All religions attempt to ground themselves in reality, and indeed they try to lend credence to their claims by introducing numerous characters. To make them more believable, most of those characters have human-like characteristics, but many are given supernatural aspects.
All of the characters have one thing in common: there is no credible contemporary evidence from outside of the religious texts to support either the existence or the events pertaining to the characters. That is something that is glossed over by the religions and hand-waved away by the people who promote, practise, and profit from the religions.
This page (and its sub-pages) puts an end to the hand-waving by examining the major characters involved in the various religions, and by exposing a few home truths that the religions would rather not be exposed. As per usual on this site, obviously fictional characters are not given any credence by having their names capitalized.
Christianity
Just under 30% of the world’s people claim some form of Christianity for themselves, and that number is falling. The other way of appreciating that Christians, is that over 70% of the world’s population don’t believe in your religion, and that number is rising. That figure is actually much higher when denominations are considered, for example over 82% of the world’s population are not Catholic, and over 98% of the world’s population are not Baptist, etc.
Christianity shares many of the characters with Judaism and Islam, however it has many of it’s own. This section will look at the major players and will demonstrate the major problems and flaws with those characters.
god
Christianity is a monotheistic religion, which means that it promotes just a single character as the main figure and creator. It isn’t possible for Christians to explain where their god came from, so the “explanation” always given is that “god is eternal” – which explains nothing. The single god figure is all encompassing and has no competition. He (yes, in Christianity, god is always considered to be male) is presented as being omnipotent and omniscient. That means that he is all-powerful and all-knowing.
The problem is that the god figure is a fictional character.
If the god figure was just a presence, the story would have a better chance of working, however it falls apart when god gets involved. Via physical events and interactions with people, cracks in the facade emerge. Christians only focus on their god being wise, loving and fair, however the text is jam-packed with instances of god being: mean, murderous, unfair, jealous, unkind, and wrong.
The following link is to a page (on this site) that demonstrates that the Christian god is a character invented and adapted by superstitious and ignorant power-craving iron-age men. After reading the following link you will never look at the Christian god in the same way.
jesus
It’s hard to decide if god is more important to Christianity than jesus, and there are arguments to be made for both. Obviously god is considered to be the head guy who kicked everything off, but jesus (christ) is the one who ended up lending his name to the sects covered under the umbrella of “Christianity”. It does seem like many religions could happily lose their god figure but would be less happy to lose their jesus figure.
The problem is that the jesus that people think they know is a fictional character.
There’s no denying that the events pertaining to jesus are central to the message of Christianity, however there’s also no denying that there is no credible evidence supporting those events. That’s something that is difficult for fundies to acknowledge, however it is true and the following link is to a page (on this site) that covers the topic in detail. You will never be the same “Christian” after you have thoughtfully read the page at the following link.
more (coming soon…)
Islam
(coming soon…)
Judaism
(coming soon…)