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Christianity is the religion I'm best acquainted with, seeing as it's the one I was raised into, albeit a fairly unorthodox and liberal take on it. Since my teenhood, I've felt very conflicted about the whole thing.
On the one hand, a large majority of the historical figures I admire most were guided and inspired by one version or another of the Christian faith and the noblest facets of its ethics. When it (seldom) lives up to its own standards, it's perhaps the most awe-inspiring life philosophy. On the other hand, I find many of its tenets, or at least their most commonly agreed upon interpretations, to be highly objectionable and frankly intolerable.
While Christianity may well have a claim to the most crowded lineage of moral paragons, its history is also marred by the countless atrocities committed in its name, like most other religions. Even now, droves of self-proclaimed Christians spurn the beating heart of Jesus' message to instead obsess on the dregs of the parasitic dogma layered on top of it. The latter is littered with heaps of distasteful and incoherent rubbish it needs to answer for.
Furthermore, it seems the minute someone displays an openness to spirituality and the slightest of fondness for Jesus' teachings, they get swarmed by proselytic Christians angling to conscript them into their gang by means fair or foul, which irks me substantively. Why should every person imbued with spiritual inclinations be forced to bend the knee to whatever religion has the most peer pressure backing it up in their culture? It's perfectly fine, and dare I even say commendable, to be a spiritual independent (or whichever other strand of free-thinking heretic you prefer to style yourself as, I don't judge).
As such, I felt impelled to put down my vehement contentions in writing as an unordered series of self-contained posts listing the reasons why I personally will most likely never convert. As an added bonus, once I've externalized them, they'll serve as a publicly accessible reference that I can point people back to in case of need.
I am well aware that raising such objections to widespread religious doctrines isn't a novel undertaking and harkens back to a long, old, and abundant tradition. However, none of those I've come across so far have addressed my idiosyncratic pet peeves quite to my satisfaction. As we say where I'm from, "On est jamais mieux servi que par soi-mêmewhich roughly translates as "you're never better served than by yourself"".
Introduction #
With that said, onto this post's topic. Although the filtering of souls is the most abhorrent Christian tenet in my eyes, the biggest block standing between me and conversion is probably that I'm not inclined to Jesus monomania. It holds no appeal to me, whether it's logically, emotionally, or aesthetically.
It must be noted that by its nature this post offers a subjective perspective. I do not expect to deconvert any Christian, nor am I trying to. My argumentation isn't meant as an offensive maneuver but rather as intellectual self-defense.
If you're happy living an unobtrusive life as a Christian, I have no beef with you. Live and let live. But to all those with imperialistic ambitions who would aim to bring me into the fold, then these are the hurdles you'll have to address first. And based on your track record up to now, I strongly doubt you'll ever be able to.
With that said, let's get back to our topic. Jesus monomania is probably the first quirk of card-carrying Christians that will jump out at you if you spend any time near them. Although I'm chill with the dude himself, his stans can get creepy pretty fast. How do you know someone is a vegan Jesus monomaniac? They'll tell you.
You need more Jesus in your life! You MUST ACCEPT Jesus in your heart! You need to SUBMIT to Jesus! Recognize Jesus as your personal LORD and SAVIOUR!
Whether or not this glib impersonation speaks to you, I think the concept warrants a deeper explanation.
What is Jesus monomania? #
As far as I'm concerned, belonging to the Christian denomination and being subject to Jesus monomania are one and the same, at least on a theological level. After all, you don't need to ascribe any exceptional divinity to Jesus in order to follow his moral example.
According to the Wiktionary, monomania is the "excessive interest or concentration on a singular object or subject". Another way to phrase it is focusing on one thing above, and at the expense of, all others.
Let's consider some of the most fundamental theological Christian tenets.
- Jesus is the literal (and only) incarnation of God in human form. This is why many get so hung up on the factuality of the immaculate conception. It contributes to the mystique of Godly incarnationWell, that and a discomfort with sexuality. Nobody can ever be allowed to say Jesus' mum was a 'ho.. Jesus being God also plays into the symbolical significance of the Creator embracing the human condition and the suffering that comes with it.
- Jesus was resurrected after death, proving the existence of the afterlife through his direct example. This is a big promise of Christianity to its believers: not only will your soul survive your demise, but your earthly hardships will be rewarded manifold and across eternity, provided you followed the rules.
- Salvation and one's relationship to spirituality are mediated through Jesus (sometimes the Holy Ghost too). He serves as the ultimate middleman. That may not be their favorite way to word it, but it is basically what they believe nonetheless.
This all makes Jesus the most important human being as the sole bridge between humanity and the divine. Hence, under Christianity, spirituality is Jesus monomania.
To be clear, I have no issue if, as an individual, you really resonate with Jesus above any other spiritual figures and find fulfillment in choosing him as the linchpin of your faith. However, I'm less cool with you trying to shove him down my throat and paint him as the only viable option.
