The Seduction of Religion: An Illuminating and Provocative Guide to the Religions of the World

By Paul Singh

The Seduction of Religion offers an illuminating and provocative guide to the religions of the world, focussing on the irrationality of religious beliefs. The point of this book is not to preach atheism so much as it is to encourage its readers to reflect more carefully on why they believe what they believe. Every religion, thinks

• Language: English
• Publisher: Science Literacy Books
• Release date: Mar 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780997054156

Book preview

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CHRISTIANITY

The Origins of Christianity

CHRISTIANITY IS THE WORLD’S LARGEST AND THE MOST organized religion on the planet today; so, I will discuss Christianity first. In 30 CE (plus or minus a few years) a Jewish prophet and miracle worker was crucified by the Romans. But that was only the beginning of the story. Three days later, according to the New Testament, a few women visited his tomb and found it empty. They claimed to have been informed by an angel that God had raised Jesus from the dead and that he would soon reappear to his disciples in Jerusalem and Galilee. And, according to the Bible, for the next 40 days, Jesus appeared to his disciples on various occasions. Most neuroscientists, neurologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists who dare delve into this topic agree that these appearances of the resurrected Christ could not have been more than hallucinations produced in the over-excited imaginations of the disciples, whose hopes that Jesus would usher in the Kingdom of God had been shattered by his tragic death. These hallucinations led to the growing rumor that a Jewish apocalyptic preacher called Jesus had been raised from the dead three days after he was left in a tomb. A few years later, a devout Jew named Saul, while on his way to Damascus to persecute Christians, claimed to have had a vision of the risen Christ (a light from heaven flashed around him and he heard the voice of Christ saying, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?). Believing the vision or hallucination to be a true revelation from God, he became a Christian himself and began to preach the Gospel throughout the Roman Empire. Saul, later known as Paul, thought that Jesus was God and that his death and resurrection had accomplished the redemption of mankind. And he was convinced that Christ would soon return to the earth for the final judgment.

Paul never met Jesus and did not know much about him, and yet he created a religion out of the popular beliefs about the last week of Jesus’ life that were still prevalent among the marginalized peasantry of Palestine. The religion of Christianity essentially focuses on the story of the last week of Jesus’ life (his crucifixion and resurrection) as described by Paul and the four Gospels.

Although it was very common to steal and borrow ideas while writing religious stories in ancient times, not many Christians know that most of the Christian stories in the New Testament are really versions of old tales of the Egyptians, Babylonians, Sumerians, Zoroastrians, and Greeks that were adapted to interpret the life of Jesus. Every historian of religion except those who are religiously motivated agrees on this and there is way too much historical literature on this subject-matter to dispute this fact. This is often how many of the new faiths were created in the ancient world. To give greater credibility to their writings, many religious zealots ascribed their writings to famous people of the past (Moses and Enoch, for example). Sometimes anonymous writings were later ascribed to important people of the past, as happened, for example, with the four gospels of the New Testament which were attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John only in the second century.

The Fable of the Christ

The story of Jesus is probably the greatest fiction that mankind ever invented. By fable or fiction I do not mean that a man called Jesus or Yeshua never existed. I believe that indeed there must have been a charismatic leader with such a name with a very small following in first-century Palestine. However, the religious legends and stories built around Jesus were concocted and embellished over many years, giving rise to one of the most superstitious religions of all time. There is no better example of a religious rumor ever--anywhere, anytime in history—than the rumor of a man allegedly resurrected three days after his death. This rumor, however is not unique to Christianity.

New Testament and Lost Christianities

It is apparent from the mutually contradictory stories of the four gospels, without having to seek evidence from outside historical sources, that Jesus’ miraculous birth is a made-up story, his raising Lazarus from the dead is a made-up story, his feeding multitudes of people with a few loaves is a made-up story, and his resurrection is a made-up story—indeed, the greatest made-up story of all time.

It is also important to know that every version of the New Testament available to believers today is a copy of a copy of a copy as Bart Ehrman says. The copies available today were altered and modified thousands of times by generations of scribes. The scribes revered the Bible, but when they translated it, they tried to revise and reconcile contradictions as much as they could. Yet numerous contradictions remain in the New Testament. If read carefully, however, the New Testament gives us many clues about the gradual growth of the Jesus myth after his death.

There are enough red flags in the New Testament to alert critics to the fact that much of what Christians consider as historical fact is myth. For example, the belief that the four Gospels were written by eyewitnesses is totally false. Most Christians accept the New Testament Gospels because they have been taught that they are inspired by God, but there is absolutely no historical evidence that this is so. Recent surveys show that very few Christians today have read the Gospels or know much about them.

Sometime in the fourth century, the New Testament was culled from a variety of documents, including letters, thirty or so purported gospels and many other short works. After much deliberation, infighting, and raging disputes, the New Testament was canonized in the form we find today. Many of the books not included in the canon, including most of the gospels that were rejected, were proclaimed heretical and their followers persecuted later by the state-supported Christian church. As they say, history is written by the winners. It is the winners who are considered correct and everyone else wrong. Truth becomes irrelevant over time.

