This is the fifth part of my multi-part story of how, as a non-believer, I spent years in my teens and twenties looking at all the evidence for and against Christianity as fairly as I could, eventually concluding it wasn’t true. The introduction is here, and I’ll link all the parts back there as I write them.

At this point in the story, I was still in sixth form (the last two years of school).

The Messiah

One thing that did strike me as notable about Christianity was that it hadn’t, in general, convinced the Jews. Specifically, the Jewish people had rejected the claim that Jesus was the Messiah. Which struck me as an important point; I knew that Judaism regarded the Messiah as vitally important and believing Jews were really looking forward to him turning up, so it sounded as though they’d have been thrilled had they actually thought he’d done so. Which meant that they must have had good reason to believe that Jesus wasn’t the one they were waiting for. I concluded it would be worth finding out what that reason was.

Of course, the traditional Christian explanation of this was that the Jews had failed to recognise their Messiah when they saw him as he didn’t fit their incorrect expectations of what the Messiah would be. Yup; Christianity’s explanation for this awkward point was that the Jews were wrong about a key part of their own religion. This was still more than two decades before the coining of words like ‘mansplaining’ and ‘whitesplaining’, so I did not think of this as ‘Gentilesplaining’ when mentally shaking my head at it; but I got the concept even if I didn’t have a term for it. So, no, I wanted to hear what Judaism had to say about the Messiah and why they thought Jesus didn’t fit the bill.

Since this was also several years before the Internet, this was not particularly easy. I spent a lot more time looking through the religious sections of all available libraries, and eventually found a book with the information I needed. I’m afraid I can’t at this stage remember either what the book was or precisely what information on the subject I got from that book as opposed to what I’ve learned from numerous sources since, so some of this I might not have picked up until later; therefore, on this key point I’m going to have to be a bit vague. However, the gist is that ‘messiah’ (which is an Anglicised version of ‘mashiach’, the Hebrew word for ‘anointed’) is on one level a term that Judaism used for any king or priest, but that the Messiah was a title used for a particular king and descendant of King David, who was supposed to rule over Israel in a time when Israel’s enemies had been miraculously and permanently defeated and Israel herself was living in a time of peace and plenty.

That seemed pretty conclusive. Since Jesus clearly didn’t fit the definition of the Messiah, it seemed entirely logical that the Jews had concluded that he was not, in fact, the Messiah. Sadly, I don’t think I thought of the Monty Python quote at that point, so that was a good cue missed; but the message was still clear enough.

So where did this leave me?

Thinking about it now, I’m really not sure why this wasn’t the end of the argument for me. Christianity claimed that Jesus was the Messiah. He clearly wasn’t the Messiah. That’s a pretty basic point on which to be wrong. I genuinely can’t remember how I excused this to myself; I guess I was so determined to give Christianity a fair hearing that I gave them a free pass on this blatant inaccuracy.

Next up: More of the same sort of thing, but this time during my medical school years.

This is the fourth part of my multi-part story of how, as a non-believer, I spent years in my teens and twenties looking at all the evidence for and against Christianity as fairly as I could and eventually concluding it wasn’t true. The introduction is here, and will have links to all published parts.

At this point in the story, I was still in sixth form, which refers collectively to the last two years of school, aged 16 – 18. If you know the US system, that’s the equivalent of the junior and senior years of high school (age-wise, I mean; the schooling system is completely different and quite a bit more specialised at this point).

The Gospels and Jesus

As per the last post, I was well aware of the flaws in gospel accuracy. However, they were still the best information we had available on the origins of Christianity, so reading them seemed to be another obvious step. However, despite repeated attempts – starting sometimes with gMatthew because it was the first in the layout and sometimes with gMark because it had been the first written – I got bogged down each time and gave up. I read a lot of separate sections of the gospels, and since then I have read all of gMark, but at the time I never made it through any of them. The main reason for this was, simply enough, that Jesus sounded horrible.

Everything I’d previously read or heard had led me to believe that, when I read Jesus’s story, I’d find an amazingly sympathetic friend/overwhelmingly wise teacher like no other. Instead, he seemed predominantly to spend his time ranting about how awful everyone else was, including the people who supposedly had been his friends. Following Jesus seemed to be about having it rammed into you how badly you were screwing up, with a coating of patronising magnanimity to the effect that he was prepared to love and put up with you anyway. I didn’t, at the time, have the know-how to either fully articulate this or recognise it as a classic dysfunctional/abusive relationship pattern, and hence fretted that my instinctive reactions against it might be just the sinfulness that apologists assured me was an innate part of all of us. But that conflict between what I was supposed to be finding in the stories and what I actually was seeing there was uncomfortable enough that I couldn’t go on reading them.

