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Non-Christians: from your point of view what is wrong with Christianity?

This is a question for non-Christians who know about Christianity. In your opinion what major problems does it have? What is bad about it?

I am asking this because as a Christian i do not have an external and independent view of Christianity, so i want to see if others can see problems with it that i have not noticed.

Please be fair and objective, no Christian-bashing or abuse for the sake of it. And just saying things like "Christians are stupid" is not helpful.

Please also state your own belief system so i know where you are coming from (the objections raised by an Atheist might be different from those of, say, a Hindu).

Update:

RE: AdoreHim: I am asking non-believers because i have noticed that non-believers can see things from their perspective that believers do not notice. As a non-believer in Hinduism, i find the caste system questionable; as a non-believer in female circumcision, it strikes me as problematic; as a non-believer in Islamic fundamentalism, i think the death penalty for Muslims who change their religion is wrong; but believers in those things do not see that they are a problem. Jesus himself said that before we try to pick the specks of sawdust out of other's eyes, we need to look for the logs or planks in our own eyes. Sometimes those planks are more easily seen from an outsider's perspective.

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  • 1 decade ago
    Favorite Answer

    1. Conflicting bible - Adhering to Deuteronomy or Exodus would have you arrested in every country in the world. Christians ignore these by claiming they were not meant for the modern world (even though Christ confirmed the OT). Where did God say that there was an expiration date on portions of the bible?

    2. Biblical accounts and books excluded/included by man, not "God" - The core of Christianity is edited by humans making the bible untrustworthy as a source of divine leadership. (Check out the lost books of the bible, one of which claimed Judas died in Christ's place!)

    3. Most "laws" are not biblical in origin, but are later interpretation by humans. For example, Christ never mentioned Homosexuality, yet Christians feel they have divine guidance on the subject due to later writings.

    4. Non-beleivers go to hell, regardless of moral position during life.

    5. The whole premise that Jesus died for our sins. But Christ didn't die! So how could one say he died for our sins? He was God! He's immortal. It's like Trump spending a day on skid row, then returning to his affluent life, and claiming he knew what is was like to be poor. To me, this is the biggest confusion of Christian belief - that an immortal God died for our sins.

    6. Misinterpretation - The bible is frequently misinterpreted. For example "Turn the other cheek" does not mean to tolerate injustice, it actually means to defy and challenge it. Even the ten commandments have three major versions. How can a law written by God in stone have multiple versions?

    7. Non-forgiving God - More than one passage, including the ten commandments themselves, describe a vengeful, unforgiving God, which is not the one described in Christian dogma.

    8. Moral degradation - A person's morals should be based on a personal ethical belief to do the right thing. Christianity promotes morals based on fear of retribution, aka "Hell"

    9. The propensity for humans to usurp diefied powers, i.e. the pope (aka His Holiness), priests, etc. I kiss no man's ring, and why would the sign of a cross from a priest be more meaningful than from any other man.

    10. No modern day prophets - The first two centuries were rife with prophets who spoke and wrote in Jesus' name, including those that wrote the new testament. And Christians literally accept every word as God's truth. Yet not a single person that claims the same relationship today is accepted with the same trust. Why is a stranger who lived in 400AD accepted as a genuine mouthpiece of God, but no one in recent history has the same status (Mormanism being an exception). Did Jesus only inspire bronze age persons?

  • 1 decade ago

    I'm a Pagan and a Wiccan. I'm also a minister and a former Christian.

    My reason for leaving is quite related to the difficulties I see with the Christian faith. I see that Christianity is based on a set of books that were chosen in a manner which is not without at least an element of an arbitrary nature. There was much written about Christ that was not included in the canon of scripture and it seems that what was chosen was chosen to reinforce a particular set of beliefs; those who held alternative beliefs were dealt with quite harshly in times past.

    While the severity of those attitudes has changed over the years, the attitudes themselves have not. People of other faiths are considered heretics who are leading others astray. They are considered, at best, unwitting servants of the devil.

    Too, Christians are taught an unfalsifiable faith. Any good that might happen is offered as proof of the existence of God. Anything that might seem contrary is taught to be either human lack of understanding or the work of the devil. It is a system that defines itself and permits no contradiction. A person claiming to have contrary evidence is a person to be avoided.

    This does not promote healthy critical thinking. What is even stranger is that the religion that behaves in this fashion is the same that ridicules other religions, such as neo-paganism and Wicca as mere inventions.

    I understand the Great Commission. I understand the desire to serve god and remain steadfast. What is troubling is the seeming desire to eliminate other faiths. While Christians will not overtly state this desire, the mere existence of missionaries and evangelism makes this quite apparent.

    While Wicca, most of Paganism and many other faiths grow by simply being what they are and teaching people who specifically ask, many Christians actively pursue others. Some go so far as to go into poor areas with the offer of food, the price of which is indoctrination. These same people admonish against even entertaining the understanding of other faiths.

