I'm not "guessing" that Christianity is an abusive con.

King James Bible

To the chief Musician, A Psalm of David. 

The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, 

they have done abominable works, 

there is none that doeth good.

That last line, there, means:

there is none (of those fools) that doeth good.

It's not talking about all humans. 
---


Brenton Septuagint Translation 

For the end, Psalm of David. 

The fool has said in his heart, There is no God. 

They have corrupted themselves, and become abominable in their devices; there is none that does goodness, there is not even so much as one.

--

 Contemporary English Version 

Only a fool would say, "There is no God!" People like that are worthless; 

they are heartless and cruel and never do right.


Psalm 10:4

 The wicked, through the pride of his countenance, will not seek after God: God is not in all his thoughts.



They were thinking back to an older concept;
where it was the same 

for people before the flood.

The echoed sentiments are this:
that the kinds of people who are not God-focused in their life are 

all-evil 

all-the-time.

The idea was (for them) to call upon each other to keep staying obsessively god-focused;

else the perverse nature of the human heart would drag them down quickly
into being 100% evil.


Genesis 6:5,11,12 

And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. 


This why they chose to use the concept of "death" to express the difference between righteous god-followers vs everyone who isn't truly a god-follower.


"Death" is an absolute.

They used that term metaphorically 

as a black and white polemic;
a way to completely demonize everyone in the world who isn't wasn't a properly, righteously violent, religious extremist. 


https://biblehub.com/ephesians/2-1.htm


Ephesians 2:1 - Alive with Christ



Being "spiritually" alive was equated with having good-enough moral character to please God,

It didn't mean any human was 'all the way good'l
 or, it didn't usually mean that.

Bibles are not "univocal".

Some bible writers sometimes saw some special humans as being sinless, and fully righteous, and fully good. at times.
Whereas other texts say that's not possible.
It depended on who was writing;
and what mood they were in. 

But we can just go with the "none of us are ever all-the-way-good" idea.


Most of what's said in bible is "polemic" in nature. They were very black-and-white thinkers.


Thus, they didn't choose to explain the difference by saying something like "God's loyal fans have greater spiritual health than people who don't really know our God",

 or "more spiritual energy",

or "greater spiritual clarity",

or "more spiritual discernment".

no.

They thought in polarized extremes.

So a different kind of Theist was not half-way between atheists and proper-Jew-God-ists, in their spiritual energies, discernments, or moral character.

Neither would they say such a thing about rival-sect Jews.

Neither would they make such a charitable distinction for casual-agnostics compared to hardened atheists. 

Someone was either "alive" or "dead", as moral entities.

So maybe those writers were not imperfectly alive. But they were alive. 
Everyone else was dead inside;
like zombies, in our moral character.

==

I understand

You accept (as true)
(the claim) that Jesus died for you. 

You believe it happened;

as a leap of faith.

The available data and arguments aren't strong enough to make the resurrection claims more likely than not.

Nor is the logic of the atonement consistent with human logic.

But for the sake of hope, 
you have decided to embrace the proposition 'as true'.

You also accept it as a person receiving a gift; rather than pushing it away and saying "no thanks".

 I understand those two different meanings of "accepting" something.

--- 

As for me, 

I think "there was a Jesus". 

It was a common name at that time. 

It's just a variation of "Joshua". 

So there were technically lots of Jesuses.

 But I mean there was probably an eccentric Jew in an unpopular Jewish sect, who (for a short while) studied under a guy named John (the baptizer; or "the baptist"). ... 

He was probably an apocalyptic preacher; 

warning everyone that the end of all non-Jewish human life was coming in their generation's lifetime.

And he probably got himself killed,
either purposefully or accidentally
as 

someone claiming to be the prophesied military King of the Jews,

The Jewish messiah was supposed to overthrow their oppressor's kingdom, and then replace it with a Jewish kingdom on Earth.
 
Per the Hebrew texts, the promised messiah would come only for the true Jews, fight for a literal physical Jewish king-dom, and not-die.

The idea of a messiah dying for the sins of humanity ... is a notion that didn't develop until sometime after he died.

When he died, the larger body of Essene Jews wouldn't have thought much about it. 

He was not a commonly known figure.

Only his own inner circle put much stock in the idea that he was special;

 or even
that he was just-maybe the messiah. 

He didn't have an army. 

He didn't have any real military experience. 

He didn't have the money needed to buy weapons or train an army. 

He was already in his 30s. 

And his friends (per the stories) were still foggy about how to think of him.
 
To them, that Jesus was a great teacher.

To them, that Jesus was charismatic, smart, like-able, and a leader.


