THE DISTURBING SIDE OF CHRISTIAN FAITH

Do you believe that you have a right to judge God or criticise what God does? How then can you say you really regard him as God. You cannot believe in God except you submit to his teaching and authority and see that you should worship him. If you could judge God then you would be the real God. Your feelings and beliefs would be what is important and not God. When the Church tells you not to judge God it is really telling you not to judge its take on God. The Church pretends to be concerned about God when its true concern is itself. The Church is a deceitful self-serving outfit. You don't really want it to be true!
 
Instead of honouring human nature by saying we can't become evil enough to willingly stay in Hell forever, believers put the fact that the existence of Hell is stated in their scriptures first. They prefer to accuse us of potentially infinite evil than to contradict their scriptures.
 
Do you really want to believe in religion when it tells you that you have the free will to reject God even for all eternity in Hell? If we are basically good but prone to to mistakes, then it follows we cannot really mean to do evil. You cannot fully understand what you are doing if you bring great evil on yourself. You cannot fully understand evil when you are only looking at and interested in the good results of the evil. Thus the Catholic doctrine that hell is self-inflicted needs to be seen as abhorrent. The Church must never get away with saying it. Even encouraging a person to make a vow when you know they don't really understand, is not as bad. At least they may not be doing too much harm by going into the dark.
 
If reason tells us there is no God like the Christian God, that can be liberating and edifying. How could you want to believe in a God who condemns you to the Hell of eternal torment? You think it is more dangerous not to know the score. At least if you know there is a vindictive God you can consider getting on his good side. But that is a terrible way to live. And when you learn from Christian philosophers that God is not really like us and has no feelings you start to see that wanting to believe in God is an example of misplaced desire. Such a god is not attractive. A God like a daddy in the sky with feelings and so on would make it that bit easier to believe in Hell. A god who is not like us very much would put you off without Hell and put you off faster if belief in Hell were part of the equation.
 
No Catholic denies that you have to love others by trying to help them help themselves stay out of Hell. Jesus was constantly warning against the danger. It follows then that as most Catholics will not warn you about Hell, even should you admit the worst of sins, that they do not love you. The atheist has every chance of being more sincere!
 
Jesus Christ said that the greatest commandment was to love God with all your powers i.e. in totality. We are to love God to that extent just because he commanded it. We therefore do not do it because it will be good for us or anybody else. We are to love our neighbour because God commanded it which means we do not love the neighbour for herself or himself but for God only. Love for God alone is expressed through doing his will for others. He wants us to do good for others but for his sake and not theirs at all. It makes us inhuman. Catholics cannot want the bread and wine to turn into a God like that. They would not really want to be nourished by him or to worship him in the form of bread and wine. What Catholics worship is a fantasy god. The Eucharist is idolatry. The Catholic has no right to ask for anything in return for going to Mass apart from a reprimand.
 
Strangely, most Catholics want to believe that we evolved in the past from animals. But this contradicts the teaching of the Church which asserts we all share Adam and Eve as our first parents. The Church used its infallibility in making the teaching. Thus to reject the teaching is to say the Church is not infallible.
 
Popes Socinus, Innocent and Zosimus and the infallible Council of Carthage endorsed the correctness of the following decree of the Council of Mileum 2 in 416,
 
Canon. 1. All the bishops established in the sacred synod of the Carthaginian Church have decided that whoever says that Adam, the first man, was made mortal, so that, whether he sinned or whether he did not sin, he would die in body, that is he would go out of the body not because of the merit of sin but by reason of the necessity of nature, let him be anathema or cursed to the uttermost.
 
Anathema means that if you have denied the teaching then you have completely rejected the faith. Any parts of the faith you agree with you agree not because you trust God but because you want to believe so it is worthless. You may as well not believe anything.
 
Adam was not made mortal meaning he could not have come from animals. He was like an angel or something that took the same condition as ourselves after he sinned. Evolution says that our ancestors were all mortal from the first moment of their existence..
 
The Church says that family ties are severed by death. The wife and husband are no longer married when one of them dies. Jesus said that this idea is true. Thus the grief you have for your dead baby boy or girl is lunacy for they are not your child anymore. The Church even goes as far as to argue that if your dear father is burning in Hell and you are in Heaven you will not be upset for the family tie has broken. It is odd how Mormonism with its notion that families are eternal is unable to compete better with the Catholic Church.
 
The Mass is vindictive for it is Church teaching that it threatens judgment and death on anybody who eats the wafer and drinks the cup without believing it is the body and blood of Jesus. This is based on a text from the Bible that say he who eats without recognising the body eats judgment and punishment and condemnation to himself from God. It tells the Corinthian Church that the reason it has members sick and dying is because they have committed that sin!
 
If you answer the sinner has only herself to blame then consider this, "I should only believe or encourage what will not deliberately upset or harm another even if it is wrong. I should only have beliefs that should they prove to be wrong, no harm to me or others is done."
 
If the supernatural exists, it surely means there are forces out there than can bring you harm whether wilfully or otherwise. Believers in the supernatural agree. Those who do not believe but suspect that there could indeed be a supernatural dimension in the universe or outside it will also agree. Many people then avoid things such as yoga and Ouija boards and Tarot cards etc. They don't want to take a chance to open doors and let harmful or uncontrollable forces into their minds and bodies and lives. Yet they will receive the rites of the Church! If they see themselves as opening the door and consenting to the risk, then why do they take it for the Church?
 
They like to use the holy water of Lourdes which is supposedly empowered by the Virgin Mary who appeared there. The entity identified as the Virgin was really just one of the many ghostly women in white visions talked about in that locality - so who was the Lourdes entity really? The place where the water appeared was known for occult worship and paganism. The Christians say that Satan heals people but he always takes away one problem to give you another. It will be one that is intended to become a worse one. He will reason, "This person took a chance knowing that it could be me who is healing. Thus they consent in a way to worse harm - they consent to my influence and power and presence."
 
