CelticBear’s Musings

John W. Loftus has a post today over on Debunking Christianity in which he highlights a site by a former seminarian: Craig Lee Duckett:

<> 25 Reasons Why I Am No Longer a Christian

As for me, only about 5 of those reasons were enough to bring me away from being a true believer to a non-theist. Although I’d learned about another 10 reasons in the last couple of years since.
Here’s a few of the ones that did it for me:

1) The world simply does not behave the way described in the Bible
4) The concepts of Heaven and Hell are equally morally and ethically reprehensible
5) Historical Evidence shows much of the Old Testament was appropriated from earlier Sumerian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Canaanite, & Persian Myths
6) The Account of the Flood and Noah’s Ark bears striking similarities to the Epic of Gilgamesh and other pre-dating Creation/Flood myths
10) The ancient gods and goddesses that were assimilated by the Hebrews to become Elohim EL & Yahweh YHWH
11) Myths of Dying-Resurrecting God-Men Born of Virgins that Pre-Date the Story of the God-Man Jesus
12) The Problem of Evil (Theodicy) and the Hiddenness of God
13) Natural (Empirical/Scientific) vs. Supernatural (Faith/Language-Based) Belief Systems
14) The Gospels are not ‘eyewitness’ accounts but anonymous third-person narratives
15) The ‘Evolution’ of the Christian Canon and Jesus’ Godmanship
17) Archaeology and Biblical claims
22) Examined objectively, the Bible is rife with errors, contradictions, misstatements, and inconsistencies
23) Belief, Doubt, Disbelief and Critical Thinking

The site has each of these reasons linked to a description of what is meant by that reason as well as a reading list to help one learn about it.

I just recently posted a blog article: Jesus didn’t exist. Sorry. in which I go over how the utter lack of any contemporary historical notation of Jesus, his contemporary followers, nor events as described in the gospels, makes the likelihood of Jesus having even been a historical reality extraordinarily slim. This was one of the biggest reasons why stopped believing, and I really only started finding out about the lack of history through listening to Robert M. Price on podcasts. Price also was the one through whom I discovered the ridiculously abundant similarities between the Jesus figure and pre-existing myths, such as Mithras, Dionysus, Horus, etc. (I also talk about that in: Jesus didn’t exist. Sorry.)

I was just working on a new post delving deeper into the history of the Judaic myth, sparked by the horrible intellectual dishonesty I encountered at an adult Sunday School class this last weekend. I hope to have that posted soon. The actual history of the Hebrews, which is significantly different than what is portrayed in just the Old Testament, is quite fascinating!