The Christian world versus the real world
The Bible speaks of a world that you can only experience by reading its books. Look for it not in your neighborhood, your city, your state, your country, or anywhere on planet Earth- it is a world gone with the wind, or much more likely, a world that never really existed.
The following quote is taken from John W. Loftus, at his website “Why I Am Not a Christian”:
The Bible is filled with superstitious beliefs that modern people rightly reject. It describes a world where a snake and a donkey communicated with human beings in a human language, where people could reach upward of 900 years old, where a woman instantaneously transformed into a pillar of salt, where a pillar of fire could lead people by night, and where the sun stopped moving across the sky or could even back up.
In this imaginary world an ax head could float on water, a star could point down to a specific home, people could instantly speak in unlearned foreign languages, and one’s shadow or handkerchief could heal people. It is a world where a flood can cover the whole earth, and a man can walk on water, calm a stormy sea, change water into wine, or be swallowed by a “great fish” and live to tell about it.
This world is populated by demons that can wreak havoc on Earth and make people very sick. It is a world of idol worship, where human and animal sacrifices please God. Visions, inspired dreams, prophetic utterances, miracle workers, magicians, diviners, and sorcerers also populate this world. It is a world where God lived in the sky (Heaven), and the dead “lived” on in the dark recesses of the Earth (Sheol).
This is a strange world when compared to our world, but Christians believe that this world was real in the past. My contention is not that ancient people were stupid, but that they were very superstitious. As Christopher Hitchens puts it: “One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge.”
The Christian world is also one that was created in 6 days with Earth at its center, a world where Neanderthals, Homo erectus, and Homo habilis have no place in history, where dead people rose out of their graves, walked about the city and conversed with the living, a place where demons could enter pigs and cause them to run off a cliff and drown themselves, where two bears can maul and kill 42 children, a place where a woman can conceive and deliver while remaining a virgin, where the act of sending dead people to a place of eternal torture can be seen as a just punishment for living an ordinary human life, a place where angels interact with the local citizenry and make important proclamations, where slavery is held up as an honorable ‘enterprise,’ where women are a form of property, and where rebellious children, adulterers, and homosexuals are considered so evil that they deserve to be stoned to death.
And finally it is a world where God feels that he must kill his own son because he can find no other way to forgive people of their sins.
Yes, this seems like a very strange world to anyone alive today. It should take only a few moments of reflection to understand, to grasp, to figure this whole thing out, that the god of Christianity is to adults as Santa Claus is to children- an imaginary friend.
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