Mark’s Gospel, historically the oldest, was placed second after Matthew, followed by Luke and John. This is followed by the Acts of the Apostles (early Church history). The remainder of the New testament is made up of letters, thirteen of which are attributed to Paul, three to John, two to Peter and one to James. The New Testament concludes with the Book of Revelation.

According to biblical scholars, several letters attributed to Paul were written by others to alter some radical notions of Paul’s original letters. These letters are 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, all written around 100 CE. Three other letters written by followers of Paul in the 70’s (Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians) are more conservative than Paul’s authenticated writings, especially when it comes to the place of women in the church. For example, Ephesians 5:21-22 states, Wives, submit yourselves unto your husbands, as unto the Lord. For husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is savior of the body. Therefore, as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything. Considering what Paul says about women being equal elsewhere in his other letters, the above does not sound like Paul. The Catholic Church has used these and other quotations from the New Testament to treat women as inferior to men and to prohibit them from being priests and enjoying equal rights with men. This inequality continues to this day in Roman Catholicism and many other denominations.

If the books and letters are read chronologically, in the order they were written, one can clearly see a definite sequence of development in Church doctrine. Who Jesus is and who he becomes changes as time goes by, as documents are altered and edited, and as new ones are created or forged.

Paul initially joined a group of followers of Jesus after having been their persecutor. This group of followers used to meet in synagogues after Jesus’ death and claimed that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah, the Christ, the anointed one of God. Paul initially felt that his goal was to drive these people out of synagogues, but later he accepted their basic beliefs about Christ. It is clear from reading Paul’s letters that this group did not see anything exceptional about Jesus’ divinity, his virgin birth, his teachings, or miracles or healing. One also does not find evidence in Paul’s letters that Paul believed in physical resurrection. Whether Paul’s change in heart about believing in Jesus as the Messiah has anything to do with some experience Paul had on his way to Damascus is a matter of debate for Biblical scholars. That may be part reality and part fiction fabricated by devout Christian authors.

About 40 years after Jesus’s death, the gospel of Mark was written. It was the first of the four gospels, and it was used by Matthew and Luke as an outline of Jesus life upon which they based their gospels. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called synoptic gospels because their basic outline is similar. John’s Gospel is very different. It is a spiritual gospel that does not reflect the historical Jesus and represents a Christology of a much later time, possibly between 90 and 110 CE.

Ninety percent of Mark’s Gospel appears in Matthew and almost 77 percent of Mark appears in Luke. Additionally, about 200 verses that are not found in Mark are found in Matthew and Luke. This additional material is shared by Matthew and Luke. The authors of Matthew and Luke had the Gospel of Mark before them when they wrote their own gospels. The remaining 200 verses were copied from some other sources, the most important being the Q source (Q stands for Quelle meaning source in German). Such copying practices were at least partially confirmed by the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas in 1945, in which overlapping verses from Matthew and Luke were found to be nearly identical to statements from Thomas’ Gospel. Critical scholars of the New Testament have no doubt that both Q and Thomas are the result of additional literature by Christians after Jesus’ death, although there may be some actual words of Jesus contained in both documents.

Essentially, this means that we have records even older than Paul’s, traceable to people who talked and walked with Jesus and who transmitted accounts of those events in oral history until they began to put them in writing in the 50s. There is no mention in these early writings of Q of Jesus’ birth, miracles, feeding multitudes, and raising dead people. This was mostly invented later. The Christianity practiced today is the religion about Jesus created primarily by Paul and later embellished by the Gospel writers. Remember, the Gospels are all anonymous, and only in the second century were they attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The same stories told by Mark get longer and longer in Matthew and Luke; this practice of embellishing old stories was also a common practice in all ancient literature, religious and otherwise. The scientific standards of history writing that all historians observe and insist upon today were simply unknown at that time.

There is no mention of the miraculous birth of Jesus in Mark, the oldest Gospel. Although Mark tells us that Jesus is the Son of God, he says absolutely nothing about a miraculous virgin birth. The miracle-performing Jesus who appears in Mark’s Gospel and then reappears in Matthew, Luke, and John is a new figure who came into view for the first time in 40 years after Jesus’ death. Such distorted versions of history are often a typical result of oral traditions that add more and more new stories to pre-existing legends with the passage of time. The Christians for whom the Gospels were written were immersed in a gentile culture in which great leaders were gods, sometimes in their lifetimes and sometimes after their deaths. Claims of dying and then rising and ascending to heaven were quite common at this time both among Jews and gentiles. Caesar Augustus was worshiped as a god, and after his death it was claimed that he was taken into heaven. Alexander the Great’s mother was said to have been impregnated by a god who had taken the form of a serpent. These were common cultural beliefs in the first century.

What was different about Jesus was that he was a nonentity compared to these great kings. From a careful reading of Mark, it is reasonable to conclude that Mark did not believe that Jesus rose physically from the dead. His gospel ends by stating that the tomb was found empty. That is all it says. It does not say that Jesus was resurrected. The original Gospel ends at chap 16:8, with the three women fleeing the empty sepulcher. A second ending (verses 9-20) in which a resurrected Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene and the eleven disciples was obviously tacked on later to make it coincide with Matthew and Luke. Many Bibles contain a notation to that effect. The material beginning at 16:9 is so jarring that it is obvious that another writer added it later.

