Here is a short synopsis of my reasoning.
*The Jewish faith is built upon mounds and mounds of BS and purported violence.
- There was never anything even close to the Noah Deluge fable
- The Tower of Babel fable...is well babel BS
- Moshe and his Exodus fable is at least 99.9% BS
- The whole conquering of Canaan is largely made up
- There was never any day the Earth stood still for Joshua
- The sun wasn’t set back 10 degrees for Hezekiah
- Lots of stupid and/or barbaric Laws
* The NT doesn’t get it much better
- I find it fascinating that the later the Gospel was written, the more fantastic the story unfolds. And, but for Mark, all were most probably written after the sacking of Jerusalem.
- The purported Jesus believes in his Jewish roots, thereby adopting all the above BS
- The virgin birth narrative is built upon a poor reading of the Tanakh
- The whole birthing narrative between Luke and Matthew is a jumbled and conflicting mess
- The Gospel writers can’t even falsify a proper House of David lineage
- The Gospel writers turned the Pilot into a pansy Roman officer, yet Rome recalled him for brutality
- The Trinity construct is a convoluted/nonsensical mess
- Later Christians didn't like the ending of Mark so they conspired to commit forgery and added a more pleasing ending
- Scholars know of at least one instance where a Gospel verse was adjusted, to make the trinity more definitive
- Even Later Christians didn’t like that Josephus left the Jesus-god out of his writings, so they forged in a cute paragraph
- There is ZERO written about Jesus from anyone that was his contemporary* and had a chance to meet him, outside of the True Believers hell bent of creating a new religion.
- Considering all the Jesus-miracles claimed, one would think he would have gotten a serious and large following within Israel. Yet that is where the new religion seemed to fair the poorest, instead growing in distant Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece and Rome.
*contemporary – look up in dictionary if one is unsure of its real meaning
Then there are many weird verses like this:
Matthew 5:17-19 "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven,". Paul argues directly against this several times in order to make sure Gentiles can be brought into the fold while ignoring the law.
It is the totality of these things, and many other more minor details, that I find not logical nor rational. From looking at the whole picture, I find little to be compelling, and much repulsive, within broadly defined Christian theology. I find the whole “I want to live forever” fantasy to be an odd reason to suspend otherwise rational conclusions, just in the hopes that religion X will reincarnate me after I die. Add in the propensity for people to delude themselves into believing all sorts of shit, religious (LDS) or otherwise (UFOs), and it is not surprising that humanity has put tens of thousands of gods upon pedestals.
Seems like it prefers to play hide-and-seek more than anything else.
What do you have against "hide-and-seek"?
Some truth is elusive. Or "Truth" -- with a capital "T" -- maybe the truth that presents to us the possibility of eternal life is partly elusive.
But there's still the plain or simple part. Jesus showed us his power, in the healing miracles. With such power (including resurrection) he could put us into Heaven, to say it simply. That's not really hide-and-seek, because what he did was in plain sight and was straightforward.
Except of course we don’t have any plain or simple Jesus part, as it came later from anonymous writers, written decades after purported events, and humanity has only been able to find nearly whole copies from 2-3 centuries later, depending on the book. Your idea of not “hide-n-seek” is closer to Bill’s “I didn’t have sex with that woman”, as evidently he thought blow jobs didn’t count. A god not playing hide-n-seek, might have nudged Pontius Pilate, to write back to Rome commenting on having to execute a crazy Jew who claimed to be their King; and then god could have protected it within the Roman archives. A god not playing hide-n-seek, could have inspired one of the first dozen disciples to sit down and write a Gospel in the 30’s, within a few years of God’s death/resurrection. God could have nudged them to send copies outward, to initiate a historical record.
Hide-n-seek is fine as an intentional game among people. Hide-n-seek pisses me off when someone/company plays it to avoid dealing with a product problem. Hide-n-seek would really suck, if I got this while trying to buy a house. And if a purported god thinks Hide-n-seek is reasonable, when it is putting death on the line, well….fuck it/him/her.