While I didn’t have the words or understanding to explain properly why that part of the gospels bothered me so much, there were also some specific incidents described that I knew were wrong. There was the time Jesus got in a snit just because a tree wasn’t producing fruit when he wanted it to (the intended symbolism escaped me at the time, so this one just came across as Jesus throwing a bratty tantrum). There was the time he was fine with having costly ointment poured over him after having told other people they were supposed to sell everything and give all their money to the poor (I was firmly on Judas’s side on this one, and, yes, I did notice how the gospel author wanted to discredit him by imagining a corrupt motivation for him when he was clearly the one in the right). And, above all, there was the time when a mother came to him desperate for help for her dying child and he called her and her child dogs and wouldn’t help her until she begged him. Even allowing for the theory that it might just be my sinful soul putting me off listening to Jesus’s words of truth, I really didn’t think he was making too good a showing here.

But surely at least Jesus’s teachings were dazzlingly wise beyond anything the world had previously seen? Well… these didn’t seem to live up to the hype either.

For one thing, Jesus outright banned divorce (with a possible exception for female adultery, depending on whether you believed Matthew or Mark; however, both of those sources were very clear that no other exceptions were allowed). I was (and am) all for the importance of marriage and the desirability of being committed to keeping relationships going where possible, but I did recognise – even as a naive and starry-eyed teenager – that sometimes it wasn’t possible. If a relationship had broken down past fixing, how could it possibly be a good idea to keep the two people concerned trapped in it rather than give them each the chance of someday finding happiness with a different partner? And that, of course, was even before you got to the really difficult cases where the consequences of keeping a marriage going could be downright dangerous. Your partner could be beating you, sexually abusing your children, and gambling or drinking away the household finances, and according to the law Jesus laid down you’d still be stuck with them for a lifetime, even where that meant keeping children stuck there as well.  This law sounded like a terrible idea to me.

Jesus also, supposedly, taught that even thinking about doing something wrong was just as bad as doing it. To be fair, it wasn’t actually clear to me that Jesus had in fact meant that; I don’t just mean in the sense that none of us are really sure what Jesus said and what was added into the story later, but in the sense that the actual words he’s claimed to have spoken might not mean that. Jesus said, according to the translations we have of Matthew, that thinking about doing something wrong meant doing it ‘in your heart’; but he never said that that was as bad as actually doing it. In the spirit of fairness with which I was approaching all this, I thought it reasonable to give him the benefit of the doubt on this one. However, I certainly saw it interpreted that way by some of the Christian teachings I read; and, if that was really how it was meant to be interpreted, then that was a terrible law. How could we help the thoughts that crossed our mind? Why should someone be blamed just because a thought of something evil happened to pass across their mind? (1) Of course that wasn’t as bad as actually doing the thing!

(It did strike me as a strange contradiction that while Christianity claimed Jesus had tossed out all those nasty restrictive laws that the Jews had previously been stuck with – in fact, outright hyped this as one of its selling points – it actually managed to come up with laws far more burdensome than anything I was seeing in Judaism.)

Of course, there were better aphorisms among the things Jesus was quoted as saying. However, I was reading enough about Judaism to know that ideas such as ‘Love your enemy’ were developments of contemporary Jewish thought rather than forays into completely new, hitherto unknown realms of ethics. Our modern-day society gave Jesus all the credit for these, but they had in fact evolved from the context of a considerable amount of rabbinical thought and wisdom developed over the years.

Prophecies

These were the other thing of note about the gospels, and, of course, starting at the beginning of gMatthew means coming up against a lot of them straight away, because the author loves telling us that such-and-such happened in accordance with such-and-such a prophecy. The Bible I was reading (2) footnoted each of these with the OT verse or passage that was supposedly being referenced, so I started checking them. It immediately became apparent that Matthew was… well, very, very creative in what he was willing to count as a Messianic prophecy.

A virgin shall conceive? Nope; that line actually came from a completely different prophecy involving a threatened war centuries earlier. Also, from the general reading on the subject I was doing, I learned the original line didn’t even specify a virgin but used a more general word for a young woman.

