Christianity is based on lies and error

CHRISTIANITY: THE GREAT LIE. PROGRESSIVE RELIGION AND INTEGRAL POLITICS Ray Harris

There is a discipline in truth finding and truth telling. It is a contemplative path that cuts harshly through the mind's tendency toward fantasy. We are story tellers and we like to comfort ourselves with convenient and pleasant lies. In traumatic circumstances the mind will create an alternative reality, sometimes that alternative reality is so far from the truth that we call it madness. At its heart philosophy is the rigorous search for the truth. In the beginning this was also a spiritual quest. Wilber has adequately explained how spirituality was divorced from Western philosophy – a post Aristotelian false direction.

But what has all this got to do with Christianity? Well, precisely this: it turns out that when we get into the devilish detail about Christianity we find out that it's all lies – all of it, especially the bit about the Devil. I like this twist – when you examine the detail you find there is no devil in the detail– and no Christ, and possibly no Jesus. Everything is up for grabs.

This is important because Christianity, as an ideology based on lies and error, has been perhaps the single most important cause of developmental regress and arrest in the world - yes, the world, the whole planet. Christian missionaries have invaded every corner of the planet spreading a false doctrine. It has devastated many cultures and even today, Western powers pressure non-Western cultures to adopt laws based on Christian concepts, particularly in the area of morality. Christianity's attempt to control morality has had destructive effects, yet, paradoxically, because of its reliance on lies it ends up being a thoroughly immoral ideology - it consistently breaks the two ethical imperatives mentioned above.

Christian hegemony was an important factor in the decline of spiritual philosophy. By replacing philosophy with a theology based on lies the original teachings of several philosophical schools were distorted, allowing a later materialist reaction to arise. By taking God out of nature and out of man and placing Him in a remote heaven, Christianity created the dualism that allowed science to concentrate exclusively on nature and ignore God. If God was separate from His creation then he could be kept separate and out of mind.

Perhaps the most devastating consequence of Christian theology is its emphasis on faith. As I will argue below the early Christian ideologues struggled against competing ideas about Christ and the nature of God and the Cosmos. They could not argue from evidence because they had none, instead they argued from faith. Today orthodox Christians still defend their beliefs against an ever increasing amount of contrary evidence by arguing from faith. The American fundamentalist responds to the hard evidence contradicting a literal interpretation of the Bible by constructing a rationale based on faith alone – it is so because I believe it is so.

We might choose to ridicule such fundamentalist beliefs, however, it is not the specific belief that is the real problem. By raising an argument from faith to the same epistemological status as an argument from facts and reason, Christianity has opened the door for other beliefs to use the same excuse. Thus a whole range of bizarre and contradictory belief systems claim a 'right' to exist solely on the basis of a supposed 'right' to faith. This diminishes the power of what is true and merely creates a confusing array of false paths based on fantasies and lies – it plunges the world into gobbledygook. rharris6@bigpond.net.au