When he died, they were shocked and confused.

 It proved 

he was NOT  the messiah. 

Their prophesied messiah's purpose was to overthrow a gentile kingdom and establish a Divine Jewish kingdom in its place. 

 

But then again, 

 it's not as-if he was making great headway towards becoming a military leader anyways.

 
Paulogia, a popular guy on Youtube, has interviewed several qualified scholars about it. 

They've put forth the idea that Peter had a "post bereavement hallucination". 

It's a very common psychological phenomenon.


That might have been how-and-when the rumors of that-Jesus coming back from death began.

 
It's just a theory; but it's very plausible. And it fits all the data.

Eventually, someone goes back to re-interpret (badly misunderstanding) the Hebrew texts; to re-imagine the "messiah" in a new way.

They turned the defeat and failure of one local jewish sect ... into a spiritual victory.
 
As the legends of Super-Jesus evolve, 

those legends don't circulate much beyond the local region until decades passed.

To make it seemingly-plausible, various men in the rumor-chain take it upon themselves to re-assign meaning to old religious texts.
 
The "suffering servant", for example, goes from being about the people of Israel ... to being about the messiah.
 
Today, scholars widely disagree about what kind of person "Paul" was, where he got his ideas from, and what his writings even really meant.


His writing do seem to be at least mostly metaphor.
But that leaves a huge range of possibilities open for hidden meanings and possible interpretations.
 
In any case, he either never heard any rumor-stories about Jesus' earthly miracles and specific adventures ...

 or Paul doesn't think those are credible, 

or Paul doesn't think those are important. 

So he doesn't mention that stuff; not even the empty tomb.
 
Paul claims he never heard anything about the earthly ministry and adventures of Jesus;

 not from any human whatsoever. 

He claims he got everything he knew (which wasn't much) from a vision. 

He admitted he wasn't sure if he was really seeing the risen Jesus or if it was just a vision in his head.

His own description of this transformative experience
matches the clinical description of something called "Temporal Lobe Seizures".

This has led some qualified scientists to suspect (with some confidence) that was the real cause of his religious experience and beliefs. 

However, I think Paul was probably just lying.

It's impossible to be certain.

In any case, 
by then, 

decades had past since Jesus died.
 
Paul never met Jesus.
 
Paul heard some stories. 

And then Paul lied about how he really heard about Jesus. 

As the decades passed, the legends evolved.

  Someone finally wrote down whatever version of the legends they heard. 

But they never heard about most of Jesus's miracles.

 So they didn't write about those.

This later becomes known as the "Mark" gospel.

Decades later, the next version is written down. 

By now, the legends have grown to include even more miracles.

 The Gospel of Mark dates from c. AD 66–70 (at the earliest). 

Recently, scholarship has been leaning towards re-dating all the gospel stories to slightly later dates.

But for now, late-1st century dates are assumed. 

Matthew and Luke around AD 85–90, and John AD 90–110.
 
None of the gospel stories were written by eye witnesses.
 
Fundamentalist churches and their fake "scholars" may say they were written be the original eye-witness apostles.

But real scholars share consensus that those texts were absolutely not written by those people. 

And their actual reasons for those conclusions are  expertly factual and logical. 
  
Moving forward, 
Luke's author tries to make the entire story more Rome-friendly and gentile-friendly. They are trying to help make the stories more marketable and relevant to the larger world.

 
Decades later, the unknown author of John tries to outshine earlier versions, with even greater miracles and a higher "Christology". 

Here, we see how the legends are evolving to make Jesus more and more otherworld-ly.
a greater and greater Being.
more divine.
more closer to being like God.
setting that stage for Jesus to eventually become "God".

 
However, none of those rumor-chain repeaters and developers were able to hide or repair certain glaring inconsistencies in the lore they were helping to create.
 
https://www.amazon.com/Paul-Jesus-Apostle-Transformed-Christianity/dp/1439123322


Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity

 
Death & Afterlife: Christianity's Unsolvable Dilemma




 
The Christian texts/stories borrowed from Greek and Roman religions.

 They also borrowed from Greek literature, such as borrowing from Homer's Iliad. 

They also borrowed from the Hebrew religion. 

But the Hebrew religion borrowed their ideas from other and older religious cultures too.
 

Today, the oldest known still-practiced religion is Hinduism.
It far predates the Hebrew religion(s).
 
Polytheism far predates monotheism.
 
Theisms as a whole immerged gradually from simpler concepts, over many thousands of years.
 
Even for the Hebrews, monotheism took a long time to develop. 

The Hebrews were the Canaanites. 

They were a faction that split off from the rest of the Canaanites. 

