"The World Would Be a Better Place Without Religion" -- A Sentiment Common on College Campuses

[Manifestor_of_Light]

75. Which issues?

I looked at both their websites and saw no challenges to the standard doctrines. I saw some non-literal interpretations of the idea of Jesus and in what dimensions he lives at present.

How about you telling me what issues that Spong or Borg have challenged and questioned?

I still see the same doctrines on the trinity, original sin, virgin birth, substitutionary atonement, and "If you believe in Jesus hard enough and pray hard enough and have faith, he's going to make things better." And the unspoken and unchallenged and arrogant assumption that Christians are happier than other people, because they have faith. It's not about thinking. Thinking is discouraged. It's better to just believe, results be damned.

That insistence that if you do what the church fathers tell you, your life will change dramatically for the better, has made a lot of people turn into atheists who see faith in God as a shared delusion. The idea that God will solve your problems or at least make them better, when one is in a pit of black despair due to circumstances, sounds too much like the promises of a used car salesman.

If there is a god, and he helps people, he helps them through the actions of people on earth. If Christians, don't help others, or actually harm people, Christianity seems like a pointless exercise and inadequate to deal with human problems. And it's a good way to scare people and take their money, with them expecting some kind of help from donating, and it's all a tax-deductible scam. And it has real big problems with correlation and causation.


Way back in 1553, John Calvin and the Council of Geneva had the first recognized Unitarian, Michael (Miguel) Servetus, of Aragon, Spain, burned at the stake. Servetus believed that Jesus was both divine and human but not part of the Trinity. Servetus was against original sin, substitutionary atonement and infant baptism. He argued a whole lot with Calvin via letter so they decided he must be put to death for heresy.

I thought people had brains so they could learn how to solve their own problems and society's problems, working together, not live in fear of an all-powerful god who has to be praised constantly by puny humans, or he gets mad and kills a few thousand at a time.