If we're to assume there is a God and They intend to convey information to humanity, giving Jesusand potentially the other biblical prophets before him a monopoly over this communication entails several troubling ramifications. So despite remaining agnostic about the resurrection, I reject all the other claims as highly implausible and objectionable. Instead, I favor alternative interpretations that avoid these pitfalls and present a more consistent and coherent theoretical framework.
As far as I can tell, there are two main troubling implications of making Jesus the one and only source of divine truth and salvation.
The first concerns the fixation on emphatically demarcating a rigid spiritual hierarchy, which seems to clash against Jesus' entire life philosophy.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others #
The more you learn about the Bible by reading excerpts and listening to scholars talk about its content and history, the more you realize that as a whole it's a heterogeneous accretion of sources from various traditions and authors with diverging perspectives. That's why it features many internal contradictions and inconsistencies. This even applies within the narrower scope of Jesus' teachings.
As such, it's pretty trivial to cherry-pick quotes that seem to support your favorite interpretation and invalidate its challengers. I'd rather skip the endless hair-splitting to focus on the essence. Therefore, I'll be addressing the most coherent, holistic, and core version of Jesus that seems to emerge from the Bible and the way people tend to think and talk about him.
From my perspective, universal love, humble solidarity, and forgiveness are the main recurrent themes in the message of this gestalt-Jesus. You're supposed to treat everybody well because each individual bears intrinsic value.
This read is reinforced by the numerous Christians who like to credit their religion as the origin of all the positive reforms that underpin the current political consensus of developed nations, be it democracy, women's rights, or the abolition of slaveryAlthough, technically, the First Testament seems very chill with owning slaves. and institutionalized racism. This is all built upon a foundation of egalitarianism: no one individual or class is better than another; hence, there is no justification for disparity on the basis of demographics or castes.
Doesn't it seem odd then to raise Jesus to a status above all other humans? To make him some sort of spiritual prince lording it over the rest of us?
The way he goes about helping people is humble. It's not about flashiness and peacocking. He doesn't judge prostitutes, or adulterous spouses, or beggars. He washes people's feet. He doesn't seem to think himself more worthy than the rest. The entire Christian ethos of generosity and martyrdom is founded on selflessness.
Admittedly, he does refer to himself as "Lord" in the process. Still, I'd be very surprised if Jesus got offended about you skipping the pecking order games. He doesn't strike me as the Yakuza mob boss type. His goal seems to be to raise everybody else up to his level, not to uphold clear boundaries between the upper crust and the riffraff.
To me, this inconsistency extends to his supposed parentage. I don't have an issue with him being the "Son of God" as long as he's not the only one.
Praise be to Jesus, the divine heir, and woe be to the rest of us disgusting, half-baked, flawed creatures. There's no way you can compete with the ultimate nepo baby. Kiss the ring of your spiritual betters. All hail the metaphysical caste system.
As I see it, there's nothing unique about being God's child. Either we all are or none of us is. The attempts at stripping divinity from the commoner to hoard it within a few chosen ones are not only distasteful but also discredited by most accounts of mystical experiences. I reject the misguided theological segregation of the lowly creatures from the lofty creator.
It seems I was fortunate to be spared from the instincts that would compel me to seek authority figures to pledge myself to as a groveling minion out of self-loathing or responsibility avoidance. I have no need for lords or masters.
Although this contradiction is a sticking point for me, it probably won't have much effect on most Christians. They seem to enjoy their hierarchy pyramids. The next one, though, is far more disturbing and harder to account for.
For Jesus to be the GOAT, God must be the WOAT #
Besides being God's Son, Jesus' main feat was supposedly bringing salvation to humanity. If you make this assumption, I do not see how it's possible to exculpate God from being a mentally unstable monster aside from titanium-grade denial and Olympic gold-level mental gymnastics.
Why did God wait millennia upon millennia to save humanity? Why would They only send the one true messenger at an arbitrary point in time, long after the advent of humanity, in one limited point in space? That would imply anyone who missed the train because they were born too early or a bit too far away is irremediably screwed for inscrutable reasons. They can just kiss their salvation goodbye. Sucks to suck.
Speaking of salvation, that concept only makes sense in light of an anterior damnation. For Christians, the standard explanation is original sin, a story so patently ludicrous it doesn't even deserve its own post.
Let's just quickly consider it here, for the sake of argumentation. Two twerps sample an apple they weren't supposed to. God throws the most unhinged hissy fit, exiles humanity from the Garden of Eden and the afterlife, and curses us to suffering and mortality.