Who would want to risk taking the Catholic sacraments when,
 
# There is no evidence that the sacraments work. It might be speculated that when faith was at its zenith during the Middle Ages they showed their true power by making the Church fanatically opposed to heretics and pagans to the point where it burned them to death in millions. And there are scores of vindictive miracles and apparitions from that period.
 
# There is no evidence that they make recipients better than people do not receive or do not believe in them.
 
# The Catholic God is seen as fearsome and vindictive.
 
# They do not understand Catholic teaching well enough to make an informed decision to receive the sacraments.
 
Why me O God? Why my baby? The Catholic answer to that in principle is usually, "Why not?" That answer needs to be seen for the flippant insult it is. For the believer in God it translates as, "God can send pain to you as anybody else." For the atheist there is no why. It just happens. It is easier to deal with if that view is taken. If you cut your finger by accident you don't face the trauma of wondering why. It just happened and God and nobody else was responsible. You don' t suspect that somebody wants to hurt you. It is not being hurt that bothers us as much as the thought that somebody hurt us because they wanted to. It is easier to accept misfortune if it is seen as purely accidental.  For the atheist, accidents are worth enduring for the alternative is non-existence.
 
Religion likes to say, "But even if we don't want to think that God is responsible for all that happens to us and there are no accidents, we do want to think there is a good purpose for why we have accidents and suffer." This translates as, "We need to think of a purpose." But we can give it a purpose without God. If you have an accident and if you inspire others by being positive and reaching out to them and educating others about it you won't care if there is a divine purpose for it or not. How you feel about it will be all that matters.
 
Catholics are nasty by default if not conscious intent. No matter how good your intentions are, if you are in a bad or faulty or stupid religion then you are doing harm. If you don't know this, then you need to be told. Challenging need not be confrontational. You need to be challenged.
 
In principle, it is far worse to fail to challenge when the person wilfully and happily does evil than it is to fail to challenge when the person means well but gets it wrong. If the person means well they will want to be told that their religion is not as good as it pretends to be and indeed is getting its influence through selling lies and deliberate ignorance. Saying nothing implies that you want to be complicit in any harm they may do as a result of your silence and implies you suspect them of being bigots.
 
The reason it is superstitious to think walking under ladders is unlucky because it is assumed without concern for investigating and checking it out and that is an indirect insult to other people. Promoting error - our silence promotes it best - is never a private matter. It has an effect on others.
 
To partake of Catholic sacraments is intended to be superstitious - even if the sacraments have power! It is immeasurably worse if they do not.
 
People are intolerant of moralists who judge them. Religion has no purpose if it is not judging. Many people who follow religion tend to enjoy it being criticised and ridiculed and slandered.
 
The Church claims to be a hospital for sinners. Only a tiny minority of people who claim to be members of a religion obey it reasonably properly. The fact of the matter is, if you say you accept the Catholic Church as really revealed by God you must assume that it will not make many people much better.
 
We have seen how awful it is to be conditioned to support the Catholic faith and to persuade ourselves that we believe. The experience of God and Jesus and the Church as a priesthood being unloving and fake is very very common and it is not surprising.
 
There is nothing special about the message of the Catholic Church. In fact, nobody in their right senses or who knows the faith would want it to be the true religion or even mostly true! A lot of the zeal among Catholics who wish to find converts is driven by the desire to see others inflict this damaging faith on themselves.
 
Also, there is a huge ego buzz when you get somebody to agree with you especially when you are being ridiculous. The priest massages his ego by getting people to agree with him. It makes him feel important. That feeling is the real cause of “vocations” to the priesthood. The feeling is even stronger when people believe his doctrines that contradict each other and which are poorly supported by evidence.
 
The doctrines of the Church have been plainly proven to be unintelligible, silly and downright nasty countless times over. That does not stop the Catholic priesthood and the popes and the theologians from harking them. They are not stupid. They ignore objections to their doctrines that work and focus on ones that they can refute and then they boast how reasonable and precious their faith is!
 
Some people are immune to the truth. They need websites like this to see how integrity has died in them.
 
Tricks the Church uses for making you think or feel that you want its teaching to be true include -
 
# Charm.
 
# Scattering academic insights throughout its silly books to make them seem more educated and correct than what they are.
 
# Good deeds - we all do them whether religious or not. Only religion uses them to encourage people to join and support a religious system. That is manipulation. It is not the number of good people in a religion that matter but the teaching - is it true or false?
 
#    Role models - Jesus is not a lovable role model. So the Church presents many saints to you to give you a more inspiring human face as a religion. The saints that are hideous role models like psychotic St Margaret Mary are hardly mentioned. Anyway, the Church claims that Jesus did great things in the lives of the saints, and we can see what he is like from that!
 
Jesus is not a lovable role model so the Church gives you his compassionate mother to approach him through. That hides his blemishes better.
 
Jesus is not a lovable role model so the Church does not like to teach people too much about the Bible. There is no strict endorsement and preaching of the Bible as there is in many Protestant forms of Christianity. In Catholicism, it is not the Bible that is taught but catechisms which only treat the Bible as incidental.
 
The person who gives you a role model like that to be the centre of your life is bad enough. But the one that hides the truth about him is far worse. Christian commitment thrives on ignorance and laziness and the clergy take advantage of that.
 
Even if the results are sometimes good the Church is using bad medicine to do that good. To praise that is to praise seduction and manipulation.
 
Nobody needs to argue that all real Catholics for example are evil but they do need to argue that they are deceived or deceiving. The more knowledge they have the more likely it is they are deceivers.
 
Treat yourself - walk away from the Catholic Church. Do not look back.