Out of Egypt I called my son? Again, this line made perfect sense in context as a description of an OT story; there was nothing to suggest it was actually meant as a Messianic prophecy.

He shall be called a Nazarene? That line didn’t even occur in the OT; Matthew seemed to have invented it completely to fit his case.

Same thing at the other end of the stories, with the prophecy references in the Crucifixion scene. ‘They have pierced my hands and my feet’ was a) a mistranslation, and b) in the middle of what seemed to be a poetic piece of writing describing a number of different possible deaths at the hands of others; there was nothing miraculously prophetic about finding that one of those lines was very vaguely similar to something that had happened in somebody else’s death. ‘They shall look on Me whom they have pierced’ was supposedly a line God had said himself that referred, in context, to emotional wounding.

These supposed prophecies weren’t a miraculously specific foretelling of Jesus’s life; they were a bunch of lines taken out of context and sometimes mistranslated to boot.

I did find a few cases where the ‘prophecy’ that the gospel authors referred to did in fact seem, in context, to have been intended as an actual Messianic prophecy. However, the two main ones were the descent from David and the birth in Bethlehem, and, for both of those, the two gospel accounts we had completely contradicted each other (not to mention the problems with a mass slaughter of infants that was nowhere else mentioned or a census that supposedly expected people to go back to the birthplace of their distant ancestors to register). And, since Matthew and Luke wanted to believe Jesus was the Messiah and to get other people to believe the same thing, that gave them a pretty clear motive for inventing those stories.  Even I wasn’t too naive to add two and two on that one. There was also the prophecy about the king riding to his people on a donkey, but since Jesus apparently believed he was the Messiah and also would likely have known of that prophecy, it didn’t seem particularly remarkable to me that he could have arranged the colt ride in the genuine belief that this was what he was supposed to do next; nothing supernatural required on that point.

So, where did this leave me?

Unfortunately, in pretty much the same place as before. What I was reading in the gospels didn’t give me any reason at all to feel I should fall on my knees and worship the person acting this way. However, the reason I was doing this in the first place was because I recognised that ‘The teachings of this religion are horrible’ isn’t a logically good reason for reaching conclusions about the truth of it. Meanwhile, I still felt stuck with awkward questions like ‘Why were all his friends claiming to have seen him do miracles, if he hadn’t?’ and ‘Why did they think he’d risen from the dead if they hadn’t seen it themselves?’ I had even more reasons for not wanting Christianity to be true, but I didn’t feel any further forward in determining whether it was true.

Next up: was Jesus the Messiah? (Spoiler: no.)

Footnotes

(1) To be fair, I do think that most churches would in fact interpret this verse much more sensibly, and I think it perfectly reasonable to interpret it as being an admonition about dwelling on these sorts of thoughts. In other words, feeling angry with someone is normal, but nursing a grudge and building up your bitterness instead of looking for ways to resolve things and see their side is not OK. Likewise, you’re sometimes going to notice people other than your spouse are objectively attractive, but spending your time fantasising about them isn’t good for a monogamous marriage. So, if that teaching was the only objection I’d ever had to Christianity, I’d be a Christian today. However, it does sometimes get set up as a very unrealistic standard of perfection in which everyone gets labelled sinners just for having normal reactions, regardless of how they handle them and how they behave over them.

(2) We had a few different editions at home, but the one I was reading at this point was the Good News Bible, because the edition we had was the one with the nice bright yellow cover and colourful picture of Noah and the rainbow, which I always liked. It wasn’t until years later that I found out it wasn’t considered one of the better translations, but there you are; I was judging a book by its cover.

This is the third part of my multi-part story of how, as a non-believer, I spent years looking at the evidence for and against Christianity as fairly as I could, eventually concluding it wasn’t true. The introduction is here, and I’ll link all the parts back there as I write them.

By the way, the last piece seems to have been linked on an athletics news site despite having nothing whatsoever to do with athletics (rather ironically, since it was about me at sixteen and I was probably about as anti-athletic as it is literally possible to be), so I assume this was a case of the ‘Motivation’ title being encountered by an undiscriminating bot. So, just in case anyone’s come over to check that out and got caught up in the story; welcome! Hope you enjoy, even if it wasn’t what you expected.

Anyway, so far I’ve written about how I grew up without any religion and about how my horror of Christianity led me to decide to give it a fair hearing, so on to start talking about what I covered in my reading.

