So I retitled the video to Terrible Things Christianity Makes You Do, and then I thought somebody's going to come along and say, well it didn't make me do those things, so I'm going to go confessional today.

I'm going to go inward and say these are the terrible things that Christianity made me do.

When I was teaching religious studies in a university or college setting, it might surprise you to know this if you've never taken a religious studies course, that we usually would present religion as sort of amoral.

Not immoral, not bad.

We would usually say religion isn't good or bad.

It's just a thing people do.

Some people use it for good things, bad people use it for bad things, but it's just a thing people do.

But as I thought more about this, I don't find that explanation completely satisfying, and I think a big part of it is because religion is a lot of things, and I've talked in other videos about how religion is ritual, and it's culture, and it's language, and there's so much stuff wound up in religion.

But the one thing most religions have, or at the very least, again, this is about Christianity, so the one thing that Christianity does have is ideology.

And ideology, I don't think, is just value neutral.

I think ideology usually does come with some baggage attached.

Now you could say, for example, that while good people use Christianity to do good things, so for example, you know, taking care of the poor or, you know, abolishing slavery, you could also say bad people use Christianity to do bad things.

So for example, being pro-slavery, or discriminating against people, or launching the crusades, or any number of things.

When you look at the Christian tradition, you will find plenty of bad, but you'll find some good too.

So there's the big philosophical question of whether Christianity makes good people do bad things, and that's kind of where I want to hang out today.

So it is a little deep, bear with me, but I'm going to walk through it and give you some reflections on this.

So if this is your first time in the channel, my name is Chris.

I have a Master of Divinity, an MA in Theology, PhD in Christian Origins, and I spend most of my time on this channel talking about a mixture of ancient Christianity, and the New Testament, and Christian origins, and modern Christianity, a little bit with deconstructing and some stuff about finding faith again.

So this is a bit of a big kind of philosophical question, and I think what a lot of Christians don't realize is that the atheists raise some pretty damn good points, and not a lot of Christians are willing to admit that, because people get so defensive when people challenge our faith.

But let me look really honestly at this question, and let me share with you some of the bad things that Christianity made me do.

I think one of the first and most dangerous things that Christianity made me do is rationalizing the suffering of others.

Religion always has something to do with suffering.

I think anthropologists could argue that a lot of what religion is actually gave rise to us trying to understand suffering.

But even if you're within the Christian tradition, you can see that suffering plays a pretty big part in the faith.

When you have the entire faith built around the suffering of God, many people believe on behalf of humans.

When you have this whole rich Hebrew Bible tradition of suffering and waiting for redemption by God, whether it's from getting you safe from an enemy or whatever, you have the New Testament.

Suffering is all built through that as well, by people waiting for the return of Christ, and waiting in this kind of veil of tears in the meantime, or maybe suffering persecution.

So suffering has been at the core of a lot of how the Christian tradition formed.

And frankly, I think the Christian tradition throughout history, like other religions, has been a way to give a response to suffering.

Now I know a lot of atheists will argue that they don't accept the existence of a God because of suffering.

And I think suffering, honestly, is probably one of the best arguments against the existence of God.

That you have so much suffering baked into the human condition at every level.

And if you have had a relatively low amount of suffering, for somebody like me who's a middle-aged man in the Western world, my experience has been very unusual to the history of humanity.

And I think what happened when I was still a certain kind of Christian, was I tried to come up with an answer for suffering.

And I would say things like, well, it's okay that God told the Israelites to wipe out the Moabites and the Ammonites, because they were doing wicked things.

I actually just heard this from a Christian apologist, like on YouTube, like a couple weeks ago.

Somebody said, well, the Moabites, I think it was the And that's why God said the Israelites to wipe them out.

So let's think about this.

They're doing child sacrifice.

So if you kill everybody, man, woman, and child, in that ethnic group, then yes, you've effectively ended the child sacrifice.

But that's also called genocide.

And I think this is the kind of ridiculous corner I've backed myself into in the past, when I tried to justify the suffering of others.

