else within their power of control by spinning lies). Our body chemistry gives us this kind of reward. It is a survival trait. To survive, we must control resources, so to train us to do this a lot, our genetic programming gives us pleasure chemicals when we do this – dopamine, endorphins, those sorts of things. So for example, when we go shopping, and buy that huge TV, bring it home and set it up, the chemicals fire off and we feel good because we have brought a new resource into our control, and so