I wish I could give you some kind of organised X-point plan of what I covered and what sources I used, but my passion and commitment unfortunately weren’t matched by anything even vaguely resembling organisational skills. Basically, I spent the next several years gravitating to the ‘religion’ section in every library and bookshop I visited (which was a lot of libraries and bookshops, BTW) and seeing what I could find, as well as trying to read the gospels (more of that in the next post) and praying rather incoherently to the potentially-existing God to ask that I might possibly be shown some sort of conclusive sign, if that wouldn’t be too much trouble (while meanwhile trying to suppress my horror at the prospect of the answer potentially being ‘Yes, I exist and I really do want all non-Christians to burn in hell, so deal with it’). So I would not say I had A Starting Point in all this, as such. However, I think the obvious starting point for this account is the question of how reliable/accurate the New Testament is; after all, that’s the source of all our information about Christianity’s origins. So that’s what I’m going to write about here.

I’d have loved to have access to something like Bart Ehrman’s writings on the topic, but I was decades too early for them, and everything I could find seemed to be either a simplistic pronouncement or an overly specialist work that was too hard to follow. (Looking back, I’m really quite surprised by how many of the latter seem to have be available in our local library; I mean, this was Wimbledon Public Library, not an obscure university archive.) So I struggled with dry discussions of obscure technical points about manuscripts and translations and writing style, giving up on making sense of many of the finer details and being left with no clear idea of why experts reached what conclusions they’d managed to reach on the subject. However, two clear points did emerge:

1. Everyone apart from the more hardcore of Christians agreed that nobody really knew for sure who had written the gospels or what sources they used for their information. There were traditions about who the authors were, but there was widespread agreement that these weren’t based on very strong evidence.
2. Everyone, even fervent Christians, agreed that the gospels weren’t written until several years after the events they described. In fact, with the exception of one source (no, I don’t remember what it was) giving ten years post-events as a possible lower boundary for when Mark might have been written, there seemed to be a general consensus that they weren’t written till decades after events.

Even though I couldn’t at the time make sense of how these conclusions had been reached, there was enough of a general consensus on them that it seemed fair to accept them both. That meant that what we had were accounts written many years after events, by unknown people whose sources were also unknown. And I knew enough to recognise that that was the sort of situation that allowed for quite a bit of inaccuracy and exaggeration to creep in over time.

And this was more than just a theoretical concern; when I compared the way different stories or issues were treated in different gospels, I could see signs of the stories getting more detailed with time. The resurrection stories progressed from an anonymous man in the original gMark ending telling the women that Jesus had risen, through to increasingly detailed/physical appearances in later stories, with the pointed Doubting Thomas story thrown in by the time we got to John’s account decades later (I was pretty naive in those days, but not so much that I missed the obvious motive that an early church would have had for including the claim of blessedness upon people who believed unquestioningly). Jesus’s alleged claims to divinity all seemed to occur only in John, the latest gospel; not only that, but in the earlier gospels he was explicitly describing himself as the son of God or the son of man, both expressions that I learned would have been considered in that culture to describe a human rather than a god. And Jesus’s most impressive miracle – the raising of a man dead for four days – was somehow only mentioned in the fourth gospel, and I really didn’t think that was because none of the other authors thought something that dazzling wasn’t worth a mention.

So, being as fair and even-handed as I could, and fully accepting that this didn’t mean I could assume everything in the gospels was false… I did conclude that there was satisfactory evidence that the gospel stories had been embroidered along the way, and that, while we didn’t know to what extent this had happened, it had clearly gone beyond trivial detail into some theologically significant matters.

The pro-Christian books I read had various attempts at counter-arguments to this:

Yes, the apostles Matthew and John really were the authors of the gospels attributed to them.

…which would have been a lot more convincing if scholars other than hard-core Christians had agreed. Since no-one else – including, as I recall, at least some of the Christian authors I read – seemed to agree that the evidence for this claim stood up, it really didn’t seem to me that the evidence could be that convincing.

We had more evidence for Jesus’s life than for Caesar’s.

(I should point out that I’ve learned since then that these types of argument aren’t even factually correct. However, I didn’t have that information at the time, so this is my response when I read it as a teenager.)