And also, as seen through a book that I believed was holy, I would have to come up with ways to justify this suffering.

And that's a terrible thing, that if you can look at groups of people and say, well, your suffering is warranted, or there's a reason for your suffering, or I have a unique understanding of your suffering because of my religion that you don't have.

Frankly, I think it's just really stupid and immoral to try to explain and justify the sufferings of others.

And this is like on a big grand scale.

But let's go a little bit personal here, because I guess like 12 years ago, it's been a while, but I lost somebody very close to me in a car accident.

And one of the things that became really abundantly clear to me after this happened, was how much time people spend saying things like, oh, God spared me from this.

Oh, God rescued me from this thing.

Oh, I was almost in a car accident, and God spared me.

I had cancer, and God cured me.

And what you realize is that we use this kind of confirmation bias talk about God, because when we escape suffering, we tend to look at it as God has blessed us.

God helped us escape that suffering.

But there's a really dangerous counterpoint that's intrinsic to that argument.

And the counterpoint is that if God helps one person escape suffering by, you know, rescuing them from a car accident, God has then chosen to inflict suffering on somebody else by letting them have that car accident.

If God heals one person with cancer, thereby ending their suffering, God has, you know, somewhere, somewhere else, let a child die of cancer.

And therefore, that suffering has then been accepted and even blessed by God.

What you realize, if you're still going to believe in an all-powerful, all-loving God, the idea of suffering is not something that can just be okayed.

And as a form of self-preservation of my faith in the past, I was willing to justify and overlook the suffering of others.

And when it happened to me, I think, I mean, the car accident was part of it, but it's just been really through my adult life, realizing that when difficult things happen to me, or when I suffer, and I haven't even suffered that much really, some people have gone through real suffering, that yes, some people might want to find meaning in that suffering because of their faith, but it's not my place to find meaning in your suffering.

It's not my place to come up with a reason or an explanation for somebody's suffering.

And frankly, I think that was one of the worst things that religion made me do, was to keep God good, to protect the goodness of God, I had to justify the suffering of others.

And that's not something I will ever do again.

The second terrible thing that Christianity made me do was to believe in a tribalistic God, to believe in a God who loved me uniquely.

And I've kind of thought a lot about this, because Christians say a lot of things about God and what we believe about God.

And when Christians say, and I used to say, God loved the world.

But what I actually meant in practice is God loves me just a little bit more, because I've accepted the good news.

I pray the right way.

I worship the right way.

And if you had asked me, does God love you as much as God loves, I don't know, somebody in a totally different religion, in a totally different culture on the other side of the world, I would say yes, of course.

But in my head, I'm thinking, well, they're the wrong religion, or they haven't yet acknowledged Jesus as their Savior.

Maybe they haven't heard.

They haven't yet come to where I am, which is like a superior knowledge of the truth.

What so much of Christianity has become is tribalistic.

But I think like this has been throughout the history of Christianity, and it's probably true of other religions too, when you take a tribalistic God that literally existed so that people could carry him into battle against another God, figure out who won, and that was a way of figuring out which God was the strongest.

That's kind of where this came from.

And then this becomes the New Testament.

And you know, there's a little bit more egalitarian in the New Testament.

But then Christianity becomes a religion of empire.

And all of a sudden, it's our God and our empire.

And Christianity moves down throughout history.

And even for me, it wasn't like an empire-wide thing, but it was still a community and personal thing that my God was still tribalistic.

I still believed.

We sing these songs like my God is bigger, my God is stronger, God you are higher than any other.

I know these worship songs.

So many of them focus on how God loves us uniquely.

Our God is stronger than anything else.

Our God.

Our God.

God belongs to us.

And when you take a God that you claim is all loving and all powerful and make that God tribalistic, you aren't really understanding the potential of what you're saying.

If you actually were to believe that God were all loving and all powerful, then you would see that every single person in every single part of the world always belongs just as much to that God as that God belongs to you or that God belongs to them just as much as to you.