When they were still part of the larger body of the Canaanite society, they were all 100% polytheists.
 
When the Hebrew wrote the Torah, they were still polytheists.
 
"El" went from being the name of their Divine Council (the group name for all the gods),

 to being later filtered down as a name for one of their gods. 

Later, Yahweh was created with parts of older and retired gods, including a storm god and others.
 
One of the gods he was made from was "el". 

Thus it was adopted as one of this newer god's names.

 
Gradually, they went from having all the Canaanite gods, to only some. 

From there, they went from having a highest god, 

to "we only worship that one", 

to "there is only one that exists".
 

The earliest known example of monotheism was not from the Hebrews.

 The earliest known monotheism was conceived of by an Egyptian king, Akhenaten.
 
The real purpose of creating monotheism was always (in every case) to consolidate power.

 
When "a people" have many different gods, they remain easily divided over what their view and values are. They then remain easily divided about "what to do" when a king (or other leader) decides they want to conquer other nations.

 
To pursue a great harmony in a society, and to help ensure that that there is no schism when it comes to how much to trust that a ruler "really does" speak by "The divine right of kings", so that a society will quickly rally behind whatever a king says ...

 
the idea of monotheism was a stroke of fairly-obvious genius.

so now, there is only "one god". so the people no longer need to worry about what some other gods may think

so if "a god" tells a King "it's time to go on a military killing spree, to take land and women away from hated-enemies, ... 

it's now "the only God". so there's no cause for stalling to consider what "other gods" reveal to other faction's high priests.

 


https://www.amazon.com/Good-Kings-Absolute-Ancient-Modern/dp/B09K4L9ZRT/ref=sr_1_1?crid=23ZHXVR8U1UEA&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.jT83st1vIBZXgag6YIudvuItE-e88Qy_e5exUnheTKQLbQFHvEyu-jgEcwZq2HggWFsZElikQAz_vRwJyGG6HxqT_59dII8dIpzd4CcDIHU.WVRGFNVfb_k5shqP-e0fMs5Re8FeVgY4iNQKQiFvsGE&dib_tag=se&keywords=Kara+cooney+good+kings&qid=1708442193&s=books&sprefix=kara+cooney+good+kings%2Cstripbooks%2C82&sr=1-1


The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World

 

Now, I get the appeal of fundamentalist Christianity. I really do.
 

it's somewhat common 
 to feel yucky and inadequate.
 

it's somewhat common 

 to feel like we're not good enough.
 

it's somewhat common 

 to feel like we're so dirty in the essence of our very being ... that we'd love some way to be "washed clean".

 
And if we go back thousands of years, we find various cult concept and rituals designed to cater to that feeling, to ritualistically "provide" some sense of being clean.
 

so we find concepts like this: (which is a big part of what Christianity "atonement" is based on):
 


https://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/classical-literature-mythology-and-folklore/folklore-and-mythology/scapegoat


Scapegoat | Encyclopedia.com

 

Problems inherent to the proposition: 

1. Adam and Eve didn't "literally" exist. 

We know this for fact. 

Humanity has existed for hundreds of thousands of years; since long before anything like Hebrew religious-ideas were created.

The Hebrews copied their lore from other older religions. 

 

2. Even if we pretend Adam and Eve existed, 

I reject the concept and claim that I'm morally responsible for or "carrying inherited debt" for anything they could have done.
 
3. I wasn't alive when Jesus died either. Nor would I have helped kill him. So I'm not responsible for that either.


4. if a Creator made me imperfect (for any reason at all), then THEY owe ME an apology. 

I would not own THEM some moral debt for: how they made me.

   
5. nobody should be measured against the impossible and nebulous standard of "perfection".

 This is what the Sunscreen song was talking about.

 it's the same thing. 

"Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel UGLY". 

Early and later Christian writers were developing the modern capitalist-value marketing model; without even realizing it. 

target the vulnerable. 

print and distribute efforts to prey upon those vulnerabilities. 

instill shame for how much we all "miss the mark" of an impossible standard. 

exaggerate people's lens; when it comes to their own failings. 

then offer to sell them an expensive subscription service, to help them feel less dirty about it. 

advertise that expensive service as "free"'. 

lock them into an auto-renewing cycle of dependence on that service; with "lifetime" contracts.