    Anyway, that's the short version of the story.

    Blessings,

    --Dee

  • 1 decade ago

    I was raised christian but i turned to paganism, specifically Kemetism (the reconstruct of the ancient egyptian religion). Kemetics have a monolatrous kind of belief which is different than monotheism. It's a belief that god is made up of different aspects.

    Here are some things i have against christianity:

    1) Christianity teaches fear and intolerance. That there is this almighty God that will punish a person eternally for any sin they commit and kill people he thinks are abominations.

    2) Too many people use christianity to steal people's money, build megachurches, fly in private planes, and drive lexus'.

    3) Too many people can use christianity to justify their actions, like killing gays or blowing up abortion clinics. "Well God told me to do it"

    4) People use christianity to control what other people can do and what they can't do. Politicians are very guilty of this.

    5) Christianity is the most abused of all religions, meaning people use it for their own gain and power. There is something wrong when a religion can be abused as much as christianity has been.

  • Anonymous
    1 decade ago

    I am fourteen, and currently being raised Catholic. I've been a Catholic since I was six months old, but I haven't believed in the church or the Christian faith for two years now. Because I realized that Jesus, being such an accepting and inspiring person would never have advocated the **** going on now. We're all supposed to "fear God" and fear "Satan" more. The experiences of parental divorce and social ostracism have made me realize several things:

    1. In orthodox christian thinking, there's never any concession made for human Individuality or honest ambition. You either go to Heaven, and you're a good, pious person who does what they're told their whole life, or you're a crazed, irresponsible drunkard, and you go to Hell. I don't think I fit into either, as someone who values freedom, acceptance and honesty.

    2. Organized religion has caused more Human bloodshed than any other dogma.

    3. Agnostics and people who worship God in their own way are the nicest, most intelligent people you'll ever meet, at least in my opinion.

    4. My father, whom I still respect despite the fact that he did it, abandoned every Catholic moral he ever hammered into my skull when he left my Mom and got his girlfriend pregnant. All while he was working on his PH.d in Catholic Theology. This negatates everything he ever said about Catholic dogma. However, since he influenced my entire thought process, I still respect him. I'm just not going to listen to anything he says about Religion.

    5. Everything my Catholic christian friends do is somehow contained by dogma that they can't really explain beyond a few cliche phrases. I'd rather use my conscience to determine the right path of action.

    Anyway, I'm only young, so maybe I've made some errors, but I think I'm probably one of the more qualified people to give you insight. I still pray every night, but I do it standing up with my arms crossed. If God's so big, he shouldn't care. My fingers are tired of typing, so I'm done.

    Source(s): There could be a god.
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  • 1 decade ago

    Christianity is wrong for me -- that doesn't mean it's not a fulfilling and valid faith for millions of other people. With that in mind, I try not to throw stones.

    However, since you asked... three main problems spring to mind.

    1) The fact that Christianity proposes to take a book written many centuries ago, and compiled (with a lot of editing) over a couple more, and use that as an inerrant guide to navigating the modern world. This means taking the moral and purity codes of various ancient tribes as "gospel" truth.

    2) Related to #1... the fact that so many Christians are SO ignorant of history and culture, and that the religion encourages this, especially with regards to itself. This can lead to a poisonous "us versus them" mentality. Two words: The Inquisitions.

    3) The fact that Christianity claims to be THE only path to God. This is absurd given the scope of human history and the widely varied ways in which different cultures and religions seek the Divine, usually very satisfactorally and richly within their own context. If the Judeo-Christian God is THE only God, then all I can say is that He truly sucks at getting out memos, because many peoples never even heard of Him until the missionaries came along.

    Source(s): Wiccan, but I was a devout Christian for many years
  • 1 decade ago

    Christianity as many errors, the short list is thus:

    It allows others to shift blame for an evil deed off of them and say they are sorry and then they are forgiven.

    It openlly insites fear and intolorence.

    It makes its followers seek out other people and try to persuade them to join thier faith, which is not right.

    It has a deffinite history of sexual imorallity within the religion, despite what the Bible teaches.

    And finally some of the Scrolls where left out, making it falible, where Christianity teaches that the Bible is infalible.

    I recentlly left the Christian faith, and joined the Pagan/Wiccan, and if I can say so myself I have more peace and understanding now than I ever did as a Christian.

    Blessed Be.

  • 1 decade ago

    Personally, and a little reluctantly, I'm one of those Pagans who was raised in a considerably strict Christian household. (It was weird, when my parents were still married, it was pretty relaxed, but outwardly Catholic, after my father won the custody battle, *he* got much stricter, but when he remarried, my step-mother is a wonderful Quaker woman who's practically a Buddhist when compared to most Catholics).