The implications of what you're saying is that God loved that Moabite child that, you know, apparently the Israelites were commanded to slaughter just as much as the Israelite child who was, you know, waiting at home for the battle to be finished.

By our own theology, there's no difference in the love that God has for people if you actually believe this.

So in practice, my religion said a lot of really nice things, but ironically I didn't actually start practicing it until I left.

Until I deconstructed, I wasn't able to look at other human beings and see that you are just as worthy and valuable as me.

That your ideas, the way you experience the world, the way you see truth is just as valuable as my expression and the way that I see truth and that was transformational for me.

The third terrible thing that Christianity made me do was that it made me really narcissistic.

Modern evangelicalism, there's this anthropologist, T.H.

Lerman, who argues that a lot of what modern evangelicalism does comes out of the hippie movement and I've talked in other videos like this one about how the way that we think of salvation as a modern evangelical in a western context is complete nonsense and is totally different than what an early Christian thought of when they thought of salvation.

But the way that Christians think about salvation has become so personal, so individualized and it's being mixed with our western idea of the self and this anthropologist, T.H.

Lerman, argued that it's also a product of the hippie movement and I think it's true because I grew up in the echoes of this.

Remember Keith Green and all these hippie Jesus people?

That Christianity also became about self-actualization and when you have a religion that focuses on your personal salvation, your indwelling of the spirit, your self-actualization, your journey, your unique call to do something amazing for God.

We also grew up in this missionary culture that celebrated like Jim Elliot who went off and like went to go preach to this tribe of people even though he was killed before he ever preached to anybody.

But we had these kind of heroes that were all like these great, it was mostly men, there were some women, but these great like men of the faith and all of this boiled into this pot of like extreme narcissism that I saw the world as fundamentally being about me.

When I talked about what God wants or when I would talk about God's plan, it really just meant me.

Like what am I doing?

What great thing can I do?

What amazing thing am I called to do?

How am I going to transform the world?

And this sort of individualistic thinking was extremely selfish and I think it's not hard to fall into a pattern of thinking like this because narcissism feels good.

If you have a religion that tells you it's okay to be narcissistic or that tells you God has this unique special purpose plan for you to do great things, I mean who doesn't want to believe that?

That's like ear candy.

Like everyone wants to believe that they have a unique special purpose.

Whether it's true or not, I don't know.

That's a bigger theological question.

But I found that when I left and stopped seeing God as existing solely for my self-actualization, I became a much healthier person.

I want to talk about one more thing.

So this is and as I'm talking about this, I'm thinking of other things for what I say but I'll save them for a different video.

I think I could talk about original sin too.

I'm not going to talk about it in this one.

But one of the things I wanted to talk about is the way that Christianity made me see insiders and outsiders.

And I see this all the time and let's go to the extreme.

I'll give the example of a disgraced telemangelist.

There have been a lot of them.

There have been a lot of people who I have like personally known and looked, not known, like known but known of, listened to their stuff, looked up to.

One of the most famous is a guy named Ravi Zacharias who was a Christian apologist and literally became part of the reason I wanted to start studying Christianity.

And it came out kind of after his death he turned out to be a creepy sexual predator.

Go figure.

So one of the things that I would see whenever there was these men, usually men, embroiled in sex scandals, was people saying, oh well they're you know good godly men but the devil just had a moment of weakness.

They're men after all.

And on the flip side, when you had non-Christian people who would do like the slightest little thing like tax, you know, tax evasion or something, they're like, well what do you expect?

They're not Christians.

So the way of looking at the world that I had was a way that was incredibly charitable and generous to every single person who I saw as a Christian.

That they were fundamentally good people because they were saved.

I could say that goodness was like at the core of them and if there was anything bad it was like on the periphery.

That maybe they stumbled sometimes, maybe they, you know, slipped into temptation.

I spent the first 30 years of my life working in churches and the last 10 years of my life being outside of the church and I can tell you that there's fundamentally not much difference in people inside or outside of the church.