The Dance of the Christians

As almost a rite of passage into skepticism many examine the Bible closely for the first time. Often the first impression is that no one could really read this literally. The second is that most people understand the work as a Bronze Age compilation of tradition and legend in an era where the supernatural was the best explanation.

One quickly comes to the realization that many Christians do accept the bible on its face and accept everything as the literal word of God. One also comes to realize that Christians have spent 2000 years analyzing the Bible and have an answer to every seeming contradiction or inconsistency sufficient to please literalist Christians. Some of these explanations require a considerable level of dancing to make the explanations fit for all except the most blindly committed.

Contradictions and inconsistencies can be broken down into four categories:

The factually wrong. Most of these are minor issues such as Leviticus 11 stating that rabbits chew their cud or that the stated dimensions of Noah's ark could only hold a fraction of the known animal species. Others are inconsistencies between two sources such as how many times the cock crowed during Peter's denials of Jesus or comparing the genealogies of Jesus found in the Gospel of Matthew with that found in Luke. These are typically only problematic for literalist Bible adherents and fundamentalist Christians, who generally just ignore them and go merrily on their way.

Contradicting traditions. Some of the most problematic areas of the Bible are those that contradict the evolved traditions of the Church. Most of these are problems for the Catholic faithful who rely upon these traditions to a much greater extent than their Protestant brethren. Probably the most significant of these is the use of idols, which is directly prohibited in the Bible but plays a very important role in the Roman Catholic Church. The issue was significant enough to cause a number of splits in the the Church and countless deaths and wars during the middle ages.

Implausibility. Most of these are simply humorous such as men using a star to navigate to a particular house or the entire flood narrative. However; Implausibilities can have devastating consequences for people whose identify comes from scriptural reference. The best example of this is the exodus from Egypt. The numbers used in the Bible (600,000 men of war) highlights one of the problems with the story. Six hundred thousand men aged 17 to around 40 would translate to approximately 2 million people in total when considering women, children and the elderly. It would have taken them literally months to cross a sea and Moses arms must have been exhausted behind held up for that long. That the story makes no sense cuts at the heart of jewishness because their very identity is so closely tied to this presumably historical event. This gets translated to a problem for Christianity both because Jesus was a Jew and because many Christians adhere to a literal version of the story.

Non-Biblical or Post-Biblical traditions. Whether it be the day Christ's birth is celebrated or the celebration of his resurrection, the ties to paganism are unmistakable and problematic for a religion that put so much effort into killing off this once dominant set of religious beliefs. That Christianity could simply be a melding of many pagan myths has always been contentious. The parallels of Jesus teachings to those found in Buddhism or his birth and death stories found in many other religious traditions have caused many to dance. These are typically addressed either by reversing the order (pagans copied from Christianity rather than the other way around) or simply by asserting that all the other myths are false and the only ones actually true are those believed by Christians. Equally problematic is the co-optation of Pagan calendar dates to help ease Pagan's into Christianity. It is not by coincidence that Christmas is held on December 25 (Mithras' birthday) and Easter was a traditional Pagan holiday. Taken in total, these tales illustrate the manmade origins of the Christian religion and most Christians do their best to simply ignore these parallels.

Of all the absurdities of Christian belief five stand out more than others, highlighting the falsity of the entire religious belief system known as Christianity. Listed in ascending order they require the most dancing around the evidence in order reconcile with the belief systems yet, ultimately, all the dancing of Christian apologists cannot make their explanations rise above the ridiculous.

5.  The Virgin Mary
4. The Day of Jesus' Execution
3. Luke's Census
2. Genesis
1. Paul's Version of the Messiah