This argument struck me as just plain weird. Maybe there are people out there who feel the story of the Caesars is of such vital emotional importance to them that they cannot deal with any apparent flaws in the evidence or counter-arguments, but, if so, I’m not one of them. I didn’t know how much evidence we had for Caesar’s life and I didn’t care. If we genuinely didn’t have enough evidence to support widely-held beliefs about Caesar, then I really wasn’t going to respond by clutching my pearls and gasping ‘No, no! We must keep believing in Caesar! This cannot be!’ So this wasn’t something I was going to use as a benchmark for Reasonable Amounts Of Evidence To Believe Something.

An expert had done research into the matter and found that it took two generations for myths to arise when stories were being passed on, so, even though the gospel stories were written years after events, they were still early enough for the information to be accurate.

(Also not true, but also something I only found out later to be flawed.)

I didn’t know what to make of this one. I had a great respect for experts and it seemed quite absurd for me to question the word of one… but that didn’t mean I could just blindly accept something that was clearly not correct just because someone told me an expert said it was. If I’d read that an expert claimed that objects fall upwards or that the sky was green, I wouldn’t consider that a good enough reason to believe those things. Likewise, I knew perfectly well that there was no mysterious two-generation requirement for inaccuracies and exaggerations to creep in when stories were passed on; although that effect got worse with time, it could happen from the very start. So, expert or not, this one was so clearly flat-out wrong that I couldn’t accept it. I was baffled by it as I couldn’t understand how an expert could be so wrong, but there we were.

The part about the resurrection definitely had to be true; there was no way everyone would have acted in the way they did after Jesus’s death if he hadn’t really been resurrected.

And this was the argument that always sounded too convincing to keep me from dismissing the whole thing even in the face of all the other flaws I found.

I was still determined to give the whole thing as fair a hearing as possible, which meant not dismissing all of it just because the story had been embroidered on the way. And apologetics books insisted that only the actual sight of an actual resurrected Jesus could have convinced the disciples to spread the word in the way they did and that the only possible explanation for the Romans not displaying Jesus’s dead body to prove his continued death to everyone was that it was missing as a result of having come back to life and walked away from the tomb. To which I couldn’t, at the time, think of any solid counter-arguments.

I wasn’t ever completely convinced by those arguments, reasoning that we surely couldn’t be that certain what people would or wouldn’t have done in response to one particular set of circumstances two thousand years ago. But, at the same time, I sure as hell couldn’t think of another explanation. I could easily see how the story could have grown, but not how it could have got started.

I couldn’t find any counter-arguments in anything I was reading, either. This was a gaping hole in what anti-apologetics information I could find. I didn’t know, at the time, how easily people could come to believe in miracles. And this was still years before Richard Carrier’s Why I Don’t Buy The Resurrection Story, or Kris Komarnitsky’s writings on cognitive dissonance reduction and how that might have influenced the disciples in the immediate aftermath of the crisis of Jesus’s execution, or even the nights when I’d try to explain to my small daughter that, no, just because I didn’t know the cause of the noise she’d heard that still didn’t mean it was a ghost or a monster, and ruefully reflect on how sometimes you really don’t even need a watertight alternative explanation to dismiss a massively improbable one.

So, at the time and for years afterwards, this argument stumped me.

So, where did this leave me?

Confident that at least some of what was in the gospels had been invented for dramatic effect, but still left without a way of refuting the basic dogma of ‘Jesus was raised from the dead’, or, more worryingly, ‘Jesus was sent to die for everyone’s sins and all non-believers will BUUURRRRN IN HELL’.

Next up: what I made of the content of the gospels.

This is the first part of my multi-part story of how, as a non-believer, I spent years looking at the evidence for and against Christianity as fairly as I could, eventually concluding it wasn’t true. The introduction, which explains in a bit more detail, is here, and I’ll link all the parts back there as I write them. In this part, I write about the background; how and why I was raised without religion.

I got a certain degree of Christian-slanted religious education just from growing up in the UK, because state schools here are legally required to provide religious education and ‘a daily act of collective worship’. (The latter meant, in practice, that our school assemblies would include a prayer addressed to ‘Dear Lord’ and a Christian hymn, and sometimes the day’s story-with-a-moral would be from the Bible. Eventually I ended up at a posh secondary school where we were expected to provide our own hymn books, and figured out that I could cut the cover off mine and use it to smuggle paperback novels into assembly, so that was the end of me paying much attention to anything we were taught there, but I’d already absorbed quite a bit of this Christianity-lite by then.) The religious education was supposedly multifaith, but we did get a very overtly Christian teacher for a couple of years when I was in middle school; fortunately, she aspired to the Jesus-as-Good-Shepherd-and-inspiration model rather than the fire-and-brimstone model, so it wasn’t a significant problem overall. I filed the more religious parts of her lessons away in the ‘might or might not be true’ mental category.