Even call it a "contract" (aka "covenant"), to further seat their mind into a sense of obligation. 

selling their soul to a mysterious savior.


integrate them into a niche society of followers, to mobilize a peer-to-peer reinforcement system.

why?

 because it's easier to keep sheeple properly penned ... if they can become each other's gatekeeper.

 
create a system where anyone who seriously questions the narrative will be seen as "potentially dangerous" and showing early signs of "spiritual weakness" (leading to spiritual "sickness").

quickly re-assimilated them back into the narrative by peers and authority figures.

use a Heaven-bribe and a Hell-coercion to help ensure compliance. 

teach them to gaslight each other (and themselves)
to say:
 they aren't being coerced
and 
 they aren't coercing others.  

 
Foster a social system where members could LOSE at least some important MEASURE of trust, value, and respect ... if they leave the group. 

 
Continue fostering a social environment where the litmus test for "spiritual health" and for being truly "one of us" is: 

agreement with the dogmas and dispositions of their exclusive collective.
  
tell them they have a "direct and personal relationship" with a higher BEING. 

encourage them to not-notice how dependent they are on mere fallible men ... to tell them "who" God is, and "what" God wants from them.


make them all think they come into their understandings, feeling, and commitments freely ...

 even though those all come from deep cultural and social emersion into an elaborate system of manipulation;

- a system which took thousands of years (of men's efforts) to develop and refine; 

based on trial and error, to find out what works.

 --

But it doesn't work on me anymore. 

Because I healed from the shame.
 

They can't exploit a weakness that I overcame
 
So when they say we should all FEEL that, I understand exactly what they're trying to do.
 

I'm imperfect. 

And that's ok.
 
Granted, I wish I were closer TO perfection; 

as I'd define it.

But an entirely perfect world 

of entirely-perfect people

would be a very ironic sort of hell. 

In any case, 
I make mistakes. 

I have failings.

 I will never fully overcome all of my failings. 

And that's ok.

 
I don't owe my creator an apology for how he made me.

 That is, after all, something he did to me.
It's not something I did to him.
Nor is it something I did to myself.

I don't "deserve to die" (or worse) for merely being flawed.
 
Now, I won't claim to "deserve grace", because that would be a contradiction in terms.

"Grace", in the Christian context,  means "undeserved kindness".

Here's the problem I have with that:

Kindness is not something people should have to compete, beg, or win the right to receiving.

Instead, it just makes sense to me to say that kindness should be the default for how all intelligent beings treat all living beings.

 So then it's not really a reasonable thing, to speak of kindness as something people should have to "deserve" first. 
 
Kindness should not be treated as a form of currency.
 
Gifting it to others shouldn't be seen as a form of charity.

Kindness should be the default.

So then I shouldn't need to argue that I "deserve kindness".

And nobody should be telling me I don't deserve kindness. 

Kindness is just simply not how ethical beings should behave. 

 So now I sit here thinking about what sorts of exceptions we 'aught' to make.

When should we not be kind?

It is ultimately a "kindness" to give a medically-warranted shot to a child.

It is ultimately a kindness to imprison a proven-dangerous human; to protect innocent people, and to protect those dangerous people from themselves.
Although, the conditions in which we imprison such people is very unkind. And our society really should be trying to outgrow that unkindness.

 Prisons should be for keeping people safe, 
and for rehabilitation, and for scientifically studying criminals towards the goal is a safer future world. 
 We should not be using prisons to make criminals suffer for vengeance's sake. 

My point is that kindness sometimes take the form of necessary-actions that cause some suffering ... but which ultimately prevent more suffering than we cause. 
So then we can reasonable say "we should always be kind; even with criminals". 

So when someone tells me that kindness itself is a currency that people should have to either MERIT or else do without, or else be gifted kindness as something "undeserved", 
I think they're being thoughtlessly "transactional" about it. 

I automatically deserve "grace" for the failings I struggle against; even without some ritual human sacrifice.
 
I automatically deserve forgiveness for everything I'm already genuinely aware of and regretful about;

 especially once I've owned those mistakes and made myself available for restorative justice with those I've wronged.

 
A strongly ethical Being
would not need to be paid or begged for help.

My ever-ready-ness to be assisted into growing as a person ... is what makes me deserving of that help; even if nobody exists who could-or-would provide that assistance.
 

There is no ethical or rational place (or need) in all of that ... for some perfect Jewish guy to be sacrificed to a god.
 
There's no rational or ethical reason that's even possible ... for why "surely that needs to happen".
 
I can just forgive others. 

Why should a PERFECT BEING be held to a lower standard?

 
If I can forgive a Super-Being for FORCING me to be imperfect, ... then that same Super-Being can forgive me for what HE did to me;
 
and then also forgive me for the inevitable consequences OF that imperfection.
 
Christianity doesn't make good rational or ethical sense.
 
But to evade being called out for that, ... Christianity gaslights us about it.