Then one day, somehow, the divine butthurt recedes. God changes "His" mind for inscrutable reasons and relents. "He" sends Jesus to get nailed, and just like that, bang! Salvation is unlocked. Too bad for the hundreds of thousands of suckers in prehistory and antiquity who died before that point and all the others after who never got a chance to learn about the New Testament due to limitations in information dissemination.
Once more the God of the canonical Bible seems to be of several minds and favor sloppy design rife with poorly handled edge cases. Maybe "He" is a tad racist and doesn't care too much for tribal people and anybody who lives a bit too far off the Fertile Crescent.
In any case, for the crime of being born in the wrong place and time, there'll be no eternity for you. And if you're upset about that, or about your kid getting cancer, or anything else for that matter, well, find peace in the knowledge that it's all justified because some random schmuck bit into some no-no fruit aeons ago.
And even if we were to assume the veracity of original sin, the redemption story itself is shady. Daddy's most special baby boy dying on a cross is supposed to redeem all of humanity? Sure, it's an awful death, but I mean, there's been even worse. In the face of humanity's suffering as a whole, it's but a drop in the bucket. Good heavens, meanwhile the homies are supposedly being tortured in hell for ETERNITY. There's no comparison.
Is this another spiritual caste thing? Perhaps his pain counts more than ours, rabble that we are, seeing as he's from the metaphysical aristocracy? This entire narrative framing is in very poor taste.
There are alternative interpretations to make sense of some of these discrepancies, such as the Gnostic Demiurge or positing an incomplete, learning God who evolves over time, but none of these align with the main Christian canon.
Of course, there's also the atheist perspective that says there are no prophets or spiritual masters. It's all mere confabulation, superstition, and misunderstandings. That's a plausible option, but it's a well-trodden and indiscriminate objection. It doesn't offer tailored criticism to the Christian perspective.
I think there's more bite in showing that you can come up with a more coherent model based on the same assumption rather than dismissing the latter wholesale. So let's consider this counter proposition logically derived from the presumption that "there is a God, and They intend to convey information to humanity".
An alternative model #
If the God who created the universe wanted us to know something, all They had to do was ingrain it within us from birth. So God must have reasons to withhold information from us and, in so doing, allow uncertainty and doubt to exist. They seem to prefer a non-coercive approach to imparting divine wisdom. If the goal is to offer discretionary opportunities to realize these deeper truths, it has to happen through more contentious means, regardless of whether they're mediated but straightforward (such as spiritual masters or "prophets") or unmediated but more subtle (such as feelings and intuitions).
Seeing as Jesus preached a message of universal love, humility, solidarity, and forgiveness, if he is indeed a messenger of God, it seems more likely that the latter isn't a demented tyrantOr at least, They're really sly about it.. Such a God wouldn't have forsaken anyone in the first place, so there's no need for salvation. Life on earth can't be intended as a curse, a punishment, or a means of filtering.
A loving, universalistic, and forgiving God would not send a tiny handful of messengers arbitrarily across time and space and risk preventing millions of souls from ever discovering a message They thought of importance.
Such a God would believe in second chances and want to give every individual more than a single opportunity to heed the call. If they're rational, they would also diversify their portfolio, so to speak, and use more than a single avenue, adapting the message to be approachable by different cultures and proclivities. As it happens, this does track with the myriad of mystics and spiritual teachers who have been recorded across history and geography.
In fact, since it's God we're talking about, They wouldn't be constrained to using middlemen and could send hints directly to each and every individual through intuition, reason, experiences, and more.
Again, this tracks with the recurrent mystic theme of experiencing unity with the divine, the Hindu yogis or the Zen masters who claim enlightenment can be taught, and Jesus exhorting his followers to emulate and, to an extent, become like him.
In this model, a direct, unmediated, personal attunement to and relationship with the divine isn't a privilege bestowed to a small elite but largely accessible to any with the predisposition and commitment required to achieve it. Every human is God's progeny and has a connection to Them. And Jesus, as outstanding of a paragon and messenger as he may be, is but one spiritual master among many others. One of the greatest perhaps, but as human and godly as anyone else.
The myth of the "one and only true dogma" doesn't follow from any divine mandate. It's merely an artifact of outworn human organizations desperately clutching to retain their monopoly on control. No creed is supreme. It's not a question of whether they are partial and inaccurate, but how much.
There's no reason to believe you can't nurture a connection with the divine if you happen to jive better with a different spiritual figure or set of teachings than that of the Christ. God doesn't discriminate Their mystics and masters on the basis of tradition, culture, gender, or any other arbitrary demographic delineation. Such crude and silly prejudice doesn't extend past the purview of humanity.
By the same token, being Christian doesn't guarantee you a direct line to God. A quick look at the past and present will reveal a profusion of behavior from many who claim the label that couldn't be further from Jesus' teachings and example.
By obsessing over the messenger, it seems many forgot about the message.
What does God value more: worshiping the idol and its theological regalia or walking the walk?
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