So, as far as background culture was concerned, I did absorb a watered-down version of generic C. of E. Christianity from school. Not enough that I ever came close to considering myself a Christian even culturally, but enough that I was aware of what Christianity was about and that it did shape some of my assumptions; when I thought about whether God existed, I rarely thought to wonder whether more than one god existed, and the god about whose existence I was wondering was typically a version of the traditional Abrahamic god rather than any of the others humanity has pictured over the millennia.

As for my home life, however, my parents neither practiced nor criticised religion. We kept Christmas and Easter as secular festivals, and we did have quite a few Bibles around the place simply because it was the wonderful sort of house that was full of books of every variety, and religious topics did sometimes come up for dinner-table discussion in the same way that all sorts of other topics did (I don’t have any specific memories of these, but my mother recently reminisced about them, remembering the time my father and sister were arguing agnosticism versus atheism). But there was nothing more formal. On the flip side, they were never anti-religious in the slightest; there were no criticisms of or rants about religion, and I never had any feeling that it was something of which they disapproved.

There are moments in life that you realise only with hindsight to have been the planting of a seed, and one of those was the time that I asked my father why we weren’t being brought up as any religion. His answer was simple enough; he explained that because he was Jewish and my mother was Christian, they thought it was fairer not to bring me or my sister up as either religion. This struck me as a perfectly reasonable answer, but it also started me wondering; what did it mean to be Jewish or Christian? Or, for that matter, any of the other religious groups to which I was vaguely aware people could belong?

It’s worth mentioning here that, in the case of both my parents, the respective terms meant ‘came from an undogmatic version of that particular religious background’. As you’ve probably gathered, they certainly weren’t practicing members of those religions, or even believers, by the time I was growing up. But just the idea that people could be categorised in this way was interesting to me. I started looking out for books about different religious lifestyles and ceremonies and what they mean for the people concerned.

For years, that part – the cultural side of religion – was what really interested me. Questions over the truth of it interested me as well, but in a more distant way. ‘Does God exist?’ or ‘Which (if any) religion is actually true?’ held, as far as I can remember, about the same level of interest for me as ‘What job will I do?’ or ‘What kind of life will I have as an adult?’; yes, they were important and interesting in an abstract sort of way and I’d certainly have liked definite answers had such been available at that point, but they weren’t anything I felt any sort of immediate pressure to have answered.

So, where did all this leave me?

With a kind of vague default belief in a filtered and toned-down version of the traditional Abrahamic god, heavily footnoted with ‘but we don’t really know if it’s true’ disclaimers, and coupled with a keen awareness that this belief didn’t default to being Christian.

This would, in the long run, affect my search for answers about Christianity in multiple ways:

• I started from about as impartial a background as anyone growing up in this society realistically gets. (I do realise that’s not the same as genuinely being fully impartial, but we all absorb something from society, so I don’t think ‘fully impartial’ is an option short of being raised under a rock somewhere.) I wasn’t burdened with any expectations of following or shunning religion, and that made things a lot easier for me.
• Because the god I learned about at school was presented very much in a ‘suitable for the children’ way – all the love and wisdom, none of the fire and brimstone – I grew up with the general impression that God’s existence would be a good thing overall. One of the things I sometimes see Christians say about atheism is that it’s just a sort of wishful thinking from people who don’t want to believe in God (I’m not sure how that’s meant to fit with the idea that atheists are also all just looking to fill a ‘God-shaped hole’, but whatever). For the record, that wasn’t the case for me; I’d have preferred it if I’d been able to reach an honest conclusion that someone wise, loving and powerful was in ultimate charge of the universe. I just didn’t want to use this as a reason to kid myself into believing it was true when it wasn’t.
• I also grew up understanding that it wasn’t a binary choice between Christianity and atheism. Not that I ended up in any of the other options in the end, so I suppose it’s a moot point, but I’m still glad to have always recognised that the decision’s a lot more complicated than an either-or.
• On which note, I was always fascinated by Judaism. I’ll write more about this in my next post, but this interest did mean I learned quite a lot about it, and some of that would be really useful background in understanding Christianity.
• And finally, a key point: I grew up with personal awareness of the fact that good and wonderful non-Christians exist. When I heard the Christian belief that people who weren’t ‘saved’ by Christianity would end up in eternal hellfire, it had a very personal meaning for me, since any such claims included my father. (And, it seemed reasonable to extrapolate, many other similarly good people who also didn’t deserve eternal torture.)

