Concluding my revisit of Christianity

Well, if you look back a few posts, you’ll find that I felt compelled to invesitgate my home team; the Anglican Church.  It was a well meaning enough idea, I felt moved to reinvestigate them, to see if I’d missed something and dismissed them too hastily, all those years ago.

So I bought a copy of a NIV bible and a book on the history of the gospels, also a book on the history of the God belief and it’s interpretation[2].  Well, the bible is an interesting read, I found myself pointing out a problem before we’d left the Creation, and as for the flood and the whole Sodom & Gomorrah thing, well others have covered the Noah’s Ark story in more detail than I ever could.  S&G was just mishandled full stop, at least to my mind.

I fast forward to the New Testament and find myself perplexed by the differences in the Gospels, yes I appreciate they were written by different men for differing audiences, but there are problems that go beyond that.  Inconsistent reporting is the most outstanding, but that is something I can’t really overlook in a text that makes the claims this book does.

Then I wander through some sites and find that nobody agrees on the interpretation, some very literalistic (see my essays for my views on that) and some very liberal but nothing that really solves the issues I see.

So I revisited arguments, religious apologetics vs skeptics, I found that things haven’t really changed.  To be honest, I got heartily sick of debates where nobody really manages to resolve anything honestly.  All I saw were arguments full of smokes and mirrors obscuring tactics, which made me ask ‘If you religious apologetics can’t even discuss this on the level, is it even worth bothering with at all?’, I appreciate that everyone does it (even inadvertently) from time to time, but there is so damn much of it in what I was reading that it made me sick to the depths of my mind.

That was what did finally it, I have what I consider legitimate criticisms of organised dogmatic Christianity and couldn’t find a straight externally verifiable (i.e. not circular logic) answer that didn’t shoot at least some of the bottom layer of cards out from under the whole edifice.  All the answers I could come up with that worked left me with a thing that wasn’t much of anything (no omnipotent interventionist creator, no legitimate ancient dogma, etc) and I realise now I was applying the valuable lessons I learned from reading the Kalama Sutta.

Eventually, I realised I was reading the Bible as a Skeptical Buddhist, which kind of resolved things for me.  Things were finally sealed by my learning about the Panadura Debate (or Panadura Controversy) in Sri Lanka.  An exact transcript of this doesn’t exist as far as I know, but I have searched and found a commented summary of it gleaned via an Internet forum.