    On the other hand, I don't have any ill feelings toward Christianity. I never really did. yes, my father "made me" go to Christian youth groups when I was in high school, but I chose to go to the teen gatherings at my step-mother's Friends Meeting House, and that was pretty cool -- a lot of Quakers are even pretty cool about non-Christians attending meeting house, as long as they support the Quaker ideals of Equality, Simplicity and Brotherhood.

    Now, as far as why I'm not a Christian, I just never felt it "fit". Some people "find Jesus" and it's an amazing experience and they become genuinely good people because of it (rather than people like Fred Phelps, who use "born again" Christianity as a sort of a crutch for bigoted words and actions). That's kind of my experience, except I'm Pagan. I always felt the presence of the Greek Pagan Gods, and it took a sort of "spiritual wake-up call" for me to actively dedicate a significant part of my life to their worship, and I feel I'm a better and better-adjusted person because of this.

    If being a Christian does that for some people, then that's good, and I wish them all the best.

    But at the same time, nothing with the Christian Bible resonates with me, spiritually. I have issues with a few verses that can be interpreted to advocate child-abuse, sexual inequality and so forth, but it's like the Q'ran -- it has many passages that advocate both peace and war, love and hate. It's all open for interpretation. Many people who see no spiritual value in either book will take issue with those passages and claim that it invalidates the book as a whole.

    One religion's mythos ("sacred texts" in ancient Greek), is no better nor worse than any other. It's all about which texts resonate with a person on spiritual levels.

    Now, I have issue with certain parts of Christian history, but I also understand that these acts were performed under the command of a scat few's interpretation of Christianity's sacred texts -- Christianity does not necessarily advocate those acts any more than Islam in and of itself advocates genocide of non-believers. Those passages are parables that humans have used to their own purposes for centuries. I have a problem with *some* behaviours of modern Christians, and *some* Christian history. That's not the same as having a problem with Christianity.

  • 1 decade ago

    I followed Christianity (Episcopalian) strictly for many years. Somewhere in my mid-20's I started to realize that Christian theology is a bit obsessed with punishment and rigid rules.

    I also can't understand why any God would send a non-believer (such as Ghandi) to hell simply because he did not believe that Jesus was the Son of God.

    Your question was worded very intelligently! I really try to keep an open mind with all religions and actually work for a church. Hope this helps!

    Source(s): Atheist Wiccan -- an environmentalist who practices magic but worships no gods or goddesses
  • River
    Lv 5
    1 decade ago

    The idea that an innocent man's blood relieves anyone of any wrong-doing they have done in their life by simply saying they believe that it does. Or that belief alone somehow relieves them of any consequences of their actions. The idea of a human sacrifice all together is a turn off, but the idea presented above is what really sticks out. To worship such a thing brings up images of ancient people who thought killing an animal or even a person brought them some kind of power from their God(s) over lost crops, war, etc...

    The problems I see of some of the followers are those who so easily condemn others solely based on their lack of belief in such a thing. As one questioner earlier had posted a question asking why Atheists and Non-Believers hated Jesus truly shows the ignorance of some of the followers of Christianity. Some seem to lack social skills all together as if the phrase "be in the world, not of it" means to totally detach oneself from all people who are not like them... when in fact the very person they claim to follow spent most of his time amongst people who did not believe like him... even broke Laws he stated were essential for a Good Life ( and you certainly didn't see him hounding people with condemnations). Such hypocritical ideas have lead those of us who do not believe to view the whole religion as merely those who wish to be Special above all others... and the followers back this up by stating "we're not perfect, just forgiven"... as if they know for sure that no one else is forgiven for anything.... or that they have not repented (which merely means to turn away from wrong-doing - has nothing to do with suddenly believing anything of a religion). Personally, when I see people state things within their own religion, things which I have studied myself and know the definitions they present for them are not true, they lose a lot of credibility as it just seems they are only repeating what they've been told that religion stands for... rather than actually studying, not just the words they read, but what languages they come from (I'm not saying people should learn Greek and Hebrew... I mean they should understand the basics of the lang used and at least understand the original meaning of the words they are applying to their beliefs), also the cultures they have been derived from. 500 years from now, people will be reading what was written today and taking everything totally out of context based on their "modern" meanings of the words we use today - which in turn causes the whole text they are reading to lose it's meaning all together and to be replaced with something else.

    Pagan

  • 1 decade ago

    I think the main problem with christianity (and other religions of the sort for that matter) is that they believe they can comprehend god. I am agnostic...so i believe it's possible there could be a god, or there may not be a god or higher power. If there IS a higher power, i dont think it's at all possible for us to know, let alone comprehend it's nature, form, wishes, reasoning, etc. I find the christian belief that god is so simple that us humans could write a whole book about him and know exactly what he wants of us, quite honestly, naive in the fullest sense.

    Source(s): I was raised mormon, converted to christianity, and am now agnostic.
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