And that’s about it for the general background. In the next post, I’ll write about how I got into looking into Christianity in particular.

In Christian apologetics, there’s a very popular type of story that could be described as ‘The Scoffer Is Convinced’. (It isn’t, as far as I know; I just invented that name. But it could be.) The three most famous examples are Lee ‘The Case For…’ Strobel, Josh ‘Evidence That Demands A Verdict’ McDowell, and, of course, our old friend J. Warner ‘Cold Case…’ Wallace. The basic format is thus:

The person in question was once not just a nonbeliever but an utter stereotype of skeptics (although the ‘stereotype’ part isn’t pointed out). They felt nothing but derision for Christianity, laughing at the utter foolishness of it all. Then they actually started looking properly at the evidence for Christianity… and were astonished to find how solid that evidence actually is. Convinced by the overwhelming evidence, they eventually convert to Christianity, henceforth to lead a happily transformed life and possibly write a multibook series about it all.

I’ve never either derided or converted to Christianity, but my story does have one significant thing in common with the stories above: I’m also a nonbeliever who made the decision to look properly into the evidence for and against Christianity and weigh it up as fairly as possible. I spent years of my teens and twenties doing this. And – as you can probably deduce from the fact that I’m here on an atheist blogging platform – I reached the opposite conclusion from Strobel, McDowell, Wallace and their ilk. As a result of all my reading and thinking, I reached the firm conclusion that Christianity is not true.

This seems, by the way, to be an unusual way of doing things; not the ‘deciding Christianity isn’t true’ bit, which is reasonably common, but putting that amount of time and effort into the decision only to stay on roughly the same end of the theological spectrum. I’ve read accounts from people who made the Convinced Scoffer’s journey in the other direction, starting out as Christian and losing their faith as a result of putting thought and research into it. I’ve read about people who convert from Christianity to a different religion. And, of course, I’ve read about people who start out as nonbelievers and stay that way without feeling the need to put much in the way of research into checking out other options. I just can’t remember any other accounts I’ve heard of nonbelievers who put this much time and effort into deciding that, yes, they’re still nonbelievers. There must be others out there, I suppose; I guess we’re just few and far between.

Anyway, I’ve told part of this story already; how I looked at the arguments for believing in (the Abrahamic) God and couldn’t find any convincing ones, leading to me eventually becoming agnostic and then atheist. However, during this time I was also looking specifically at the arguments for or against believing in the Christian faith. (And, no, this was not the same question. On the one hand it would have been logically possible for a god to exist yet for Christianity to be wrong, as per the many other forms of religious belief in the world; on the other hand, the fact that I couldn’t find convincing evidence for a deity’s existence anywhere else didn’t mean that I wouldn’t find it in Christianity, which did after all specifically claim to have such evidence.) That’s a story I haven’t yet written; effectively, the anti-Strobel-et-al story, in which a skeptic genuinely and thoughtfully looks at the evidence and ultimately reaches the opposite conclusion.

So this, for what little it’s worth, is my story; what one teenage skeptic made of Christianity on giving it an honest examination, and why I reached the conclusions I did about it. Not a conversion story or a deconversion story, but a nonconversion story.

While I do not anticipate any multibook deals out of this one, it has certainly run into a multipost story, and a long one. I didn’t want to take my usual route of spending months or years dribbling the posts out one at a time, so I’ve actually drafted them all already, and plan to post them on probably a daily schedule, linking each one back here as I post. (This might well be the only time I ever use the phrase ‘daily schedule’ regarding this blog, so allow me to take a moment to relish it.) Tomorrow’s post will be about the background; how I grew up nonreligious but not anti-religious.

Part 1: Background

Part 2: Motivation

Part 3: About scriptural (un)reliability

Part 4: Reading the gospels

Part 5: He’s not the Messiah…

Part 6: University

Part 7: Word of God?

Part 8: In accordance with the prophecies…

Follow-up: Resurrection addendum