Antony Van der Mude
2 min readSep 4, 2022

--

Christianity is a very brittle belief system. It stands or falls on a single claim: that there is something special or unique about the Christian Bible that makes it different from any other document written by humans. That is a pretty incredible claim. I just don't see any good evidence for it. As far as I can tell, it is a book written by humans, for humans, just like any other book.

C.S. Lewis presented an argument know as the Trilemma: Jesus is either Lord, Liar or Lunatic. There is a fourth possibility: Legend. A legend is a story that has an historical basis, but it is fictionalized - it is embellished. The Christian story is a Legend. Most religious stories, from the time of Gilgamesh on, are like that.

You argue that the Bible is inerrant. This is certainly wrong. Not only does it contain errors, it is incomplete. For example, Jesus only gives infidelity as grounds for divorce, but makes no mention of spousal abuse. In any case, a large fraction of marriages end up in divorce for many good reasons. Given the alternative - between saying that Jesus is in error, or that saying billions of divorcees are in error - Okham's Razor should lead you to the conclusion that Jesus is in error.

Every religion is unique in its own way. There is nothing special or unique in Christianity's claim to by unique. It's just like people. We are all unique in our own way. And being human, Jesus is just as unique as any one of us are.

Yes, there could be a creator god. But that does not imply that Christianity should be taken seriously as a belief system. God could exist, but just not the Christian god.

A better alternative to Trinitarian Christianity is Unitarian Christianity. Sophia Lyons Fahs once wrote a biography of Jesus for youth entitled "Jesus, the Carpenter's Son". There are no miracles and he dies in the end. But Unitarian Christianity is better aligned to reality than a Trinitarian belief system and is a more rational religion to live by.

--

--

Antony Van der Mude

Computer programmer, interested in philosophy and religious pantheism