Last week a friend from college who asked to be identified with the pseudonym of Bill Clinton, but we’ll just call him Bill, sent me a rather lengthy email with a lot of questions and points to ponder. We had studied theology together and have the bond that was formed by struggling together through two years of Greek, so I want to take his questions as seriously as possible. I will be answering them on the blog (with his permission of course), but due to how much there is, I’ll be spreading it out over the next few weeks.

I should note that today’s excerpt is from near the end of the email and is at the end of a paragraph talking about some apologetic sermons.

I sense that you have decided that your search is finished, but you might find it interesting none the less.

If I take my skepticism seriously, and I do, I have to apply it equally to everything, including my currently held views. I have gotten to where I am now by following the evidence where it leads and I fully intended to continue to do so. As such I hope my journey is never finished.

If on the other hand, you are specifically referring to Christianity, then the likelihood that I would ever return to that faith is as close to zero as possible. I’m not saying that to be an ass, but here are my current objections to Christianity:

• The god presented in the Bible is a sadistic asshole who set humanity to fail in the Garden of Eden; slaughtered every man, woman, child, and animal, except for a small representative sample; slaughtered the first born of Egypt for the actions he caused their king to make; ordered the complete obliteration of entire tribes and civilizations; ordered the murder of infants and rape of young girls; and is credited with many more atrocities. If I believed that such a clearly evil being existed, every moral fiber in my body would demand complete opposition of it.
• The doctrine of salvation by grace is equally grotesque. The thought that a being could be so vengeful as to demand death for people following their very natures is horrible. The whole set up of one innocent person suffering on behalf of everyone else is unjust. Then to only offer salvation to those who live their lives for a cause for which there is no evidence while condemning those who live their lives with the integrity of skeptical inquiry is just plain capricious.
• Those objections aside, Christianity as a religion is dependent on two historical events. There must have been a literal Adam and Eve who were created as perfect, sinless beings in a perfect world that was free of corruption, who were then the first to sin and all of humanity has inherited a sinful nature from them. Secondly, Jesus Christ must have been born of a virgin, lived a sinless life, died, and rose from the dead. The first historical dependency has been completely falsified by science and the second dependency is not only impossible, but there is no evidence that Jesus even existed at all. Christianity is as falsified as the ancient Greek worship of the Olympian pantheon.

Really the only situation I could imagine in which I would ever become a Christian again would be if I were to suffer such a horrible brain injury that everything that is Dustin Williams was gone.

That still leaves millions of possibilities, none of which I would take seriously with out sufficient credible evidence. As Carl Sagan said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”