What we can take away from the literal reading of the Christian scriptures, if read alongside of the non-canonical gospels and keeping in mind the first and second century common knowledge (not the twenty-first century scientific knowledge) is that each gospel was written by a different group of followers of Jesus and each of those groups had a different understanding of who Jesus was. Some thought of Jesus as a wise teacher, others thought of him as god, and yet others thought of him as equal to God, the father. It is also clear that these groups lost their influence when a more powerful group of Christians emerged 200 years later that absorbed and adopted some of their teachings. This new group of Christians (who we now call orthodox Christians) decided in favor of a new doctrine called the Trinity, and distinguished themselves from other groups with this novel idea of three in one and one in three. The doctrine of the Trinity, held by different ancient Christian groups, won out in the end, and became the distinctive doctrine of orthodox Christianity.

The earliest letters of Paul were put after the four gospels and Mark, the earliest gospel, was put after Matthew. Such a manipulative attempt at a specific arrangement of placement of books and letters in the canon was done to give the impression that Jesus’ miraculous birth, death, and resurrection were believed by the earliest Christians, which is not the case. The words applied to Jesus such as savior, son of god, god incarnate, divine, god from god, lord, liberator, redeemer, savior of the world, were words that first and second century people were accustomed to in pre-Christian contexts. The literacy rate in the first century was abysmally low, and critical analysis of new supernatural claims practically non-existent, so the church followers could invent superstitious doctrines that Christians still believe today.

The Book of Revelation

The definition of prophecy in theological discussions is complicated. I intend to use the word prophecy to mean some sort of prediction. One reason for this is that all ordinary religious and non-religious folks are inclined to think that anytime someone talks about prophecy, some sort of prediction about the future of our world is being made. This is precisely what the Book of Revelation does, at least for the most part. The word prediction in science is tantamount to the word prophecy in religion. When scientists talk about prediction, they are essentially prophesying as well. In other words, there are common elements between the two words, one religious and one scientific. But there is a big difference. True prophesy is to be able to predict years ahead of time that a comet will hit the planet Jupiter in April of 1994 and then watch it happen on that date and time right in front of your eyes. True prophecy is to be able to predict the precise dates and times of all the solar ecipsed thousands of years ahead of time and then watch that come true with precision and accuracy. That is prophecy. That is a true prophecy or prediction which only science can make.

In this sense, no true prophecy is found in the bizarre utterances of the Book of Revelation, the sort that can be found only in science. Scientific calculations can predict the precise date and time when Halley’s Comet will pass by our planet in the year of 2061. Thousands of Christian prophets have come and gone since the days of Jesus and before him; but none of them has been able to accurately predict anything, yet Jews and Christians still try to decipher the prophetic codes secretly buried in the language of the Bible. The question arises, why doesn’t God call a spade a spade, instead of playing around with us in His secret code language? Do Christians and Jews ever feel embarrassed when they can never find any prophesies in the Bible? And yet they can always find prophecies after the fact! A prophecy after the fact is not a prophecy but only nourishment for religious fools who seriously lack any sense of distinction between what has already occurred and what is yet to come. Some Christians and Jews cite the example of a Biblical prophecy made thousands of years ago of Jews returning to their homeland as proof that biblical prophecy is true, but that claim proves nothing. One prophecy coming true out of hundreds predicted is consistent with simple mathematical probability. In fact, the laws of probability mathematics would be false if not even one of the thousands of these prophecies came true. Real prophecy is to be able to foresee that the asteroid Apophis will closely shave the Earth on Friday the 13th in the month of April in the year 2029 and then again in 2036. That is what scientists know. Prophecy is not in the lurid descriptions of the punishment of sinners by the Old Testament God in an unknowable future. Prophesying dates of Doomsday, and then revising those dates in every new generation when predictions fail clearly falls short of prophecy.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Seventh Day Adventists are the experts when it comes to making false prophecies. Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists have set dates for the end of the world many times since the inception of their religions. Those dates came and went and new Doomsday dates were thereupon set by their prophets. Their prophets showed no sign of shame or embarrassment when their prophecies did not come true, but this is not the most interesting part. The most interesting part is to see that the teeming millions who trusted these prophets showed little or no signs of embarrassment. This only reinforced the followers’ beliefs and made them dig in their heels even deeper when their religious leaders failed to deliver.

There are two ways of looking at John’s Book of Revelation. Probably the fairest way of looking at it is from the viewpoint of literature of that era. From this perspective, since John could not have written his tirade overtly against the Romans for fear of punishment or even death, he expressed his hatred of the Roman Empire in enigmatic symbols. He was supposedly exiled on the island of Patmos by the Roman government. This book therefore can be fairly and squarely designated as belonging to a genre called apocalyptic. If the book of Revelation is understood to be an attempt at revelation on the other hand, then it must be nothing more than the writings of a visionary poet. There is nothing prophetic about it; these are just imaginary utterances